we have poor boys Jonah being the firstborn quite sensitive a must very easygoing Gabriel he's crazy he's a four-year-old yes yeah and we have an idea my pregnancy with Elijah was was really difficult I'd had great pregnancies with my other two Elijah started with problems from about 12 weeks I had lots of bleeding it was very stressful got into bed and I turned to James and just said feel really uncomfortable and then having had two pregnancies before the penny drops that my uncomfortable is labor pains I was absolutely terrified he was twenty five weeks and three days when he was born premature birth is a huge global problem over 15 million babies will be born prematurely a year and that in the UK equates to about 61 thousand babies being born prematurely and one of those about a thousand will die there's in an incubator with UV lighting because his skin was so delicate he was fed through his bloodstream there was very little we could actually do for him he feel helpless I was running scared of holding him as I was really scared that I would drop him it was just so small I didn't fully understand what was going on and why he was where he was everything was was looking good for an idea it wasn't on their event station she's reading for himself with a little bit of help I seem to be doing really really well everybody tells you how many premature babies they know and how big they are now they're all 6-foot tall they all end up being six foot tall but also one of the things that people would say was that if the doctors are all right then you're all right but if the doctors start looking worried then you need to worry I went in the doctors looked really worried Elijah's had a routine head scan which I basically showed that his brain had been starved of oxygen and so he just had a massive brain damage there was no chance of him really making any any recovery from that we were both clear that the right thing to do was to move to palliative care and just to you know Alijah today i'm died and so you have all this emotion and all this love and he's not there he's already lived for five weeks and he's already died it's just very hard to get your head round he's still my son he might not be here but he is here he's always gonna be here at the moment if a woman comes to us as a first to my mother we cannot predict or identify whether she's going to have a preterm birth at all we only become aware of them when they turn up in labour ward in labour and at that point we can do very little to improve the outcome of the baby the research we're doing should hopefully identify the mechanisms that cause in Crete and birth one of the major causes was the evidence of mild infection and the reproductive tract so what we're trying to do is develop a non-invasive test and this is a bit like the test that you would have if you are having a smear test for cervical cancer we can take the swab and get a result there and then and be able to reassure the woman about her risk of preterm birth and we have various interventions that we can give if necessary we never kind of really understood why Elijah came early and whether anything could have been done earlier on perhaps helped so we thought I was raised money for actual medical research research in the in the area of premature birth is not well funded at all and we really need more research money if we're going to understand what causes preterm birth I can't explained the impact of the loss of one of our children and the boys are living without their little brother pain doesn't go away but you were just this new life by funding the research gives the hope to families action medical research provide world-class quality research and if if their research can prevent premature birth it's everything [Music] you