The Olympic gold medallist opens up to Clare Rigden about the tragic death of her baby son Finnan, who lost his courageous battle for life 10 days after he was born.
It should have been the happiest time in their life. Newly married, Olympic aerial skiing champion Alisa Camplin and her husband Oliver Warner were preparing for the birth of their son and looked to the future with unflagging optimism and a sense of excitement. Alisa’s pregnancy had been an easy one, and the 36-year-old was, as her friends kept telling her, a picture of good health.
“I am a little girl, and our baby was going to be a big boy with long bones, so I looked big – but I also looked healthy,” she explains. “I had been super-careful. I didn’t have any caffeine, alcohol or diet products, just fish, lean meat, fresh fruit and vegetables. With a balanced diet I didn’t put on too little or too much weight, so we thought we did everything right and that everything was going well.”
But during a trip to Canberra for work, Alisa got the news any expectant couple dreads to hear. There was something wrong with their baby.
“I had food poisoning, which was totally unrelated to the pregnancy, but quite severe,” she explains. “So I went to Canberra hospital to make sure everything was OK. I thought I was just being conservative, but when they did some routine scans, they noticed something unusual with the baby’s heart.”
“The doctors went into diagnostic mode, trying to see what was wrong – which was hard, because a baby’s heart is only the size of its fist and our baby was only 32 weeks at that stage,” Alisa explains. As the days wore on, a clearer picture emerged. Alisa and Oliver’s child was suffering from severe congenital heart disease.
Read more of Alisa’s story in this Week’s Woman’s Day on sale now.
Do you have amessage of supprt for Alisa? Share it with us below.
Related stories
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
.png?resize=380%2C285)
