Bereaved fathers to raise money for Luton and Dunstable Hospital’s neonatal transfer service with special football match

Joe Stevens, 27, was told that he lost his son, Frankie when he and his ex-partner were having her final scan before expecting to give birth.

The roofer from Biggleswade said: “It was back in 2021 when my partner at the time was pregnant. We got to the last stage when you had to see the midwife for the last scan, and they couldn’t find the heartbeat.

“We had to have a funeral. It was a really bad time, it wasn't nice for anyone.”

In October last year, Joe’s friend, Grant Bunker, was expecting the arrival of his first child with his wife, Ellena.

Grant, 30, said: “We got to around 25 weeks, and then she started to get cramps and a bit of discomfort. It was her first pregnancy, so she didn't know whether this was normal or not.”

The couple went to get medical help at the Lister Hospital and were told that Eleanor was dilated.

He explained: “[The hospital] called the PANDR service, the one that we're raising money for, to transport us from Stevenage to London.”

These plans soon changed as her contractions started.

Grant said: “She went to labour at this point, and it started to happen really, really quick.

They said to us that we were not going to London, because if we were to go to London and anything happens during the transport, then Dougie wouldn't survive.”

In the early hours of October 6, Dougie was born and placed into an incubator.

Lister Hospital specialises in caring for babies born at 30 weeks or more, so the family was transferred by the PaNDR (Paediatric and Neonatal Decision Support and Retrieval) service to the Luton and Dunstable Hospital.

Grant said: "It takes about two hours to go from the hospital incubator into the transport incubator. After that, the PaNDR crew took Dougie to the Luton and Dunstable Hospital. Then it was another two hours transporting from the transport incubator back into the hospital incubator.”

In the hours that followed, the couple sat with their newborn and spent time together as a family as doctors monitored Dougie.

After failing to get any sleep, the pair woke up and were told that their baby’s blood and oxygen levels were “all over the place”.

Grant explained: “Things weren't working going to plan, he had a transfusion. Once they put the blood inside him, he started to get pressure on his brain, causing a bleed on the brain, so he had severe brain damage. Also his lungs were sticking as well.”

His consultants told his parents that they could not do anymore for him and placed him on a life support machine.

The Bunker family joined at the hospital to be with Dougie and he died on October 7.

His parents were still able to bathe him and have time as a trio while Dougie was in the maternity suite’s cold cot.

Grant said: “Those are memories that we're going to cherish forever. It might sound really weird to some people that we were doing that with a baby that's not alive, but it didn’t matter, he was our son, and he was still with us during that time.”

On Saturday, June 14, Joe and Grant will put their football boots on and take part in a fundraising match - with donations going to PaNDR.

The service is run entirely by volunteers and relies on donations to help as many families as they can.

The men will each have two teams playing at the Caldecote Pavilion in Upper Caldecote.

Already, £5,000 has been raised in raffle tickets - with prizes including a signed Manchester United shirt, tickets for Arsenal, Chelsea, Spurs and Liverpool, and a signed Northampton Saints Rugby shirt.

There will be food vans, stalls, live music and fairground rides. There will also be parking onsite.

For Grant, he hopes this charity match will become a yearly tradition.

He said: “It’s in memory of Dougie and Frankie. It’s just the fact that people will still talk about them, and they're not going to go and be forgotten about.”

For Joe, he hopes the event will be an opportunity to open up the conversation about how men are also affected by baby loss.

He said: “The respect I have for my ex-partner is crazy because of what she went through and still had to give birth. It's a totally different feeling for [women] because they carried a baby.

“I think as a man, you're looked at to be sort of the rock of your family. But obviously, you're going through it as well. You're just building everything up, everything just getting built up, built up, and you're going to explode at some point. You can't just hold it in.”

Talking about his experience with Grant has been helpful for Joe, and he is encouraging men who are in a similar situation to voice their feelings.

He added: “Definitely talk to people. Talk to your other half about it, because you're both going to be in a bad way. And if you don't speak to each other about it, it's going to just build up and build up and cause problems.

“It does get easier, it may seem like it won't. But it does.”