Ms Claire Cullen-Delsol:

I get asked that a lot because my daughter Alex died in the womb at 26 weeks, only five weeks after her diagnosis. Those were the longest five weeks of my life. She was born in the maternity wing of University Hospital Waterford and then I got to bring her home for a night and to have a funeral service. Her family, that is, my parents and my brother got to meet her and my kids got to meet their sister. It probably sounds like it would not have made a difference had I travelled but I refer to those five weeks We were standing in the kitchen the day we got the phone call with the diagnosis. We had decided that we were going to paint the kitchen for the new baby so myself and my husband were standing in the kitchen painting when the phone rang. We answered and the fabulous midwife from Holles Street hospital told us the she was very sorry but that she had bad news and that our baby was going to die. I cannot describe that moment. The world just fell apart and it has never come back together properly since then, though I am getting there.

I realised at that point that I was going to have to continue the pregnancy. I could not face the thought of leaving my kids and I did not have the money to travel; I would have had to borrow it. I just could not do it. My little fellow was only 18 months old at the time and he had never spent a night away from me. As the pregnancy progressed, however, I could feel her getting weaker. I could feel the movements changing from kicks to movements to flutters that grew further and further apart.

I was timing them and how long it had been since I felt a movement - six hours, ten hours, 14 hours. For two nights I sat up in bed convinced that she had died and I went through all the emotions. My child had died. In my head, she was gone. I had the grief, the mourning and all those feelings, and then I felt a tiny flutter ten hours later and again 14 hours later. In essence, I mourned her death twice before I actually experienced it.

In that time, I could not go out. I could not face the school run, for example, with the other mams at the gates saying, "When are you due? You will have a busy Christmas this year. Are you mad? They are so close together", and all the other excited questions. If somebody said that to me, I would just stand and bawl in front of them. The children would get distressed and I just did not know what to do. I was trying to get out and go to the supermarket. A woman would walk past with her baby and I would literally abandon the trolley and just leave, walk out the door. I could not face it. I could not participate in any part of my normal life. I called in sick to work and I never went back to that job again. I could not even drive up the road there because the other two women on my team who were pregnant were due around the same time as me. I still have never seen them in person again.

This was looming ahead of me - I knew I was going to have a stillbirth. I knew she was dying. I was 24 weeks pregnant and she still was not kicking. I knew there was no way she was going to survive very long. I knew she was going to die. I was going to have to give birth to a dead baby. It was ahead of me; I did not know when, but it was going to happen. The worst thing in my life was in my future but there was no way for me to prepare for it or plan for it and I had no idea when it was going to happen. The nightmares I had were horrendous. Every single night I dreamed about what that birth was going to be like. The fear, the pain, what was going to get me through labour knowing that I would not have a baby at the end of it? What gets us through labour? The thought that it will all be worth it in the end. That is it. That is what the midwives say to us. Nobody was going to be able to say that to me. There was going to be no cry. I was not going to have a baby to bring home. I was not going to be able to feed her. She was never going to have baths. I was never going to change her nappy. That was all ahead of me and I could not bear the thought that it was going to happen and I was not able to do anything about it. I was not going to be able to be her mam.

During that time it just felt like I did not matter. It felt like I did not count. All the things that I hold dear, all the things that are important to me in my life, like minding my kids and being a good mam, having a good relationship with my husband, being a good friend, a good daughter, being an all right sister - those things are important to me. My job was important to me. When I could not perform any of those functions, it did not matter. There was a thing that could have been done to help me. There was something. I was not asking for a procedure to be invented. I was asking for something that takes place all around the world, that people recognise as real medical care. I was denied it. I was told I did not deserve it, that I was not good enough for it. The fact that I had to drop out of society, that I could not function, that I was not able to be me any more did not matter just as long as I was alive. From that experience, I ended up with post-traumatic stress disorder. I have been on medication ever since. I take a tablet every day to stop myself going off the deep end. Had I been given control and had somebody said, "actually, it does matter that you feel like this. It matters enough for us to do something about it", it would have made all the difference.