How this all started………
My husband and I attended our 20 gestation scan for our third child (yep, surprisingly he didn't just drop me at the door which was the running joke in our mother's group about the third pregnancy - done all this before). The obstetrician doing the scan was saying things like "beautiful heart, lovely looking lungs, great kidney" and we were smiling smugly at each other. Then all of a sudden she said "kidney …… hmmmm……. " and we knew there was a problem.

I hate it when doctors change demeanour and then put on the poker face - you know there's something up and I like to get it straight.  She muttered something about renal reflux or renal duplex and then said we'd have to talk it through with our obstetrician. Being told there is something wrong with your baby is horrific - it feels like the floor falls away beneath you. Luckily for me, this was our 3rd child (I was a seasoned war veteran), I had worked at the Children's Hospitals both in Melbourne and Sydney as a psychologist, and had even, coincidentally, worked on a study about renal reflux (when we wee the bladder contracts - renal reflux is when urine goes from the bladder back up to the kidneys when the bladder contracts). I can't imagine how this information hits mothers who haven't the exposure that I've had.

Other than that, oh and a move from Melbourne to Sydney at 35 weeks gestation, it was a really normal straight forward pregnancy. The delivery was tough which had nothing to do with the kidney things, but rather I haemorrhaged and lost a litre of blood at delivery. I was confined to bed post delivery for 3-4 days (who remembers exact things at these moments?), and it was a fog of sleeping, breast feeding and rebuilding blood supply. It took me about 4 weeks to feel that I could get through a day without dizziness and needing a daytime sleep to recuperate.

At 5 weeks of age, Matilda spiked a fever at 3am….. why or why do they do these things at 3am….???

Any fever in a newborn under the age of 6 weeks is an emergency and requires an immediate admission to hospital. So off we went to the Sydney Children's Hospital.

At this stage, no one had examined whether our baby actually had the kidney problems they had picked up in utero. I'd hardly stopped looking like a twilight cast member or the walking dead from my blood loss, let alone left the house……...