A Moray mother wants to use the grief of losing her daughter while she was 17 weeks pregnant to help other parents in the same situation.
Adele Clark, from Elgin, rushed to Dr Gray’s Hospital after suspecting something was wrong with her baby Faye earlier this month.
Tests done by medics later found no heartbeat.
The 29-year-old was given a cooling “snuggle blanket” to hold her daughter after she had given birth, which had been funded by the family of 10-year-old Jayden Ravello who died in his sleep in 2016 after suffering from a rare condition.
The gesture inspired Mrs Clark, who has a four-year-old daughter Eden, and her husband Andy to run her own fundraising campaign to pay for a second “cuddle cot” for the hospital to allow parents to take stillborn children home for a short period.
She said: “It meant so much to me that another family had done this that I wanted to help other mums.
“Faye could have been in a cuddle cot for up to one week. There’s only one at Dr Gray’s at the moment which means if it’s being used, a family would be deprived of having that time with their baby.
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“I just didn’t want Faye’s death to be forgotten. I wanted to do something so that her memory would help other mums.”
Cuddle cots use a cooling mattress to preserve a baby’s body to allow parents to stay with them in the days before the funeral.
Within days of launching her online fundraiser, Mrs Clark surpassed her target of £2,000 and the additional cash was donated to the maternity ward in Elgin.
And the family’s experience at Dr Gray’s has left them in no doubt about the value of restoring maternity services to the Elgin unit.
Mrs Clark said: “The staff went above and beyond, they really did. We came away with a little box of things like Faye’s handprints and footprints, just things we can always remember by.
“There’s definitely a need here. If I had have been transferred to Aberdeen then I could have ended up in the intensive care unit, there’s no way I would have received the care that I did.
“The care they took meant so much to us, we’ll always thank them from the bottom of our hearts.”
