Bereaved mum shares heartbreak of losing baby boy to rare infection

A mother from Derby has shared her experience after losing her baby boy five months ago to a rare illness. Teddy Gadsby was born in Royal Derby Hospital in May 2023 and was deemed fit and healthy by nurses and doctors after his birth at around 6am.

Just over 12 hours later Teddy was at his new home in Chaddesden with his dad, Jack Gadsby, and mum, Amy Wilkinson, both aged 29. When Amy was pregnant the University Hospitals of Derby and Burton were trialing a test for Group B Strep (streptococcal bacteria), a rare bacteria carried by 20 to 40 per cent of adult women.

Although the bacteria is common in women, the NHS says that the condition can be passed on from mother to child in one in every 1,750 pregnancies. Amy did the voluntary swab to detect Strep B and it came back positive which doctors ensured shouldn’t be an issue, but did say they would have to closely monitor Amy when she was in labour and would prescribe the pair a course of antibiotics as a precaution.

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For the next month, Teddy would live a happy life with his two loving parents and their elder son, Ronnie, now aged two. Amy said: “We came home and everything was fine, obviously Ronnie was loving having a little baby in the house.

“On the day he turned a month old it was just a normal day, I was at my mum’s and everything was normal. We got home and he was off his bottle and crying, but he suffered from baby colic, so his crying a lot wasn’t much of a red flag at this point. He carried on crying and ended up falling asleep, which again we thought was fine and there wasn’t anything to worry about.

“I woke up in the middle of the night that night and he felt hot and hadn’t woken up for his bottle. I took his temperature and it was 39.8 °C which is obviously quite high. Due to his age, 111 advised us to go to A&E. In the short drive to the hospital, his skin colour had completely changed and his breathing wasn’t normal. 10 minutes after we arrived there were 21 doctors around Teddy, that is when we could sense something was seriously wrong.

“His heart rate was high and his blood pressure was low. They sedated him and put him on antibiotics and once he was stable they blue-lighted him to Nottingham’s intensive care unit. They ran some tests in Nottingham and it came back that he did have Strep B, despite not being diagnosed at birth. The doctors said that Teddy had late onset Strep B and could’ve contracted it via touch from anyone carrying the virus who saw him in the previous month, not necessarily myself.

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“In the end, Teddy had three blood transfusions and the hospital moved him out of intensive care and into the high-dependency unit. Teddy had a CT scan which found that when he was being taken to intensive care his brain had been starved with oxygen and Teddy, if he were to survive, would have suffered devastating brain damage which most likely would have led to severe learning difficulties.

“They predicted that when they turned off the life support machines Teddy would be unable to breathe for himself and would most likely pass away without the support. Both mine and Jack’s family came to the hospital to support us, and we unfortunately had to make the decision to turn off his life support. The doctors thought he was going to pass away almost instantly, but Teddy lasted over two hours, showing really how strong he was.

Amy and Jack decided to honour Teddy in recent months by carrying out a fundraiser in aid of Group B Strep Support, an independent charity that supports parents such as Jack and Amy and aims to spread awareness and fund increased testing for the bacteria. Amy added: “It was actually Jack’s friend Julian who came to us and proposed the idea of a charity walk, at first we thought it was too soon but we ended up doing it, we did not want Teddy’s death to be in vain and this was a way to start helping people who may be in our position. On Saturday, September 16 we thought we’d walk from Ilkeston, where Jack is from, to Pride Park because Jack and his family are huge Derby County fans.

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“We were expecting 50 people to turn up on the day but amazingly, around 100 people showed up to support Group B Strep Support. We set an initial target of £500, and now we’re almost at £10,000, it’s amazing. Captain Kirk’s chip shop in Kirk Hallam provided sausage buttys to the walkers and only charged for donations, which was amazing, for a local business to get involved like that at their own expense was just a priceless feeling.

Amy is just one of the many mothers who’ve had a child that was victim of neo-natal death in Derbyshire, and by telling her story and raising money for such an important cause she hopes to raise awareness for Strep B. She hopes she can enable frequent testing for the bacteria that can be so damaging to young lives. If you would like to donate to Amy’s fundraiser, the details can be found by clicking here.

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