Dieter Malachi Tobias Livingston

October 12, 2006

Our tenth baby was a much wanted, loved and longed for son who was due in early 2007. When we found out that we were pregnant with our tenth child after losing our first, third, fourth, and seventh children and having welcomed our second, fifth, sixth and eighth children into the world, we were happy but extremely worried that we might lose this baby too.

As the pregnancy progressed we felt a little more relaxed as I was over halfway through and we were looking forward to my second scan, we had just turned 21 weeks and six days.

However ever it was sadly not meant to be again as when we went for the scan we were told the horrible words ‘Were sorry there’s no heartbeat’. When you get that far in a pregnancy you just don’t expect to lose your baby when you’re that far gone.

We were absolutely devastated. There is no other way to explain the hopelessness we felt and just how overwhelmingly sad and lost we felt in the following minutes, days and weeks.

How could this happen again? How was it possible to lose a baby so far into our pregnancies? Why was my body failing my babies?

It was a difficult aftermath and difficult to cope as again no one mentions that these things can happen to you.

Every time we tried to get our heads around it we collapse in an ocean of tears and grief. We had a post mortem performed on our son and it came back that there was nothing wrong with our beautiful boy.

So I had further testing and it turns out that I have a condition called mildly weak lupus which only develops within the pregnancy.

We were told this was the most likely cause of our sons death and of our recurrent Miscarriages but it wasn’t 100%. However it gave us a possible reason and something to work with.

It basically means that my blood clots too thick in pregnancy and that I need to be on blood thinning medications, a combination of pills, and daily injections to help keep any future pregnancy safe.

Because my blood clotted too thick, my son passed due to a lack of oxygen and nutrients and died.

We were under specialist care in future pregnancies and was told that my pregnancies were classed as high risk from now on.

I was told that if I had any further pregnancies that I was at a 28 % risk of having another stillborn child irregardless of medication and had a 72% chance of having a successful outcome and a live birth.

It was a lot to take in, and I had to have pills to help my son come away and start my labour off as there was no bleeding and no signs outwardly of anything being wrong.

I took the pills a while apart and gave birth to my son a few days later. When he was born, he was calcified as he had died a few weeks earlier and he was measuring small for dates, they said he was the size of a 16 week old baby.

He only weighed 8 ounces and fitted in the palm of my hand but he was so perfect and beautiful to us both.

The hardest thing we ever had to do apart from his funeral was to walk out of the hospital with empty arms and leave our beautiful baby boy in the morgue it was truly heartbreaking.

We had a feeling he was a boy and the post mortem confirmed this for us, so decided to call him Dieter Malachi Tobias Livingston. Dieter means brave soldier and he was brave as he fought as hard as he could to hold on.

We Hope that our son knows just how much he is loved and missed and take comfort from the fact that even though his life was brief that hopefully the Sound of my heartbeat gave him some comfort that he was a much wanted and much loved son.

We hope that one day when it’s our time to be reunited with him in Spirit. Dieter would be 19 years old this year on the 12th October(2025)

Thank you for kindly honouring our angel.

Jo and Rob Livingston

Dieter Malachi Tobias Livingston

October 12, 2006

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