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When your first baby arrives at 40 weeks, 8lb in weight healthy, strong, safe, you all go home after just a few hours looking forward to getting to know your new baby. Great.

By Gayle Wharton on Oct 29, 2012

When your first baby arrives at 27 weeks, things are very different. We got to know ours though the walls of an incubator and enjoyed our first cuddles through a web of wires and tubes. Neither you, nor your little one is going home for a very, very long time. Friends and family are as shocked as you are, and they want to know how to help, they want to call and find out what is happening, they want to offer support. But when you are deep in the bowels of a special care baby unit, phone calls don’t get through, and the stress and exhaustion of the incubator-side vigil means that when you do briefly emerge to eat, drink, get some air, the last thing you feel like doing is making phone calls.

In 2005, just after my son’s birth, 13 weeks premature, I began writing what would now be called a ‘blog’. Weekly, sometimes daily written updates, sent out to all our friends and family, of what was happening, allowing our friends and family to travel the bumpy road with us. Sharing via my computer became a kind of therapy for me. A chance to pour out the day’s stresses, or celebrate the day’s successes but without needing the energy to update via multiple phone calls. The replies came thick and fast at first, as time went on and the days stretched into weeks and the weeks into months, the hard core friends stuck with us, always replying with words of encouragement and empathy.

The internet was also my window into a world of new and bewildering medical terminology. We would pour over articles about premature babies, their survival rates, their complications, their long term prospects. Mostly it was hugely helpful to have the information available online, when doctors and nurses always seemed in a hurry to move on to the next baby. The internet was a vital source of information.

Bliss, the premature baby charity had a good online presence, even better now, which we emailed a few times for support and encouragement. But the most fantastic resource online for me was the Bliss forums. A place online where I could go for advice, support and encouragement from other mum’s who had been going through exactly the same time. It was a complete God send and I spent time in the forums daily, like a virtual coffee lounge to unwind and pour out the days tribulations safe in the knowledge that the other mums would rally round and message me with exactly what I needed to hear.

I can honestly say that email, the internet, chat forums, websites, all these things were a salvation for us at this difficult time. For us the support wasn’t ‘virtual’, it was very, very real.