Tap therapy like Harry's saved me after my baby died

Sarah Tobin and her husband Dave couldn't wait to meet their new baby.

- SARAH ARNOLD

After trying to get pregnant for two years, Sarah had a normal, uncomplicated pregnancy and the couple couldn't wait for the birth at a midwife-led unit.

Everything was in place for the perfect delivery, from soothing music to twinkling candles and a birthing pool.

But when an ultrasound picked up irregular heart rhythms, Sarah was moved to a birthing room and a huge team arrived to deliver her daughter Alice via an emergency procedure.

The newborn was put on life support and taken to a neonatal intensive care unit while her stunned parents struggled to take it all in.

Sarah recalls: "I naively thought everything was going to be fine as, at first, I really didn't realise the severity of what had happened.

"During the final stages of her birth, she somehow did not get the oxygen she needed. She was pretty lifeless - she didn't take her own breath - so they brought an incubation table beside me.

"I saw her for a minute while they got the tube in. It was only when I was taken down to theatre myself, because of the effects of such a traumatic birth, that it started to come to me that I didn't have my baby... I didn't know how she was and I hadn't even given her a name.

"I started to cry as the trauma was hitting my body, but I still held a lot of faith.

"That evening at 6pm I was wheeled up to see my daughter in my bed.

"She responded to my voice and when I touched her feet, she responded again.

"That night, I went to bed, thinking, 'I can learn sign language'."

But hours later, consultants told Sarah that Alice wasn't going to make it.

She and Dave made the devastating decision to turn off their daughter's life support when she was just five days old.

Following the tragedy, in November 2014, Sarah's world collapsed.

"When I had to say goodbye to Alice, my heart was broken," she recalls. "It was the lowest moment of my life and I thought I'd never recover."