A mum has relived the final heartbreaking moments of her four-week-old daughter’s life.
Little Hattie Elliot died in her mum’s arms after her parents told doctors to stop resuscitating her.
Medics had tried to revive the tiny girl five times after she developed sepsis, but mum Alison said she wanted her last minutes to be as comfortable as possible.
So she lovingly held her as she slipped away, six hours after showing signs of blood poisoning.
Hattie and her twin brother, Hamish, were born 10 weeks early in May last year.
They seemed healthy initially, but Hattie struggled to drink milk from the bottle and so needed to be fed through a tube.
Doctors warned her parents her chances of developing sepsis were greater the longer she was fed through the tube.
And tragically she contracted the blood infection in her bowel, with her mum noticing she looked greyer.
She told the Derby Telegraph: “She was getting a bit restless and looking a bit grey, so I said to a nurse I think I want to put her back into the incubator, she didn’t look a nice colour.”
Hattie was put on antibiotics and the family went home, before being called in as the baby needed a blood transfusion.
Alison said: “They’d resuscitated her a couple of times and she’d responded. They took some blood from me and it worked for a little bit.
“The doctors were so amazing. They said: ‘This is what’s happening, but it doesn’t look good. As long as you want us to try, we’ll keep trying.’
“I just didn’t want her to be in pain anymore.”
“I said to my husband: ‘I think enough’s enough’. I didn’t want her [to be in] pain in her last minutes.
“She got to have her last breaths in my arms.”
Alison, a staff member at the Royal Derby Hospital, said the medics went the extra mile for the family.
HEARTBREAKING GOODBYE
Nurses transformed a room on the ward into a space they could sit quietly to grieve for their little girl.
They also gave them a camera to take pictures to remember Hattie with, and let them walk her to the mortuary in a pram.
Sepsis is always triggered by an infection – but it is not contagious and cannot be passed from person to person.
Most often the culprit is an infection we all recognise – pneumonia, urinary infections (UTIs), skin infections, including cellulitis, and infections in the stomach, for example appendicitis.
With sepsis normal inflammation that is typically seen just around minor cuts, spreads through the body, affecting healthy tissue and organs.
The immune system – the body’s defence mechanism – overreacts and the result is it attacks the body.
It can lead to organ failure and septic shock, which can prove fatal.