Sudden Infant Death Syndrome and ptl

mummytoinghean Thu Jul 10, 2008 11:33 am

Sids is where a baby who is completely healthy can just stop breathing and their can stop for no apparent reason. Sometimes with sids there can be a secondary cause of death, but to find a secondary cause of death is very rare. Parents of babies who pass away to sids, can expect to have police involvement as it is a sudden death and will need to be investagated, as such. If you have lost a twin to sids, the surving twin will be hospitalised for upto a week to be kept an eye on as sids can hit twins in succesion for no apparent reason. If you have toddlers also they will be kept a closer eye on as well, even though it is rarer to lose a child to sids before 4 weeks and after 12 months, the main danger period being between 4-12 weeks, it can happen. I lost Inghean at 3 weeks to sids, the total percentage of babies to die due to sids at 3 weeks of age is less than 1% raising to nearly 90% in the fourth and concecative weeks.
PTL (sorry I can't type the full name) Is a condition that is life limiting, but it is never diagnoised during pregnancy, this is a very rare condition where Inghean is the only child in Great Britain to have had this, but it wasn't discovered till after her death. PTL is a condition where not a lot of O2 get to the brain during pregancy and even after birth the white brain cells are continually starved, and killed off. A child with PTL can be expected to have a maximum life span of just 3 years, but most of that will be spent in a vegative state. I never got to experience this as Inghean passed away before the signs of PTL started to show up. Somedays we wonder if it was a blessing that sids took her then, but then we wish it hadn't because we could of had three years with her. The pain of knowing that there was nothing we could of done for our precious daughter is heartbreaking, but knowing that she never suffered, eases the pain a wee bit.