Len Tyler talks about the premature birth of his daughter
To begin with, it seemed like a perfectly normal Friday the 13th. We had no reason to believe that, by the end of it, we would not still be a family of three. Obviously you can get things like that badly wrong.
We awoke to a cold, overcast morning. Ann was 31 weeks into what we had scheduled as a 40-week pregnancy. We were busy London people - babies had to be diarised like everything else. Our first child, Tom, had arrived pretty much on time. We assumed our second would have similar plans.
Ann had stomach cramps that morning, but put it down to her meal the night before. She drove herself off to University College Hospital, where she worked as a consultant oral surgeon. I was taking a year out to do a master's and set out later in a slightly more leisurely manner for City University. We left Tom, playing happily, in the care of our nanny, Liz. It was a pretty regular kind of day - at first.
Half way through the morning, I was called out of a lecture to be told that I had a daughter. Ann had gone into labour even before she could start treating her first patient and had been rushed to maternity.
As Ann's pregnancy had progressed, we had noted the various landmarks. We knew 31 weeks was early, but still viable (to use the term in its technical sense). As I walked to the hospital, it was with a feeling of great anticipation rather than foreboding. A daughter ... this had to be good news, surely?
I arrived to discover that we had a very sick daughter. I stood by her incubator, looking at a small pink person. Perspex enclosed her. She lay on a sort of white bean bag, her thin arms stretched out as though sunbathing. Her eyes were covered with gauze and a breathing tube was fixed in place. I tried to count the wires and tubes that were attached to her tiny body, but it was difficult to sort them out. A green tube joined on to a white one, which then bifurcated and headed off towards a heavy-looking piece of kit. Which did what, exactly? There seemed to be a line pretty much for every bodily function. Machines monitored her. Machines kept her breathing. It was machines she needed - not us.
Quite early on, people came to take a picture of her, which we thought was kind. Only later did it occur to us that they had done this because we might like a photo of our daughter while she was still alive. Nobody quite put it in those terms, but it was made clear to us that babies this small and this ill did not always pull through.
Doctors came to explain what the equipment did, and reassure us as best they could. The nurses were friendly and efficient. The time passed in a blur.
Later, Liz brought Tom in to see his sister. I know because in our photograph album we have a picture of a chubby toddler looking on bemused as a young nurse re-attaches a monitor to a small baby's chest. But my recollections of those first few days are quite hazy. I know we spent a great deal of time in the neonatal intensive care unit, for the most part watching our daughter sleep. She did that in spite of the bright lights, the constant hum of machinery and the wailing of the other babies. She slept, and she struggled for life without knowing what life was.
We should, I guess, have been unable to sleep ourselves, with the worry of a sick child. Yet what I remember is feeling strangely detached from it all. There were no decisions for us to make. She was in the best place she possibly could be, receiving the best treatment she could receive. We had no role to play except to wait and watch.
Perhaps if my future self had been able to whisper to me that this was our daughter Catrin in that box - the same Catrin who, one day, would cover the entire kitchen wall in crayon - it might have seemed more real. But she was not even Catrin at that point. The label at the end of her incubator still read "Baby Tyler".
We had thought that we still had two months in which to choose a name. We were still toying with calling her Lucy or Victoria or Kate or Sophie. After she was born, deciding on a name seemed the least of our problems. It was the impatience of the nurses at having to call her "Baby" that eventually forced our hand. After three days of anonymity, she became Catrin. The name is, as Catrin has had to spend her life explaining, the Welsh version of Catherine. Perhaps if we had had longer to think about it, we might have spared her years of having to spell out her name to people and of visiting pottery shops without ever finding a mug with her name on it (except in Wales). Had she hung on until 40 weeks she might have been called Lucy. She has nobody but herself to blame.
Things should have got slowly better, but they suddenly got very much worse. One of Catrin's lungs collapsed. We wondered if we were ever going to be able to bring her home with us.
This did not worry Tom. He thought a new sister would expect to share his bedroom and be some sort of competition. A sister who lived in a plastic box some way from the house struck him as a happy compromise. He also liked visiting the neonatal unit, where the nurses fed him chocolate biscuits and told him how brave he was.
One moment I do remember clearly in all this was the first time Catrin was well enough for me to be allowed to hold her. When I picked her up, it was almost as though she wasn't there. She still weighed so little, that all I could feel was the weight of the blanket she was wrapped in. I had the sudden and irrational fear that she might simply float away from me. We still had no idea if she was going to be ours to keep.
The fear that she might die faded only slowly, to be replaced with a new fear. Premature babies can suffer from a range of disabilities. A nagging voice inside me told me that she might be brain-damaged. She might never communicate with us. She might never walk. Another voice pointed out that some premature babies, such as Mozart, turned out to be geniuses.
We might have worried more if we had not had marvellous support from everyone at UCH and from the premature baby charity Bliss. They gave us the facts we needed. They gave us confidence. They gave us our daughter.
Finally in April, two months after she was born, Catrin joined the rest of the family in Islington, north London. We continued to worry about brain damage until Catrin went back to hospital for a series of tests on her first birthday. She came out of UCH the smuggest baby in London, having been praised by the doctors for pretty much everything they asked her to do. She has yet to compose that important first symphony, but in all other respects she's fine. She is now in her final year at Bristol University, studying English.
Yet, it might not have been like that. When Ann told me that she had stomach cramps that morning, I suggested she stayed home. Had she followed my advice, she would have not already been at the hospital when she went into labour. Things might not have turned out so well.
The other reason for Catrin's survival owes nothing to chance and a great deal to science. When she was born, we knew relatively few paediatricians. Coincidentally, years later, I got to know most of them, when I became chief executive of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. That is how I can state confidently that one of the great advances in medicine in recent years has been in the treatment of premature babies. Very premature babies who would have had no hope of survival 40 years ago, now have excellent prospects. This is due to the skill of the neonatologists and paediatric nurses. It is also due to the research funded by organisations such as Bliss.
Without these clinicians, without this research, Catrin almost certainly would not have survived. She might, perhaps, have been disabled. Instead, she is running in the London marathon this year. The charity she is supporting is Bliss. If you see a small blonde girl with the number 2048, running in a Bliss shirt, please cheer her on.
A Very Persistent Illusion by LC Tyler is published by Macmillan New Writing, £14.99. To order a copy for £13.99 with free UK p&p, go to the Guardian bookshop
If you would like to sponsor Catrin and donate to Bliss, then please visit justgiving.co.uk/catrintyler