UPDATE: |One minute we were going for routine scans – then one of my babies gave his life for the other News

Tom Smith and his partner Millie were given devastating news after going in for a routine scan

When Tom Smith and his partner Millie discovered she was pregnant with twins, the couple knew their lives would never be the same.

Already parenting their young daughter, the pair began anxiously sprucing up their Heywood house, buying supplies, and preparing for life with two young babies on the scene. But at around 21 weeks, Millie, 28, started noticing some strange symptoms. While decorating their home, her legs had begun to swell. In the mornings, her bump was sometimes small but sometimes huge. Recognising the signs as unusual, they immediately called their consultant.

Within a week, they had been referred to the fetal medicine unit at Liverpool Women’s Hospital, where they were told their unborn boys were showing signs of a rare and dangerous condition called twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome (TTTS). There, they made the incredibly difficult decision to undergo surgery in the hopes that both boys would pull through.

“It just happened so quickly,” Tom, 31, recalled. “We’d just been having routine scans and then all of a sudden we were in Liverpool three or four times a week.

“We’d never heard of TTTS before and it threw us into panic and confusion. It was a rollercoaster.”

Twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome is a rare condition that occurs in 10–15% of identical twin pregnancies when there’s an imbalance in blood flow between the twins. It happens when identical twins share a placenta, resulting in unequal blood exchange through connecting vessels. If no treatment is performed the outcome for the pregnancy can be poor with an 80 per cent chance of losing at least one baby, according to Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust.

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At 23 weeks Millie underwent laser ablation surgery to seal the abnormal blood vessels that connect the twins on the placenta, which stops the sharing of blood between the twins. The couple then endured an incredibly anxious week waiting for the results of the surgery.

“We’d built ourselves up for everything to be okay,” Tom said. “Millie was feeling fetal movements on both sides of her belly and we thought that was a good sign.”

But when they sat down with the consultant, they were given the devastating news that the smaller of their twins – whom they had named Elias – no longer had a heartbeat.

“It felt like the ground had just opened up and all this excitement and everything we had planned for had just been taken away from us,” he said. “It was really, really, really hard.”

Tom and Millie’s other twin, Enzo, thankfully survived the procedure, and Tom said that despite their heartbreak, the couple knew they had to turn their focus to him.

“It felt like the pregnancy would never end, because we were so worried something was going to happen to Enzo,” Tom remembered. “It never felt like the end was in sight, we had to have an MRI scan on his brain because it was connected to check there was no brain damage, and from there on out it just felt like the longest pregnancy ever.

“There was total worry and panic at every scan.”

On January 29 of this year, Millie delivered both Enzo and Elias via c-section at Oldham Hospital – a day Tom describes as the ‘hardest but proudest’ of his life. Still born prematurely at 34 weeks, Enzo was rushed to NICU, giving the pair a day to spend with Elias.

“We dressed him up and did some handprints and footprints with a bereavement nurse at the hospital,” he said. “We’re so thankful to her because she just made what we were absolutely dreading perfect.

“It sounds strange to say it was perfect but it was. The last vision I have of him was like cuddling a teddy bear before we handed him over to the funeral director. That image will stay with me and Millie forever, and it is such a nice image to be left with.”

Tom now says him and Millie feel that Elias gave his life so Enzo could survive, and that when the time is right, they will tell their now-healthy son about his brother.

Struggling to find the words to pay tribute to little Elias at his funeral, musician Tom turned to his songwriting abilities to pen a very special lullaby for his son. “I was searching high and low for the right song, the right words to relate to our journey and feelings,” he told the M.E.N. “I couldn’t find it, so I wrote my own tribute to Elias, a lullaby, just for him, in the sky.

“We used the piece of music at his service, which as hard as it was, was such a beautiful moment and I feel at peace knowing my feelings have been transferred into a piece of art that will always be there for him.”