100k in a day - Raising awareness for Stillbirth

Our story begins on the 2nd of June this year. At 22 weeks, we endured every soon to be parents worst nightmare.

It was that day when I felt that something wasn’t quite right, I hadn’t felt our baby move since early in the morning. This left us both worried, but having had a scan the week prior we thought everything would be fine. Our scan the previous week showed our baby was measuring perfectly and everything was ‘normal’ and ‘perfect’. Later that night we called our midwife with our concerns and were advised it was likely okay but to come down for a quick check up. We immediately went down to the hospital for a scan. Never in our wildest dreams would I have thought we’d arrive at the hospital for a quick check up to find out that our little boys heart had stop beating. Me in complete shock unable to feel anything, to Mitch feeling the brunt of our pain all at once.

We were told that 2 days later I would be giving birth to our stillborn baby. I begged for them to knock me out, give me a C-section anything so I could pretend this wasn’t our reality. We were forced to realise the harsh reality that in two days’ time we would become parents for the first time, just not in the way we ever could have imagined. We weren’t prepared for what was required after having a stillborn baby, we had to organise a birth certificate, cremation and potentially a funeral. All within a few days.

He is our first baby and his name will be on the birth certificate of our future babies as their older sibling. It really changed our way of thinking and we realised we needed to acknowledge him and do what we can going forward to honour and remember him. We spent the next day and a half surrounded by our friends and family, providing us with support we didn’t even know was possible.

On the 4th of June our little boy, Arthur James Finn was born sleeping but so perfect. As soon as Arti was born we were advised that his umbilical cord was extremely thin where it entered his tummy, we were later told that a freak accident had happened to cause this but will never know what that is.

We soon realised that we weren’t alone in our ordeal, with multiple people reaching out to us sharing their stories of grief. We also realised some alarming statistics around stillbirths in Australia.

6 babies in Australian are born without breath every day! With the stillbirth rate not dropping in over 2 decades. A family will leave a hospital in Australia every 4 hours empty handed and completely heart broken. Majority of parents, just like us may never get an answer as to why their baby was born without breath.

We feel as parents of a stillborn baby it’s our duty to educate and help others any way that we can. We owe it to Arti to do everything we can to help prevent other expectant parents suffering the same fate.

So we want to raise some money for a charity that we feel aligns with our visions and values.

That charity is Still Aware https://www.stillaware.org

Still Aware educate clinicians on how to spot risks, they empower women to listen to their intuition, advocate for legislative change at a federal level and raise awareness about stillbirth and the associated stigma. We certainly felt it wasn’t a topic often talked about and people should be able to talk about this without shame.

We’ve come up with the concept of “100k in a day”. #100kinaday. On the 4th of December along with our friends and family we will run a 100km relay to raise funds for Still Aware. Each person will be running 5km, 10km or 20km, totalling 100kms for the day.

At the very least maybe our story will help others realise that they aren’t alone. And there are organisations out there doing what they can to help prevent this.

So please help us raise as much money as possible for Still Aware in honour of our precious boy Arti!