One Saturday afternoon, at about 25 weeks, we were reorganising our house, ready for the babies, with help from my Dad when Jennie suddenly started experiencing lots of pain. It quickly became worse and we drove to the hospital. I had no idea then how familiar that journey would become.

We were directed by worried faces to the labour ward, and we took the first, and for me the worst of many trips down the long hospital corridors.

They quickly established that the babies were okay, but it took over 52 hours for the hospital work to out what they should do to help Jennie. This was a very dark and scary 52 hours. I’ve never seen anyone in so much pain. Jennie asked me recently to recount my memories of this time as she can’t really remember it, I was reluctant to do so, because I didn’t want to relive it, I don’t really want to relive it now, just to say that Jennie’s bravery, resilience and determination, which I had seen but a glimpse of up to this point, rose to ever greater heights. She made it clear that if she could, she would willingly have sacrificed herself to save the babies.

Fortunately that wasn’t an option and finally they operated, cutting Jennie open whilst Esther and William’s hearts beat bravely on inside her. The operation was a success, but it took another week of intense and uncomfortable hospital care before Jennie was allowed to come home.

Two days later and Jennie was in pain again we went back to the hospital and in the same hospital room she had started in two weeks earlier we were told that the babies were coming. The finality of that fact, drove everything else from our minds and within an hour Esther had arrived and then 23 minutes later William joined us.

After briefly being shown each of the babies they disappeared behind a wall of machinery, tubes and bustling blue clad doctors and nurses. It was some hours before we were allowed to see them again, stretched out in their plastic boxes, covered in wires. That night, and for the next 58 nights, we went home on our own.

I know Jennie felt it was important that this video should be shown today to highlight the journey Esther and William have made.
For those 59 days Jennie spent all day every day at the hospital, reading them stories, singing them songs and just sitting, waiting, watching as they grew stronger. It was a long and testing time, and one she rose to yet again. There was so little we could do to help them, but everything she could, she did with endless love, dedication and single minded determination. She made me so proud to have her as my fiancée, the mother of my children and now finally, my wife.

About half way through the babies’ time in hospital my God Father – Tony – told us of the poem Invictus by a William Ernest Henley in 1875. It is quite a famous poem, but we had not heard it before. When we read it so strongly summed up how we hoped Esther and William might be facing their struggles, and for me it expresses the essence of Jennie’s attitude throughout everything we had been through to get where we were, I quickly learnt it off by heart.

And this is how it goes:

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishment the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

Eventually the long, long wait was over and we took the walk we had dreamed of back down those hospital corridors both proudly and carefully carrying car seats each containing a tiny baby.

I asked David if I could share this today as an introduction to my plea to our Health Minister to not cut nursing numbers in neonatal care.

Esther and William would not be here if it was not for the skill, care, compassion and dedication of the Neonatal Nurses at The William Harvey Hospital in Ashford, Kent. They were wonderful and worked above and beyond their duty to ensure that we were able to bring our babies home.

Please, please follow this link and join me and many others in telling the Health Minister to stop putting babies’ lives at risk.