It was usually somewhere around 3.30am that my eyes would fly open. Heart racing, I nudged my snoring husband awake and whispered: “I think we need to go and check on the babies now. Just a quick look.”

By this point, Dan knew better than to argue, instead he obligingly fumbled in the dark for his trousers and the car keys. But then I lay back on the pillow and muttered something like, “Sorry, no. I’m being mad aren’t I? They are fine, aren’t they?” “Course they’re fine, they’re with those lovely nurses.”

And with that we would both try to snatch a few more hours of broken sleep before going back to the neo-natal unit at St George’s Hospital in south London at a more civilised time of the morning.

This frankly insane routine carried on for almost a month while our premature twin sons Harry and Felix caught up to their due date. They were born eight weeks early, but we were among the luckiest parents on the ward – there was nothing physically wrong with the boys apart from being small. They were just born before their sucking reflexes kicked in, so they had to be fed through nasal tubes.

Others were not so lucky. But in the weeks we spent there it was extremely rare for a baby to die. In fact, I only recall it happening once, and that was as a result of complications from a major transplant operation. All those new-born babies received the best care imaginable, and we are forever grateful to our kind and gentle nurses who spent hours upon hours consoling us, reassuring us, wiping away my tears of frustration when my breast milk failed to appear, and always sharing the endless supply of chocolates they received from grateful parents like us.

To me, every member of staff was a hero and a life saver. We have kept in touch with the charity that supports the unit and Dan has run marathons to raise funds for vital pieces of equipment.

The ward became a second home in July 2008.

I spent all day every day sitting between their two incubators, watching, and waiting. As soon as the boys could feed naturally, we could take them home. Dan went back to work – we decided to save his paternity leave for when they were back – and every evening he would come straight from his office to St George’s to meet me and say goodnight to the babies.

That was by far the most agonising, excruciating, part of each day. Leaving the hospital without my babies, but no longer pregnant, was surreal. We would go home and sit on the sofa, staring blankly at the TV. They were born but not born, because they were not here with us.

Well-meaning relatives would cheerfully tell us to enjoy the peace. ‘Sleep while you can!’ ‘Cash in on the free babysitting!’. That was impossible. Living off meals my mum would slip into the freezer, I was like a zombie those evenings, the boys were constantly on my mind – wondering what was going on at the hospital, how they were doing. If they might wake up in the dark and wonder where their Mum was.

But I never once, even in my very darkest hours, thought anyone might try to harm them. Felix was just over 3lbs and Harry barely 5lbs when they were born – they were so tiny and so vulnerable it is simply impossible for me to imagine what goes through the brain of a cold-blooded killer like Lucy Letby.

At first, I tried to avoid reading details of Letby’s long running trial at Manchester Crown Court where she calmly pleaded not guilty to seven counts of murder and 15 counts of attempted murder. It was simply too close to home, and I could never get past the first few paragraphs of any news reports without my stomach lurching.
But when she was finally convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment with a whole life order, the most severe punishment under English law, something shifted in me. Maybe it was a sense of relief that justice had been served, but suddenly in the aftermath of the trial I found myself needing to know everything about this woman who had betrayed those families in the most evil way imaginable.
Like the parents of Letby’s victims, I too had left my defenceless babies in the care of strangers, and like them I believed they were in the safest place they could be.
‘In good hands’ was the expression everyone used.

As I watched them work, calm, ordered and professional I would remark, ‘Nurses are amazing, aren’t they?’ I said it over and over again – to my mum or my in-laws, or whichever of my endlessly patient friends had come to simply watch and wait with me that day.

They could usually coax me outside for a coffee or a sandwich, it was a stifling hot July, and each time they buzzed us in or out the door, the cheerful nurses would smile even though they were exhausted from long shifts and overtime, share a joke, introduce themselves to my mates.

In short, they were everything you always imagine nurses to be.

But the sheer inhumanity of Lucy Letby has left me questioning everything. The nightmares are back. I am waking up around 3am in a cold sweat again.
The boys are now strapping teenagers, taller than me and with giant feet. They eat like a pair of truckers and everything we went through following their birth in 2008 is ancient history.

But now it feels like yesterday. Reading the heart wrenching statements from the families who left their babies under Letby’s care at Countess of Chester Hospital earlier this week brought it all flooding back. The smell of the unit, the ache of my breasts, my fingers so cracked and sore from scrubbing up to my elbows every time I entered the ward that I had to wear my wedding ring on a chain around my neck.

I have spent the past week lurching between bouts of white-hot furious rage at this despicable excuse for a human being, preying on tiny infants who needed her most. The chilling fear often turns to an icy terror so heart stopping I can taste bile in my throat when I read another detail of how Letby operated.

Needless to say, I have been clutching manically at my sons every time I can, and instead of the usual groan of “Ugh Mum get off,’ the boys are actually letting me hug them a bit longer and a bit tighter than usual because they know.

We all know how lucky we are that our nurses were wonderful, and that we never crossed paths with the worst serial killer in modern British history.