S5. Ep3. Far from home. A farming mum's journey with fetal heart block and long distance care.

Married to a busy farmer and working as a midwife at their nearest hospital, Marnie’s dream was always to have her family born and bred close to home.

She was just 19 weeks pregnant with her second baby, when her rural GP obstetrician found that baby's heartbeat was around half what it should have been, and diagnosed fetal heart block - a rare condition that would shape the pregnancy, birth, and first months of baby Amelia's life.

What followed was the opposite of what Marnie had envisaged, with hours and hours of driving to multiple appointments, days of intense monitoring and months of uncertainty, all far from home. Impacting the whole family - Marnie is so proud of her partner Pete as he worked all hours of the day, every day, keeping the farm running; and her son Jack who quickly had to get used to spending a lot of time away from his home and his parents, something he had never done before.

Marnie shares with us her incredible story of a rural family under pressure, out of their environment, in a pandemic; and of the pacemaker that finally turned Amelia's life around.