Birth was the easy bit. After five hours of labour and two paracetamol. My second child, a beautiful son arrived safely curled in my arms, happily breastfeeding at home in our own bed says Lisa Costley
Joining my wonderful, curious daughter, and completing our family. It was the perfect natural birth I had been dreaming of.
It was only following day we realised something was wrong. The redness of his skin, which we put down to the stress of birth, had not subsided. Our midwife in her first visit confirmed that our new little person had Down Syndrome. Suddenly an entire medical machine began to gather pace around our family and by midday my son was in a hospital bed.
Raising a child with a learning disability
Those first few precious hours with all of us together, were followed by days of hospitalisation and worry. Doctors with solemn faces talked through the implications and discussed whether to operate on the hole in his heart. We hoped that golden time, just after his arrival, could sustain us through the challenges to come. In that short time we bonded with him as a person, not a syndrome and we made a promise to always see him – not the condition. We tried to return to this pledge again and again when faced with the challenges of raising a child with a learning disability.
