29/12/2005
Bailey was born by Caesarean Section in the Royal Jubilee Maternity Services Hospital in Belfast on 31st December 2005. It was at 12:42 pm (lunchtime) on a Saturday that he made his entry into the outside world.
The circumstances leading up to his birth are unusual and need some explanation.
On the evening of 29th december, Michelle and I were in the car after I had picked her up from work. We were in the people carrier we had recently bought and everything was fine. The weather was awful, it had been raining hard for most of the day and now that darkness had fallen it was very dark indeed. The low cloud blocked out any sign of the moon and the rain continued to fall steadily. The road I was driving on was holding large areas of standing water and it was proving impossible to avoid them. The car must have had too much of a soaking and when I pulled up at a junction the engine cut out and refused to be restarted. In a matter of moments the lights dimmed and failed, there was no life in the car's electrics at all.
The man driving the vehicle behind us, got out to help us and realising that the car would not start under it's own power he offered to push us over the junction and a little way up the road to get us out of the way of the traffic at the junction. Even though the road is a fairly narrow country lane, that junction can be particularly busy, and so clearing the junction seemed to be the sensible thing to do.
After trying to give our car a jump start from a battery pack we carried with us, and failing, Peter, the man who helped us, got out his jump leads and we tried to get the car going using his power. this was briefly successful, but again the car soon cut out again.
Peter then got a tow rope out of his car and we began to tie the two vehicles together in order to get a tow to somewhere the RAC recovery truck would find us. Once the rope was tied, I came around the side of our car to tell Michelle what was going to happen. Peter went to tell his wife, who had been with him in their car. As I was talking to Michelle, with my head through the window, I became aware of a set of headlights travelling towards us at quite a speed. The lights moved out into the middle of the road, as if to overtake us, but for whatever reason the car moved back into line with us. The car was heading straight for the back of our and had I not jumped backwards away from our car, the impact would have killed or seriously injured me. As it was, the car hitting the back of ours catapulted it forwards into Peter's car. Following this the Police were called, but they couldn't have been less interested as there was no-one injured. The Police went through the routine of breathalysing each of the drivers and took details and then they saw us to a safer place to await our recovery by the RAC.
When we returned home, Michelle was complaining that her side felt tight and sore and that she was generally uncomfortable following the crash, and so with surprisingly little persuasion, she agreed to go to the Ulster Hospital in Dundonald to get checked out.
The outcome of the tests was that she had raised blood pressure and the two doctors who had carried out scans on heer could not find a satisfactory amount of fluid around the baby and that this would need further investigation the following morning. Then they sent us home for the night.
