Marie Gleeson

My granny definitely didn't.

So, immaculate conception.

So, yeah, so then like, you know, like young naive parents, we went through and Professor Keelan O'Donoghue was our consultant in CMH and we were in with her for the anomaly scan.

And then she said, oh, there's something I just want you to come back in a couple of weeks.

And Cailin is phenomenal.

If anybody like Cailin is a brilliant medical professional.

So she didn't say what it was.

So when she brought us in, we were still quite naive and we found out the gender that day.

So we went from this elation of having this little baby boy to finding out that that little baby boy had a very complicated congenital heart defect.

And the day we were in the Coombe then a week later with the paediatric team up there, like that was just a really, really tough day because we had gone to Dublin thinking of other people we knew whose babies had had, you know, holes in the heart or some kind of a heart defect and had been in Cromlin and had surgery.

So I suppose that's where we were at.

And then when the consultant drew out the diagram of Ciarán's heart versus another baby's heart, there were so many different complexities that because there were so many, it meant that his heart was very badly functional, wasn't going to work.

So when John said to the pediatric cardiologist, what are the options?

When they said, first off, you know, we recommend you go to the UK for termination like that just took the wind out of our sails because we were not, wasn't even in consideration.

And I think, like I said this in the book, like we drive back to the Killishy House Hotel and like I'm a talker, my husband isn't.

So there was silence in the car.

Like and when we got back to Killishy and we sat down, like I think neither one of us really wanted to speak because we didn't want to influence the other person.

But we knew we didn't make this terrible decision.

And like, I think maternally I was in a heap.

Like I was, I don't even think I was functioning at that stage.