As his wife Becky was preparing for the cesarean that would bring their third child into the world, Brett Parry chatted and joked with the medical team around her.

Becky was a cancer nurse at the same hospital and he knew the doctors and nurses as his wife's friends and colleagues.

'I knew the anaesthetist because we used to play football together,' he recalls. 'He said to me: 'Don't worry, Brett, she's in safe hands.' He pauses, still incredulous. 'But the next time I saw him was at Becky's funeral.'

Minutes after her healthy baby boy arrived by pre-planned Caesarian section — before she'd had a chance even to hold her newborn son — Becky was in a coma, fighting for her life in intensive care at Northampton General.

Even our priest has cried. He said: "When things like this happen, they make you think there's no one up there." There is a catch in Brett's voice as he swallows back tears.

A self-employed electrician, he vividly recalls the day — June 3 — when, as his second son came into the world, his wife left it.

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When they left their home for the hospital, he and Becky had no worries. She had already had two Caesarians, and anticipated no problems with this third baby, which was conceived on their honeymoon in Dubai nine months earlier.

The couple had been together since their teens, but had postponed their wedding because they'd wanted to save, first, for the four-bedroom family home they'd recently bought in Northampton.

Brett was beside his wife, holding her hand, when their son was born. 'They held up the baby, a boy. Becky smiled. I kissed her and said: "Well done." She never got to hold him because that's when the carnage started,' he says.

'She started scratching her arm, so hard I was worried it would bleed, and she said: "Brett, Brett, I'm struggling to breathe." They said it was the anesthetic, but then she started really hyperventilating and her pulse rate went through the roof. They ushered me out.

'Next, there were alarms going off and 16 people from the trauma team were rushing in and at that point I still had our baby in my arms. I knew it was bad.

'After that, they took me to another room, sat me down, and I was sweating in my blues from the theatre. I could see the worried looks on everyone's faces and they said: "Mr Parry, you'd better get Becky's parents here. She might not make it."

'I was thinking then: "If she has to be in hospital six months, a year, two years … if that's what it takes to make her better" … I was trying so hard to be positive.

'Then they said she had gone into intensive care and it was really serious, and for the next three days, every day, every night, I was there, at the (post natal) ward with Hudson, or holding Becky's hand.'

Brett has two strong, supportive families around him — Becky's parents and her three sisters, and his own parents and two siblings — and they all rallied to help.

Meanwhile, as he shuttled between intensive care and the ward where his newborn son dozed, oblivious to the unfolding tragedy, the days passed in a blur of anxiety.

Brett had called the baby Hudson, which was one of the three boys' names he and Becky had chosen for a son. She never knew his name.

'I didn't accept she'd die,' says Brett. 'Then the top doctor in intensive care, whose wife had worked with Becky — they had three children the same age as ours — came to talk to me.

'I said: "Tell me in black and white, mate. Don't give me false hope" — and he said I'd just made his job a lot easier.