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Premier League star Charlie Austin’s wife has revealed the couple’s heartbreak at losing their baby daughter.
Bianca Austin, 27, opened up about the ‘extremely traumatic’ death of Tayton-Grace, who was born stillborn at 34 weeks in August 2010.
Ms Austin and her footballer husband made the heart-rending decision to terminate the pregnancy after doctors told them their daughter would have ‘zero quality of life’.
Writing on Facebook to mark baby loss awareness week, Ms Austin, who married the Southampton striker in June 2015 and has two children with the star, said problems first surfaced 28 weeks into the pregnancy.
She said: 'I arrived at the hospital with a friend excited to see my baby bouncing about on the screen again.
'The sonographer put the scanner on my tummy and there she was, kicking and moving around.
'But the lady scanning me was quiet, she told me she wanted her senior to have a look at my baby and left the room.
‘Minutes later the consultant came back, scanned me, then sat on the chair next to me and said “it’s not good news”.’
Doctors said the baby’s brain had failed to develop properly on one side and the child would be brain damaged, though Ms Austin did not know to what extent.
She said: ‘I collapsed walking out the hospital, and remember thinking “this cant be real, things like this happen to other people, not me”.’
After spending the next month travelling to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford Ms Austin was told her unborn baby had the most severe form of schizencephaly and she would be severely brain damaged.
Doctors said Tayton would need round-the-clock care and would never walk or talk and would need the help of tubes to eat and drink.
They also said the child would have a limited life expectancy.
It was then that Ms Austin was offered the harrowing option of terminating her pregnancy.
She said: 'I cannot even begin to explain how difficult making that decision was.
'I guess it’s like having the choice whether to turn off someone you loves life support machine.
'Because though you’ve never met that baby in your tummy you have a enormous amount of love for them.
'You’ve already imagined taking them home, watching them take their first steps, their first day at school.
'Your future and theirs is already planned in your mind. But I knew all I imagined would never ever happen.
'My little girl was far too poorly and her little life would only be spent in pain.
‘So me and Charlie made the most difficult choice - to let our little girl go.’
Doctors signed papers confirming the child would have no quality of life and the pregnancy was terminated at the end of July.
Ms Austin said: 'I can’t even begin to explain my feelings that day, you can’t put that pain into words,there’s no point even trying to.
'I had to spend the next three days with Tayton in my belly as the hospital in Swindon was too full to induce me.
‘Days felt like years with a baby in my tummy that was no longer kicking me. A baby I knew was no longer alive.’
Ms Austin added: ‘I was on the labour ward still so I could hear all the other babies screaming. The screams broke my heart.’
She described her child as ‘completely perfect’ and ‘beautiful’ but knew she had made the correct decision when she spotted a large dent at the back of her head.
The heartbroken couple spent the rest of the day with the child, dressing and holding her, but later had to walk out of the hospital without their baby.
She described her little girl as ‘beautiful’ and ‘completely perfect’ but said when she saw a ‘large dent at the back of her head I’d made the right choice for her’.
Ms Austin said: 'The day that’s usually the best day of a mother’s life was the worst day of mine.
‘I felt like my whole world was crashing down around me. Even at this point it didn’t feel real, it felt like it had all been just a bad dream.’
The couple had to go through the devastating experience of registering their daughter’s birth and death at the same time and revealed friends who did not know what had happened asked her, ‘where’s the baby?’
Ms Austin had to return all the things she had bought at Mothercare - but was told she could not get a refund on the pram and cot because the receipt was out of date.
A tearful Ms Austin tearfully explained the situation but it was not until her mother phoned head office she was able to take the equipment back.
And she claims the company ‘insensitively’ offered her a voucher as a goodwill gesture.
Ms Austin wrote: 'What on earth was i going to do with a bloody mother care voucher?
'I felt angry at everything, at every woman I saw with a baby that got their happily ever after when I didn’t.
'Angry at myself for not creating a perfectly healthy baby, angry at charlie back playing football, angry at my family and friends who were moving on with their life while I was stood still in pain.
‘I wanted the world to be stood still hurting and grieving with me.’
Things eventually got easier for the couple but the weeks after the termination were tough.
'I remember vividly still wanting to strangle the people who would say to me “you’ll be ok”, because then, I still wasn’t ok, but baby loss is such a taboo people don’t know what to say,'Ms Austin said.
'They don’t realise at the time talking about your baby might be exactly what you want and exactly what you need.
'Life does go on and in time I learnt to live with the pain.
‘Losing my baby never broke me but it certainly changed me and I’m sure for the rest of my life I’ll be a different person.’
Ms Austin has spoken out in the hope of increasing knowledge about baby loss.
She said: 'Change in the hospitals that place you on a labour ward full of screaming babies, to help the cashiers in baby stores know how to deal with someone who’s lost a baby.
‘It’s to stop the people crossing the road to avoid talking to that friend who has just lost their baby, it’s family, friends and people at work knowing what support to have in place to help someone cope with their loss.’
She added: 'Baby loss is something I once thought I’d never have to consider, I never thought I’d be a statistic.
‘But I am 1 in 4, I am a mother who lost her baby, and if creating awareness can help a person even feel slightly less pain than I did back then, then breaking my silence is more than worth it.’
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