Hannah and Clint’s family heartache

Meeting your baby for the first time is supposed to be a happy, joyous occasion. But for Hannah and Clint, the day their daughter Poppy, now three and a half, was born was a frightening time for the couple.

“We had a bit of a tough time with Poppy - she had a complicated birth,” Hannah says, wincing at the memory. “She is super happy and healthy now, but for a while there, it was scary.”

Shortly after Poppy was born, she stopped breathing, and medical staff had to administer life-saving CPR to resuscitate Hannah and Clint’s tiny newborn daughter.

“They had to resuscitate Poppy for six minutes after she was born,” Hannah explains. “They did CPR compressions and everything. It was very frightening.”

Hannah had had a long and arduous birth with first child, Finn, now five and a half, so she was expecting something similar with their second baby. But it wasn’t to be.

“With Finn, I laboured for days, so I thought I’d be there for a while,” she says. “But no - she came on very quickly. So by the time I’d made the call to Clint to say ‘I think you should come home,” I was pretty much ready and it felt like she was on the way.”

Forty five minutes later, little Poppy was born at the hospital.

“But when she came out, she was grey - and she wasn’t moving,” Hannah says. 

“There were two knots (in her umbilical cord),” says Clint. “So when they extracted her and put her on the chest, the knot tightened.”

“They call it a ‘True Knot’. She had two, and through the labour, it tightened. So by the time she was out, it had restricted all her oxygen.

As soon as little Poppy was born, she was whisked to the corner of the room by two experienced midwives. And all Hannah and Clint could do was try to stay calm while a team of medical professionals worked on their precious tiny daughter.

“Hannah’s mum was also there - she was down the other end, watching,” says Clint. “I’m up next to Hannah, holding her hand.”

Hannah says she will never forget the first moments of Poppy’s time with them - and that she will forever be in debt to the ladies who brought her baby back to life. 
“You have all these fears all through your pregnancy that something is going to happen, and you think, ‘I’m in labour, this is it now - it’s going to be fine.’” says Hannah. “So that was pretty confronting.

“But, actually, I am still in touch with one of the midwives to this day - she works at the Townsville Mater Hospital.”

Hannah says she owes everything to the two ladies who saved Poppy’s life.

“It felt like forever,” Clint says. 

“We owe so much to those two amazing women,” Hannah adds. 

And, mercifully, Poppy is one hundred per cent fine now, and suffered no adverse consequences from her tricky start to life.

“You would not believe it now,” Hannah laughs. “She takes after her father - so strong-willed and determined.

“She falls down, she gets back up. She fights with Finn, and she is a very independent young woman.”

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