Marie Gleeson

And we actually threw caution to the wind just before the wedding.

So I was actually four weeks pregnant the day I got married.

So when you look at our wedding video, there's this lovely moment between us in the church.

Will you welcome the children, whatever.

And you just see the two of us look at each other.

And we were so excited and beyond delighted.

And even though it had this massive career impact, at the same time, I was like, I can do this.

I can manage the career and have a baby and, you know, go to see, it'll all be fine.

And then we were with Professor Ceilin O'Donoghue in Cork, who I didn't know at the time was going to become this amazing person in our life.

And Ceilin picked up something on our scan.

We were just in as regular people in having your first, you know, anomaly scan at the 20 week mark.

And she brought us back in a couple of weeks later.

And that was the time when she told us it was something with the heart.

And I suppose I knew plenty of people who had holes in hearts or maybe, you know, heart things.

So in my head, it was like, this will be, you know, this is... We've all heard it growing up, you know, that it was an issue and people are fine with it.

But then we went to the Coombe and we met the paediatric cardiologist.

I was 24 weeks pregnant, so just coming up on six months.

And that was a really tough day.

And I talk about it in the book and I know it'll be a motive for people, but like to get such a stark diagnosis where it was such a complicated heart defect that they told us to consider England and termination as the first option.

And for me and John at the time, that was such a blow.