Thanks for taking the time to visit my JustGiving page. Me and my partner Tanya are trying to raise as much money for our charity as we can which is the NEONATAL INTENSIVE CARE UNIT at the UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL OF NORTH STAFFORDSHIRE. we have set ourselves a target of five thousand pounds. The staff at the neonatal intensive care unit do a magnificent job and deserve all the help they can get. They are all wonderful people.

Last year Tanya and i found out that we were going to become parents. We were over the moon as you can imagine and so were both our families. We attended all the meetings with the midwives and scans at the hospital and everything was going fine. On monday the 28th of June Tanya had a routine check up with the midwife and everything with our baby was fine, however all of the joy and excitment turned to panic the following evening. Tanya had a slight bleed so we went to the hospital to find out what was going on. It turned out that she was 4cm dilated and in very slow labour,all this at just 25 weeks. We couldnt believe it, Tanya was put on a drip to slow the labour down and given two steroid injections that evening to help our babys lungs develop.

      The following morning tanya was transferred to THE UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL OF NORTH STAFFS and taken straight to the delivery suite.

     Five days later on the 4th of July our little baby boy was born weighing in at just 1lb 13oz and we decided to name him Kai. We were so scared because we were told that kai didnt stand a very strong chance of surviving the birth due to how early he was born but we all kept faith.

Kai was taken straight to the intensive care unit where he was put in an incubator and given the best treatment that was possibly available. The doctors sat us down and explained to us what was going on and what chances our son had of surviving. they told us that they were amazed that he survived the birth and that he had an open valve in his heart, this meant that there was more blood being pumped around the body than what was coming back to the heart, which meant that there was fluid on the lungs building up (this is common in pre term babies and this problem is easily solved providing that the baby is strong enough to undergo a simple operation) unfortunately kai wasn't, our son had a blood infection which he was on many different antibiotics for, which did seem to be working. However, the doctors sat us down and revealed that they had discovered a bleed on kai's brain, this is known as an intraventricular haemorrhage. This devastating news broke our hearts.

     As the days went on, Kai's condition was getting worse and on the 16th of July we were called into the hospital to have a meeting with the specialists, our hearts sank as they told us that our son was not going to make it, being told this was the worst thing either of us have ever had to accept.

     The doctors said we had two choices in which way we would like  our son pass away. We could either let him pass away on the ventilator or we could hold him, which we hadn't been able to do previously. We both decided that we wanted to hold him in our arms so he could get a kiss from his mommy and daddy and thats exactly what we did. Sadly in the early hours of the next morning (17th July) at just 13 days old we lost our son Kai Michael Taundry........ He passed away with a loving family with him.

Tanya and myself would just like to thank everybody in the NEONATAL INTENSIVE CARE UNIT  at the UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL OF NORTH STAFFS  for all of the tremendous efforts they put in to help our son and every other baby there.