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Tuesday, 18 February 2014

Will Greenwood: I owe my family to one heroic man

'I had spent my entire life in a little bubble,” says Will Greenwood with a disbelieving shake of his long head. He counts all the blessings he once took for granted: a loving home; happy school days; an international rugby career; a great set of mates, on and off the field; and a beautiful fiancée, Caro, who was pregnant – exactly as planned. A year before the 2003 Rugby World Cup, he felt invincible, charmed. “As if everything in my life had just fallen beautifully into place.”

Blokeishly, he breezed along. There was a natural order to things, wasn’t there? “Everyone gets married, gets pregnant, has children, pops them out, away you go. We were going along at high speed. Then everything came to a shuddering halt. It was like a train crash.”

The naivety of his mindset appals him now. Caro’s cervix would not hold the child - a condition known, cruelly, as “incompetence”. Their baby, a boy, was born at 22 weeks and lived for only 45 minutes. Freddie’s miniature completeness was shocking to Will. “This was no indeterminate mass of human cells. This was a living, breathing, perfectly formed absolute beauty of a little babe. I could see his little chest moving up and down.” They carried him to his funeral in a wooden coffin no bigger than a shoebox and planted a crab-apple tree in his memory. Then Caro fell apart.

“I was very selfish and I know I was no help to Will whatsoever,” she says. “I wouldn’t let him open the blinds. I made everyone live in the dark. I wouldn’t wear anything but black. I walked around the whole time holding Freddie’s mittens because they had touched him. I’d just stay awake all night like a loony woman. I didn’t think anyone else understood. I refused to talk about it. I just wanted to die. I was totally useless to everyone around me. They were dark, dark days. Will was quite stoic. He was brilliant with me and I was dreadful, horrible. He never ever made me feel that I was a rubbish partner to him but I really was.”

Will’s smudgy Lancashire voice is low and sounds as if it is coming from some way off. He is a giant of a man and that makes the quietness more obvious. “I never noticed it like that,” he says simply. “When you see your partner going through something like that, you wait… and wait… and wait. For as long as it takes. Be there. That’s all. That’s what most blokes would do.”

To understand the full wonder of their reversal of fortune, you need look no farther than the busy kitchen where Will is preparing a sausage supper at their home near Maidenhead, Berkshire. There are three lively children around the table – Archie, aged 10, Matilda, seven, and Rocco, four. Three healthy children that the Greenwoods thought were impossible. Each born after touch-and-go pregnancies. Each, they feel, owing their existence to the clinical expertise and research work of one remarkable man, the professor of obstetrics at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital.

“My ledger with Mark Johnson will never be balanced,” says Will, 41, now a rugby analyst for Sky Sports and Telegraph columnist, with feeling. “We will be indebted to him for life.” Caro, 39, adds: “I was a mother when I had Freddie. Mark Johnson enabled me to be a parent. That, for me, is a very important difference.”

In August, the Greenwoods will lead a team of amateur climbers to the summit of Kilimanjaro to raise money for Borne, a charity founded last year by Prof Johnson and the Chelsea and Westminster Health Charity to research complications in pregnancy, and particularly premature birth. The aim is to raise £250,000, and 20 enthusiasts have already signed up to Team Greens, including Alex Mancini, a 50-year-old palliative care nurse at the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit, and Prof Johnson’s wife, Dr Meekai To, a foetal medicine specialist at King’s College Hospital.

“It all comes down to a genuine feeling that if we had not met Mark, there is a very real possibility that we wouldn’t have any kids,” says Will. “We have a duty and a responsibility to do this. I would do the climb nude if it meant raising more money for him. We are giving him the opportunity to find answers to the problems that can accompany childbirth. Whatever we do, whatever money we raise, we will always be in his debt.”

There was no medical explanation at the time for what happened to Freddie. A consultant told the Greenwoods it was just bad luck and to “go and get pregnant again”. “I didn’t want another baby then,” Caro says. “I didn’t want a baby. I wanted my baby. I wanted Freddie. I was angry. So angry.”

“Bad luck” was not a good enough answer. “She is not an academic,” says her husband admiringly. “She’s a singer, a mother, an emotional heavyweight, a family heavyweight; she would not accept this.”

At the end of 2002, eight weeks pregnant with their second child, she begged to see the duty doctor who had offered comfort and a truthful prognosis when Freddie was about to be born too early to survive. His name, of course, was Prof Mark Johnson. “I knew it would go wrong again if I didn’t get help.”

It did go wrong again. But this time she was in good hands. Prof Johnson monitored her weekly from 12 weeks. At 15 weeks, the cervix started to shorten, as it does in preparation for birth. At 20 weeks, Caro went into pre-labour. Will was 12,000 miles away in Perth, Australia, a pivotal player for England in the World Cup.

“It was the day following the Georgia game,” he recalls. “I was playing pool when Caro called to tell me she was being admitted to hospital. It was happening again. Just as it did with Freddie at exactly the same stage of the pregnancy. I was plunged into a horrible, gut-churning state of anxiety.” Caro had an emergency suture or “stitch” to try to hold the baby in place, and was in intensive care.

“The chances of the baby’s survival yo-yoed all week,” Will recalled in his autobiography. “I barely spoke to Caro because she was off with the fairies in a drug-induced cloud-cuckooland. Every day of that terrible week, Mark Johnson gave me frank and precise updates on the condition of Caro and the baby. I will remain indebted to him for his cool-headed sensible advice for the rest of my days.”

Clive Woodward, the England coach, was faced with the loss of his imaginative, playmaking centre, but he told Greenwood: “This is just a World Cup, it’s not family. Unless you need to go right now, I’m going to book you on every plane out of here so that you can leave at a moment’s notice.”

Despite his recovering wife’s protestations – “I am fine. I can do this” – Will arrived at her bedside for two days, returned to play a central role in England’s dramatic triumph in Australia and was back home for the last weeks of the fragile pregnancy. Caro had urged him to return to the squad. “You go and win the World Cup,” she’d said, “and I’ll get us this baby.” Late in 2003, they went together to Downing Street to celebrate England’s victory and then Caro cautiously took her “massive great bump” to Buckingham Palace to meet “the loveliest lady in the world”.

Archie was safely born on Jan 31 2004, at 37 weeks, almost as soon as the suture holding him in place was removed. After the delivery, they realised that they had been transferred to the same room where they had held Freddie in his first and only hour of life. “I found that very calming,” says Caro. “I felt like I was with my boys. We were all together.”

Caro is a passionate ambassador for Borne. She points to the cost of full-time care for children who are severely disabled because they were born too soon. “Over a lifetime, we are talking millions. Why not put that money into research so that healthy babies are born as near full term as possible? I don’t think people see the big picture. They hear a tragedy like ours, with Freddie, and they think: 'Oh, those poor people.’ But it is not just about preventing a family from suffering. It is about preventing a lifetime of pain and endurance.”

Caro’s cervical condition is genetic. It’s unavoidable, unpredictable and psychologically undermining. “I felt enormously guilty,” she admits. “I still feel guilty. Freddie did nothing wrong. He was a healthy baby. He would have been absolutely fine. It was my body that was the problem.” (Prof Johnson dislikes the medical term “incompetent” because the word easily and irrationally translates from the womb to the patient. He prefers the description “cervical weakness”.)

They talk of Freddie as part of the family. There are photographs. Impressions on paper of his tiny hands and feet. The boys are practical, says Caro: “  'We had a brother called Freddie and now he’s not here.’ Matilda is obsessed with death and dying. She is inquisitive about things like how long a baby has to stay inside you.

“I feel Freddie is very much part of me. As a child, I remember hearing that a robin represents someone who has died. When I am out running [she is in training for the London Marathon as well as Kilimanjaro] and I see a robin, I think: 'There he is. My sweetheart.’”

Despite traumatic pregnancies, she never considered not having more children. “The irony of this whole thing is that I am incredibly maternal.” As a schoolgirl growing up in Leicestershire, she decided she wanted five children. Friends nicknamed her “Mother of the Shire”. After Archie, says Will, there was a system in place and they had the utmost confidence that Prof Johnson and his team could bring any future babies to near maturity.

The professor takes no personal credit, except perhaps for Archie’s safe arrival, but he believes that the Greenwoods’ experience holds important clues for future treatment. “For preterm labour, treatments given to women once they are in labour do not work well. It is much better to identify those women who are at risk and then use progesterone or cervical suture, which will reduce the risk by between 20 and 40 per cent. Our research aims to find a combination of agents that will reduce the risk even more.

“Currently, at most hospitals in the UK, women are only found to be at risk after they have lost one pregnancy. This needs to change. Screening of all women could be performed at 23 weeks but this is already too late for women with a weak cervix. Ideally, we should be able to screen at 12 weeks.”

Pioneering work from King’s College Hospital will soon be put into practice, he adds: “Then we will be able to screen for many complications of pregnancy, including pre-eclampsia, growth restriction, stillbirth and preterm labour at 12 weeks.”

“We have our happy ending,” says Caro. “We want it for others. The older the children get, the more I realise how lucky I am. I consider it an enormous privilege to be a full-time mother. I haven’t missed a day. I find it difficult to go abroad because I don’t like to leave them, though I know that doesn’t make me a better mother.

“The biggest test for me with Kilimanjaro will not be scaling the mountain but the time away from them. It will crucify me.”

 

 

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