Birth of Sarah Jane Lahey

Sarah Jane Lahey was born at 4:17 am at New Norfolk District Hospital, the second child of Gregory Thomas Lahey and Philippa Rose "Pip" Lahey. She was not meant to be born there. Her parents lived in Glenorchy, and the pregnancy, monitored closely after the losses that had preceded Oscar's birth, had been booked for delivery at the Royal Hobart Hospital. The expected date was still nearly three weeks away.

The family had driven out to Patrick and Jane Lahey's house at 19 Hobart Road for the public holiday long weekend, which that year fell on the eve of Jane's sixty-third birthday. Pip's labour began at her parents' house on the Sunday evening. It moved far faster than her first had done. By the time Greg judged the contractions too close to risk the forty-minute drive into Hobart, the district hospital across town was the only sensible choice left.

Patrick stayed at the house with Oscar, then two months short of his third birthday and asleep in the spare room. Jane went with her daughter and son-in-law. She had returned to nursing after retraining earlier in the decade, and on a ward staffed overnight by a single midwife, with the general practitioner on call from his home, she was allowed into the delivery room as a spare pair of hands. A larger hospital would not have permitted it. This one had no reason to refuse.

The labour reached its second stage before the doctor arrived. Sarah was delivered with the umbilical cord wound tightly around her neck. She was blue and limp, and she did not breathe. The midwife cut the cord and carried her to the warming table to begin resuscitation, leaving Pip to Jane until the doctor came through the door minutes later.

For close to two minutes Sarah gave no response. She drew her first breath under the midwife's hands and cried shortly afterwards, thin and furious, which the staff took as the best sign available to them. She was kept under close observation through the rest of the night.

Pip's emergency was slower and more dangerous. The placenta came away incomplete, and within minutes of the birth she began to haemorrhage heavily. The doctor worked to control the bleeding by manual compression and drugs while the hospital's limited blood supply was brought up for transfusion. An ambulance transfer to Hobart was raised and set aside: moving her was judged a greater risk than staying where she was.

Greg had been sent into the corridor when the first crisis began. He spent the worst of the night there, receiving pieces of information out of order, with no clear account of whether he was about to lose his wife, his daughter, or both. Jane came out to him twice. The second time, she told him they were both alive.

By daylight mother and daughter were stable. Before the day was out the doctor advised Greg and Pip that a further pregnancy would put Pip's life in serious danger, and they accepted that this child would be their last. The first name had been chosen months earlier. The middle name was added in the hospital that morning: she became Sarah Jane, after the grandmother who had been in the room, born a day short of Jane's birthday. Patrick brought Oscar in later that morning to meet his sister.