“It was super scary. Mylie was tiny. My partner got to hold her for a brief second, but it wasn’t like holding a normal baby, she had an oxygen mask on. She didn’t actually look like a baby because she wasn’t ready to be out the womb… they then took her straight off into intensive care.”
Ben Gibson, Norwich City’s centre-half, is reflecting on the toughest two months of his life.
His second child, Mylie, was born two months early, on December 17 last year, and had to spend 44 days in the neonatal intensive care unit at Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital.
At the same time, Gibson and his partner of 10 years, Ashley Gittins, had to juggle caring for their son, Taylor, who only turned one on January 27 this year. Taylor had also been in intensive care, for five days after he was born, because of complications during the pregnancy.
“It was a scary process and I thought, ‘Wow, how is this happening again?’,” Gibson said.
After their horrendous ordeal, the couple could finally bring Mylie home a fortnight ago and properly introduce her to her big brother.
In the build-up to Christmas, Gibson was preoccupied with returning to full fitness after suffering a stress fracture of a metatarsal in his foot.
However, that all changed when Ashley’s waters broke on December 14, more than two months before her due date in the middle of February.
She went to hospital while Gibson had to stay at home and look after Taylor. Around 4am, he called his parents, Dave and Michele, who rushed down from Middlesbrough to help care for his son while he met Ashley at the hospital.
With no signs of labour starting, the couple were sent home after two days and Gibson’s parents returned north. However, at 1am that night, Ashley went into labour and she then gave birth by an emergency caesarean section a few hours later.
Mylie weighed just 3lb 3oz (1.4kg). After the briefest of cuddles with Ashley, she was whisked into the intensive care unit.
Gibson, 31, said: “She was in the highest dependency room in the unit. They had one member of staff with her 24-7, on shift. She needed help with oxygen, she was on caffeine because she couldn’t breathe on her own or else she would get too tired. The caffeine was to keep her going.
“Then, gradually, they would tick things off over the coming weeks — hearing, eyesight, feeding because she wasn’t having milk, she was fed through a tube, she was on antibiotics. It’s a horrible sight. The baby is unrecognisable. She would get blue light treatment for jaundice. Her mouth was practically covered, and the rest of her body had different wires and monitoring systems attached to it.”
Ashley added: “The shock of seeing your baby with so many tubes and wires hooked up to them is indescribable — not knowing if they will be OK and the uncertainty of what lies ahead consumes every second of every day.”
The unimaginable stress and fear meant Christmas Day barely registered as an event.
“We tried our best to make it a Christmas for our son but it certainly went on the back burner,” Gibson said. “We weren’t getting each other presents and stuff like that but Santa still managed to get a couple for our son. That’s the main thing.”
Gibson, who is at pains to stress throughout this interview that this is not a sob story, said his overriding feeling the last two months was guilt.
He said: “Anyone who has experienced leaving your newborn baby in the hospital, that’s as tough as it gets but, on top of that, the thing we really struggled with was balancing things with Taylor.”
Gibson said he felt overwhelming guilt either when he was at the hospital because he’d then left his son at home with his grandparents or for the same reason the other way around.
At the same time, he was working his way back to fitness and putting himself back in contention to start for David Wagner’s team in the Championship.
“I still had to try to go to work, do the physio and do the right things when, if you’re being honest, your job is probably the least important thing to you at that point. My family is the most important thing to me by a country mile. Football is not something that’s in your thoughts. There is perspective.”
After returning to Norwich’s first team off the bench against Huddersfield on December 23, Gibson said one of the scariest moments came immediately after their 1-1 draw at home to Southampton on New Year’s Day.
As he was walking down the tunnel at the end of the match at Carrow Road, he was met by Jonny Martin, the club’s head of first-team operations, who told him he must call Ashley.
“That moment of fear just hit me,” he recalled. “I rang her off his phone and she said Mylie had basically stopped breathing eight times. I went straight to the hospital. That moment was, ‘Wow’. It was, ‘What’s going on?’. I should have been there. Ashley didn’t want to call to disrupt what I was doing in terms of the game. I said to her after, ‘Football is not important compared to that.’
“She was sat there with Mylie on her and they call it desaturation of oxygen, she had that while she was on her, she went blue and limp. That was a tough point. I was on the way to the hospital feeling horrendous that I was at the stadium, making myself available for the squad, trying to do the right thing but I was thinking, ‘Ben, what the f*** are you doing?’ That was a real tough moment.”
Gibson said the other moment that was especially difficult was when he and Ashley first left the hospital together for the first time, without Mylie.
He said Ashley, who was recovering from her C-section during the turbulent time, had been an “absolute rock” while he was incredibly grateful to the help from both his parents and Ashley’s, Paul and Jacqui, who live in Newton Aycliffe in County Durham, as well as all the hospital staff.
He was also thankful for the empathy shown to him by Wagner, Norwich’s manager who joined the club last year.
“I’ll never, ever forget how the manager was with me over this whole situation,” Gibson said. “He couldn’t have been any better with me, I’m so grateful for that. I was lucky he was so understanding.”
Two days before they finally brought Mylie home, Norwich played Liverpool in the FA Cup at Anfield on January 28.
The Championship side may have been convincingly beaten but it was still fitting that Gibson managed to score his first goal for Norwich in the fixture.
“Knowing what my whole family have been through the last couple of months, it just felt like it was for them,” Gibson said. “It was a special moment. I don’t get many but at Anfield, the Kop end, it felt like it was meant to be. Life and football are funny for giving you those moments sometimes.”
Gibson celebrates after scoring at Anfield last month (Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)
After six weeks in intensive care, the couple could, at last, bring Mylie home from the hospital.
“It was amazing and, to be honest, it was unbelievable, seeing our son next to her,” Gibson said. “It was scary though, I’m not going to lie. It still isn’t the same as taking home a normal, healthy baby. We have to feed her in a different position, it’s called a sideline position.
“It was a mixture of everything. We were a little bit anxious, excited, emotional but, as soon as we got her home for a couple of hours and saw our son take to her straight away, all our worries eased massively. We couldn’t be more in love in our family bubble.”
Gibson, nephew of Middlesbrough chairman Steve, is now hoping to help push Norwich up the league after an upturn in results this year. They are seventh in the table and only outside the play-off positions on goal difference.
Gibson joined Norwich in 2020 after a very tricky spell at Burnley, where he made just one league appearance, but is out of contract this summer. He doesn’t know where his future lies but Norwich will hold a place in his heart and he is determined to finish this campaign with promotion.
After everything he has been through, however, nothing will give him greater joy than quality time at home with his family.
(Top photos: Ashley Gittins, Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)
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