Living with never-ending pain of a child's death

Some days are easier than others for Siobhan Carroll, but there is never an easy day. Sometimes she can roll out of bed without too much thought, other times it takes a couple of deep breaths before that first step of the day can be taken, and that is often how she and her husband Noel get through the day – one step at a time.

The date of April 2, 2008 saw Siobhan and Noel’s lives turned completely upside down when the ultimate horror for a parent visited them – the death of a child.

Their eldest child, Aoibhe – who had turned four in January – woke up in the middle of the night of April 1 with vomiting and diarrhoea. Noel was at home alone with Aoibhe and her brother Eimhin (2), as Siobhan, who was pregnant with their third child, was experiencing some difficulties related to her pregnancy and so was in hospital for overnight observation.

Noel comforted Aoibhe, changed her and when she fell asleep again, tucked her back up in bed, and rang Siobhan in the hospital to let her know Aoibhe had been sick.

“I didn’t expect a thing, sure how could you? Yes, I was worried that one of the kids was sick, but kids get sick all the time. I had spoken to her on the phone earlier in the evening before she went to bed and she was in great form, so I wasn’t overly worried,” Siobhan recalls.However, Aoibhe got sick again later in the night, setting off alarm bells with Noel, and he called the doctor, who told him it sounded like Aoibhe had a vomiting bug.

As her condition deteriorated during the night, he rang the doctor a couple of time times and followed the advice given. At this stage Noel was sitting on the couch in the sitting room of their Oranmore house in the early hours of the morning, cradling Aoibhe in his arms.

They were watching cartoons around 5am when Aoibhe’s eyes closed and Noel thought she was drifting off to sleep, but he then noticed her lips had started to turn blue. He immediately rang an ambulance, and phoned Siobhan to tell her Aoibhe was not well and there was an ambulance coming out.

“I was obviously very worried then, and I spoke to Noel when the ambulance arrived and he told me ‘they’re working on her’ and I didn’t know what he meant, ‘working on her’, sure she only had a vomiting bug.”

What Siobhan didn’t know was that by the time the ambulance arrived to the house, Aoibhe had stopped breathing. The ambulance crew worked furiously on the little girl, and managed to revive her, and she was rushed into hospital.

“I was being kept in for the night for observation, so when Noel told me she was on the way in to the hospital in an ambulance, I made my way over to A&E to wait for them. I remember standing outside in the dark, it was the middle of the night so it was very quiet, and off in the distance I could hear a siren and do you know what I said, I said to myself ‘God, it sounds as if someone is very sick, God love them’ without realising it was the ambulance rushing my Aoibhe into hospital.

“The ambulance pulled up, the doors opened and someone just ran out, straight past me, and into A&E, followed by the ambulance crew and Noel with Aoibhe. Aoibhe died within an hour, an aggressive strain of meningitis taking her life,” she says in hushed tones, her voice trailing off.

At the start of the interview, Siobhan hands me a printed page with details of what happened that night, with the explanation that she can’t bring herself to talk about the horror that visited her and her family, but over the two hours we spend talking, she dips further and further into some hidden well of courage to give voice to that earth-shattering early morning.

“I was in hospital so I never got to hold her, I never got to say goodbye to her, and that’s very hard to take, she was gone, just like that. “We were great friends, great buddies, and I’m thankful for the fact that I didn’t go back to work after she was born, so I had that precious time with her, but God, I miss her so much, it’s still hard to believe she’s gone.

“She was a great little character – we’d go shopping together, and when we’d be on the way home we’d hatch a plan that I would go in and distract Daddy so she could run upstairs and hide the bags of things we had bought in the wardrobe.

“She was really looking forward to starting school – she was in the naíonra and was loving it there, and she just couldn’t wait to start in ‘big school’, as she’d say,” Siobhan explains.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.