The parents of a baby boy who tragically died after being born have told of how invaluable cold cots are
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00:00 This is our first child together. And my pregnancy was no complications, really, nothing out of the normal.
00:08 So it was a good pregnancy?
00:09 Yeah, it was a good pregnancy. I think you have anxieties in pregnancy, I think, but to think that something like this would happen was definitely not what we expected.
00:21 So there's different types of cold cots. What we had was an Abbey cot. They're more expensive, but they do better to preserve the body from deteriorating quicker.
00:35 I think they keep them a lot cooler than some of the other ones. So we had him with us Friday through to Monday.
00:45 I think it's not something normally where you'd sort of spend that time with your baby that's not alive. But obviously, you don't get the time to make memories like other parents do.
00:56 A lot of hospitals don't actually have them. So they're not sort of funded by the government or anything like that. Sadly, the hospitals that do have them, it's generally because someone's lost a child or a baby. And that's how they've become aware of them.
01:11 Obviously, because we don't have Bo, we don't get to make memories like people would with their babies, you know. So the only chance we got to make any memories was those three days that we stayed in hospital.
01:23 Without the cold cot, that just wouldn't have happened. We'd have been out of hospital the next day and he'd have been where they keep babies until they go to the funeral homes.
01:33 In those sort of three days, we had hand and feet cast done, we were able to take photos with him and just sort of cuddle him.
01:45 The last thing you think about when you give birth is that your baby isn't going to survive and that you're going to go home without your child.
01:52 So the fact that that was already there without us having to think about anything, because that's just, you're in such a state of shock that you just don't have time to think about these things.
02:03 You can't prepare for anything like that. So it's having the cold cot is the hospital's preparation for it.
02:09 And that's why we want to make sure that every hospital's got one.
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