Hannah Miley’s daughter Nula sits next to her mum and waves her arms in the air like she’s disco dancing. Or doing the 100m front crawl?
“Everybody always asks, does she get in the pool, is she swimming?” says Hannah, a three-time Olympic finalist, world and European champion and easily the greatest athlete to come out of Inverurie.
“But will she be a swimmer? I’ll leave that completely up to her.”
For now, Nula, who turned one last month, is content with playtime on the living room floor, wriggling around and emanating exactly the kind of beaming grin that earned her mum the nickname Smiley Miley during her 17-year swimming career.
“At the minute, she’s got this thing we call an E.T. finger,” says Hannah, mimicking the signature hand gesture from the Steven Spielberg movie. “It just literally goes around picking at everything.”
Nula also jumped headfirst into Halloween, dressing up as the world’s most adorable pumpkin and only held back from trick or treating because of an untimely bout of hand, foot and mouth.
All very normal for a toddler celebrating her second Halloween. And so very different from her first…
A traumatic birth for baby Nula
Nula was born at Aberdeen Maternity Hospital on October 30, approximately six weeks premature.
She was unresponsive, meaning she wasn’t breathing, and Hannah remembers the terrifying silence in the maternity ward as staff used a hand pump to keep Nula supplied with oxygen.
“I didn’t really know what was happening, but I just knew I couldn’t hear her,” Hannah says.
Doctors raced Nula to the neonatal unit where they resuscitated Nula. But Hannah and her husband Euan faced an agonising wait before they could see their daughter.
She was in an incubator; “So little, so helpless,” recalls Hannah, who was frantic with worry.
She was also concerned she’d missed that “golden hour” of newborn contact when a mum is said to bond with their child.
But when Hannah reached a hand into the box, Nula gripped her finger and held on tight.
“That was all I needed,” she says. “Just that little bit of touch.”
How the neonatal unit became like home for Hannah and Euan
Neonatal is the part of the maternity hospital that looks after sick and premature babies, and Nula was a patient there for about a month.
And though Hannah and Euan’s first experience of the unit was traumatic, their feelings towards it quickly changed.
In fact, it soon felt like home.
“It was probably the most horrific experience I’ve been through,” Euan says. “But having the staff and having people there… what they do is over and above what I would class as a ‘normal’ job.”
The Duffs — they married in 2022 — are now determined to pay back the neonatal unit and champion a part of the healthcare system that parents only see if something goes wrong.
A trip to neonatal, already potentially fraught with panic, can be even more of a journey into the unknown because it is unexpected.
“The first experience you have is when you’re in with the midwife or the surgeons and they say, ‘Get the neonatal team’,” Euan says. “And you’re like, ‘Whoa, hang on. Nobody’s told us about this. This wasn’t in the birth plan.’
“Then when you go through it, you’re like, ‘Wow, it was a great experience’. It was really positive.”
A videographer by profession, Euan has created a virtual tour of the neonatal unit for parents taking the same journey he and Hannah underwent.
He hopes to eventually launch a YouTube channel that will tell the stories of people who have been through neonatal.
“If I can help people make their journey through neonatal a little bit more pleasant, then that would be great,” he explains.
Hannah’s struggles with body image and identity in wake of birth
Hannah and Euan would have loved to have had the virtual tour available to them before the birth, though they admit the circumstances were a bit chaotic.
Hannah’s waters broke while they were sitting on the sofa watching a Netflix drama.
“We’d just got a brand-new sofa and a brand-new carpet,” Euan laughs. “And it was like 10 litres of amniotic fluid all over the whole thing.”
Now, 12 months on, they are able to laugh about it. Hannah even says she’s blocked some of the worst moments out of her mind – so much so that her major memories are of Euan’s accounts of what happened, such as the time he nipped to the toilet and could still hear his wife screaming from down the corridor.
But they are both aware of how much it has changed their lives, especially Hannah who is once again facing a big change in her life.
The swimmer officially retired from her sport in December 2021 after bagging 28 medals at world, European and Commonwealth levels.
She still holds the British record for the 400m individual medley(IM).
When she stopped competing her body went through a number of changes. With motherhood it happened again. In terms of her body image, she says, there are times when she feels “lost at sea”.
“You look at your wardrobe and you don’t fit in the maternity stuff, but you don’t fit back into your normal clothes,” she explains.
“But you know, if you buy new clothes, your body shapes probably going to keep changing, so is there any point buying new clothes?”
She is also making new discoveries about her health — the importance of her pelvic floor, for one.
“There’s those parts that nobody talks to you about it,” she says. “Even as an athlete, you don’t realise actually how bad sometimes elite athlete pelvic floors are, because it’s not something you think at the time you need to work on.”
It has given Hannah new-found respect for sportswomen who return to the elite level after having a baby. She says it can only be done with family support.
With that she turns to Euan, who is video calling into the interview from the P&J Live where he’s working over the weekend.
She tells him: “I couldn’t have got through that labor and birth had you had not been there.”
Then she explains how Euan was “the most useful person to me at that time”.
“And I needed him,” she adds. “I really needed him then”.
And Euan? How did he feel?
“I was too busy having nervous pees in the toilet,” he laughs. “I think I peed about eight times in the whole process of the labour.”
How motherhood has changed Hannah’s horizons
Ultimately, says Hannah, a two-time Commonwealth gold winner, parenthood is the most challenging thing she has ever done.
“Give me 10 400m IMs, any day,” she laughs.
Now that she’s got another human to look after, she sees just how selfish a life athletes live and how she’s had to go from prioritising her own ambitions to making sure Nula is “happy, healthy and safe”.
But while no one is handing out Commonwealth gold for that, Hannah’s horizons have changed.
“The rewards you get from it are her laughing or her wanting to come to you for a cuddle,” she says.
“Or actually eating something that you’ve made.”
In fact, motherhood has been so rewarding that Hannah and Euan are already thinking about baby number two.
Thanks to their neonatal experience, they are more confident in themselves and how to handle different situations.
“There will still be things that would be thrown in our direction,” Hannah adds, “but you feel like you’ve got a bit of a grasp and understanding as to how little people work.”
The virtual tour is available to view on the health board’s Birth in Grampian website: Neonatal Unit – Birth in Grampian
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