A MOTHER who found out she had given birth to a stillborn girl after five years of grieving for a boy has been handed a box of her tiny body parts taken from a post mortem to help her come to terms with the blunder.
Stacey Lamb had already suffered years of heartbreak after being caught up in the Scottish baby ashes scandal when crematorium staff told her there were no ashes to give her.
The 31-year-old support worker for the homeless later learned that the staff had scattered the ashes in a glade near the crematorium.
Despite having no ashes, she put up a headstone for son Daniel next to her late grandad Thomas Murray at Dalbeth Cemetery in Glasgow and got his name tattooed on her arm.
She says a nurse told her after the delivery on August 24 2011 at the Princess Royal Maternity Hospital in Glasgow that she had given birth to a stillborn son who had died in the womb at 20 weeks.
Stacey said the shock of finding out her son was actually a girl is still too raw to change the name on his gravestone or her tattoo. She hopes at some time in the future to hold another cremation service for her baby she has now named Danielle using the body tissue given to her by a pathologist who carried out the post mortem examination.
She said: “I’m not ready to change anything yet. I’ve not even changed my tattoo or the name on his headstone. It feels like I have lost two babies instead of one.
“I went to see the pathologist who carried out the post mortem on my baby and he gave me a box containing a ball of tissue from her brain, heart and other body parts. It is tiny because my baby was tiny and there is also a tube containing her stem cells.
“Now that I have something of her that I can now cremate and get the ashes from that because I was robbed of my baby’s ashes the first time.”
Stacey, who has an eight-year-old daughter Kayla and had a son Jack a year ago, said she has no idea how she is going to cope when the anniversary of her stillborn child comes around later this month because she normally takes a blue balloon to tie to the gravestone.
She had a meeting with the consultant obstetrician involved in her case, to find out why there had been a mix-up with her baby’s sex.
Stacey said: “I had a meeting with the doctor but I am still not happy.
“The nurse told me I had had a boy but I believe the doctor knew from day one it was a girl but didn’t want to tell me any different because I was so emotionally attached to this wee boy but I had the right to know.
“I should have always known the sex of my baby. It wasn’t their decision to make.”
NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, who run the Princess Royal, said: “If an early pregnancy loss is experienced, it can be difficult to determine the sex of the baby.
“Staff would use the term ‘your baby’ in conversations with bereaved parents, rather than refer to a boy or girl.
“We are sorry for any continued distress this lady has experienced.”
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