A no-holds barred heart -stopping walk into the world of premature , sick babies, many with genetic conditions written by an incredibly brave and honest woman who has walked that path herself and contributed to by many more brave parents unafraid to share the negativity of their experiences and the poor outcomes as well as the positives and joyful outcomes.
The book tackles a number of situations faced by parents with very ill, often very premature babies...from having to leave your baby alone in hospital due to a lack of NHS funds allowing space for parents to stay overnight, to the terrifying ordeal of seeing your child go through multiple operations.
The subject matter is very sensitively handled and the interviews carried out, and described by, the author are informative to the lay person.
There are many, many places in the book that will bring a tear to the eye and many more that make you want to go out and begin fundraising for GOSH, for Bliss, SANDS and the many other charities that support parents going through the horror of a poorly child.
Having had a premature baby myself (although thankfully only 4 weeks early) I can only feel that there by the grace of genetics go us all and we owe a vote of thanks to the medical and scientific pioneers who have made premature birth something survivable as well as to the parents who selflessly shared their stories and their pain with the author to give multiple perspectives of the experiences that come with a genetic diagnosis.

Fascinating, scary, heartwarming and heartbreaking in a world of so many medical advances that we can take for granted or not fully appreciate until they intersect with our lives and this brings it all to front and center. The medical miracles that can be achieved for our children! As a mother who has experienced some of her own medical intervention in pregnancy the unknown is amazingly vast but this shows you how much is done to bring two people into parenthood and provide a life their childhood.
Completely emotional and certainly not for everyone but highly recommended.

Really thought provoking. I read with a sense of awe as to how quickly medicine has advanced in this field. Great read.

A lovely written story and a good insight into a scary situation that we don’t think could happen to us. It swaps between the real life struggles of her baby son and the world of cutting edge fetal medicine. Although it was such a sad subject to read about it makes you understand how these amazing doctors are miracle workers. I would recommend this book.

What an amazing story this is. The author tells of the heartache and troubles she and others in her situation go through when pregnancy doesn’t go to plan. It seems unimaginable that surgery could be performed on an unborn fetus to aid the recovery and repair of medical emergencies, of that fetus prior to birth
I found myself truly moved by the stories of these incredibly strong parents, who have gone through hell to nurture and give birth to their babies.
It’s hardly possible to imagine the suffering and hardships these babies and their parents then have to go through to survive and get on with life. Sometimes spending months or even years, in and out of hospitals.
I can only say, what a privilege it is to share their stories and the work carried out by the amazing medical staff. Indeed, I read this book and felt truly humbled.
A must read. An amazing read.

This book is very imformative about the fragility of human life and how modern medicine helps to cope with the vast array of problems pregnancy and childbirth pose. All of the accounts of each child and their families are intricately portrayed. The emotional roller coaster that parents and the medical staff have to cope with on each journey is dealt with sensitively.

The fear and love that parents experience when a new life is created but something goes wrong.. The bravery that medical professionals show when trying to save a baby's life and how they navigat the issues.. All of these are covered in this book. both at an emotional level and physical one.

I felt this book was well written and extremely informative on the facts. It helped me understand how it is for people who are faced with these heart rending dilemmas. Walking in their shoes is a lot harder though and a totally different experience from understanding. Rare genetic conditions, survivors of premature birth, and congenital defects are so hard to understand when you have little contact with them.

Overall I thought the book was well written. However, there were times when I felt it was more of a medical journal than a book which is it's only downside.

The First Breath is a beautifully written memoir about the author’s experience with fetal surgery and neonatal care as she lived it as the parent of Joel born in 2011. The book explores the historical, current and futuristic look at the care of babies while in utero and in the months following birth. It takes an honest look into the implications of saving babies born with severe prematurity or profound congenital issues and the impact, not only on the child, but the parent and rest of the family. Through a series of interviews with specialists in this field, the book provides insight into the differences in philosophy of care between individual caregivers, and certainly within different cultures. The book also provides a narrative of the experiences of several other parents whose children have spent their first months in hospital.

I highly enjoyed this book. It is insightful, deeply moving and thought-provoking. It challenges our health care systems to take a good look at how we can improve care of these tiny individuals as well as the family supporting them. I respected the author’s concerns regarding the lack of support for these children as they age out of many government-sponsored funding. This is an important discussion which needs to be explored further as medical technology saves and extends the life of babies who in earlier decades would simply have died.

Thank you to NetGalley for the opportunity to read such a fascinating book. It was a privilege to travel with Olivia Gordon through the journey of her son's birth and his struggle to survive. One could empathise with the myriad of feelings Olivia felt during the months following Joel's birth and I was very interested to read about all of the developments in the field of neonatology. What an amazing and exciting area of medicine and Olivia has been so fortunate to witness cutting edge surgery during her research. Joel is clearly a very loved child who has thrived and I wish Olivia and her family the very best.

⭐️⭐️⭐️ 3 (just) stars

This book started well, as we learned about the author’s pregnancy journey. However it kind of abruptly jumped ahead to the outcome and then we got lots of chapters about the history of foetal medicine/surgery.

Then interspersed with flashbacks to the author’s story again.

I found it jumped around too much and there was way too much historical detail and data.

But I did really enjoy her personal experiences, those of the other parents she met and her time with the doctors, who lets face it are miracle workers.

I was expecting this book to be the story of the Authors birth and consequent care of her son. However, although there is some focus on this, the book is mainly focused on how these very premature babies live and the medical professionals who operate on them and make life and death decisions on a day to day basis.

I did enjoy the book - but I found myself skipping to the parts of the 'real' women and their stories. I found the medical jargon a little too much and unnecessary. I thought it would have been nicer to hear the stories of the women who had been through premature birth such as the mother with one twin who died in the womb, the mother who had tried for years to get pregnant only to be told her unborn baby had a genetic disorder and all of these interesting tales of pure courage.

All in all, this would be a good read for a student midwife or trainee doctor, or even a mother of a premature baby - perhaps not so much for a read about these miraculous babies.

A lovely read. A mix between a real life story and a scientific study. Easy to abord despite the sometimes difficult subject matter

This is an honest exploration of neonatal and fetal medicine by an author whose own child spent months in SCBU. Gordon examines the ethics of medical advances in the field but doesn't lose sight of the human stories, including the experiences of clinical staff working with these tiny, and often tenacious, babies. There's no shying away from the tougher questions either and readers may well find that their previously-held beliefs are challenged in unexpected ways.

A tender and well written account of somethong most of us thankfully will never experience. Memoir style it never deviates from the heart of the matter. A priviledge to read.

I was asked to review this book by the publisher. Having three children myself I was intrigued to read this book. At first it started out very well. I’m glad I’m not pregnant whilst reviewing this book as I’d be worrying.

The author is a journalist and the way in which she delivered this book felt As such. More facts and details and less of the emotional stuff. Olivia Gordon has a child born with hydrops and she tells her own pregnancy story in bits and pieces. Never giving the reader one complete story/case study at a time which I found frustrating and unnatural. As a reader I wanted to know the fate of these families Olivia wrote about when I was introduced to the couple struggling with their unborn baby and complicated pregnancy, only to find out later on that some babies didn’t make it.

The author has clearly done a lot of research and travelling to write her book and I admire her dedication to the subject.

Olivia Gordon’s son Joel was born with a genetic syndrome in 2011. This is the story of his life interwoven with the history of fetal medicine and the stories of the other babies and parents Gordon met on her journey.
It is also the story of a new generation of babies born very early, and how we will need to respond to them and their abilities and define them by their humanity rather than their diagnoses.
A journalist, she interviews some of the medics who treated Joel and is also witness to surgery that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.
This adds up to a book that is highly personal and emotional but is also an objective history of the progress in keeping very premature babies alive.
It is not always an easy read, as you might expect, but it is an interesting one and Gordon handles the juxtaposition of personal and historical well.
It is very dense though and I sometimes found I could only read it in small chunks.
Recommended.

Journalist Olivia Gordon began to delve into the world of prenatal and neonatal medicine when she discovered first hand that pregnancy and the expected and long anticipated healthy baby isn't always the reality. In fact, Olivia had a really difficult and challenging time as an expectant mum after she was told that her baby boy was struggling and needed some life-changing and relatively new interventions whilst she was still pregnant.

This account is less so about Olivia and her journey with her son, and more about taking some time to gain some perspective whilst she shares her own story, other interesting cases she's witnessed during her investigations for writing this book and explores some of the thoughts of the leading minds of fetal medicine. She sheds some light on the enormous developments even in very recent times with specialist fetal medicine interventions and asks us to consider just how far we have come. Consider this - only within your own lifespan have some of these new changes been made, meaning that if you had been that baby with a condition capable of taking your life in utero, you wouldn't be here right now. In present day those changes mean that most babies with most conditions compatible with life can receive care and procedures which might very well save them.

What I really liked was that this book is ostensibly a very big thank you, a celebration no less, to the fetal maternal specialists, sonographers, midwives and neonatal nurses who actually make all of this happen. They get very little credit for what is an astonishingly difficult career choice and the reality is that a lot of those professionals have chosen this pathway entirely selflessly - they just want to save babies lives - so credit to Olivia Gordon for her nod to them. The ethical dilemmas they face - is their patient the mother, fetus or actually both? - are also slightly touched upon and this made for interesting debate.

Olivia Gordon does a really good job of making quite complex conditions, critical situations and often confusing procedures relatively simple to understand to an outsider. I can see a real comfort for readers who are going through similar situations, have children themselves or simply want to learn a little more about what is essentially a very forward thinking and ever-evolving speciality. Equally, it could help those professionals in the field to really feel more appreciated.

Reading the content though for someone familiar with this field perhaps has less to be gained in terms of new information. The major drawbacks for me were pacing and a few small errors. Obviously the author is not claiming to be a specialist in this field, she purely wants to share her story and others to offer some insight and she does this wonderfully and for the most part very accurately. There are a couple of areas which are less well explained or slightly incorrect. For example, a section surrounding spina bifida signs and the shape of the fetal head was slightly incorrect ("a fetus with spina bifida has a distinctive head shape a little like a banana" - it is the cerebellum which is banana shaped in cases of spina bifida, not the fetal head; the fetal head is however lemon shaped in some spina bifida cases). This wouldn't be jarring at all for someone reading for the experience, but for those more familiar with this area it might be a small niggle.

As is necessary with a first hand account, a lot of facts have been scattered throughout this book. This is great, but makes for quite a dry read. Not necessarily a bad thing, and absolutely could have been a personal issue given that the subject matter was not new to me, but something to bear in mind.

Overall I think the author has done a really great job of enabling more people to really appreciate the realities of some pregnancies and for some babies; the emotional strain a difficult or unknown diagnosis or series of tests places on an already anxious expectant mum are staggering. She somehow manages to cover a lot of ground, genuinely capturing the history of fetal medicine and the developments therein, in relatively few pages and touches on a number of interesting cases. Ultimately, the take home message for me was this: Every pregnancy is different but the people who can do something to care for your baby ABSOLUTELY will do everything they know how to in order to make sure your baby reaches you safely.

Read and reviewed in exchange for a free copy from NetGalley. I went into this expecting a memoir from a neonatal doctor, in the vein of Max Pemberton or Adam Kay, the sort of book I love, although was more hesitant with this given the nature of neonatology. However, the book was about the experience of Gordon (and others) parenting with a child in NICU and their subsequent lives, interspersed with the history of foetal medicine and neonatology. The book was fascinating (I'm generally very interested in healthcare and the history of medicine), and Gordon writes fantastically, her words filled with emotion. While this wasn't always an easy read, it is incredibly worthwhile, and I'd definitely recommend it to others.

An in-depth report on how we treat premature babies, including a history of how the medicine has advanced, filtered through the author's own experience of having an early baby. Interesting and moving.

This is an emotional delve into fetal medicine and what happens in neonatal units across both the UK and the world. This is not an easy read if you have had any dealings with NICU units or have had difficult pregnancies. It's very scientific but also very human as both the doctors, nurses, patients and parents are the focus of this book. It poses questions about how babies are cared for and how both the child's and parents aftercare is dealt with and I'm sure it will help people who have been through NICU situations or are going through them now feel that they are not alone.

This is such a heartfelt, poignant read- it is beautifully and tastefully written. It gives us the reader an insight into fetal medicine. It’s such a moving account.
Thank you to both NetGalley and Pan Macmillan for my eARC in exchange for my honest unbiased review