What did you think when you first saw me after I was born?

When Isla was first born I actually couldn’t think straight. I had been given pethidine and god knows what else and I was flying high! I mumbled her name to Colin, well what I thought was her name – turned out it was completely different to what we had decided between us, but we both liked it anyway so we kept it! Because she was born by C-section due to being distressed during labour, she was whisked up to the Special Care Baby Unit. Also, she scored really badly the first time they did the APGAR test – luckily the second time she got a great score. She had also swallowed some meconium during labour, so had an infection. All in all, she really wasn’t very well. I don’t know why, but it didn’t occur to me to be worried – it was like I knew she would be just fine. The nurses from the SCBU took a Polaroid picture of her for me, and every time I awoke from my morphine-induced stupor I looked at the picture and thought “Abigail” and then thought, “No, that’s not it, oh, it’s Isla!” Funny what drugs can do!

So, my first thought was Isla’s name, which wasn’t the planned one, then it was Abigail, and then, once the drugs wore off and I could think straight, it was just love.