Rosie Drage, RMN BSc, Coach & Founder of Postnatal Minds

As a mental health nurse, I’ve spent over a decade supporting people through some of the hardest moments of their lives. I have great insight into what strength and resilience looked like – how to hold hope, how to cope when life doesn’t go to plan. But nothing could have prepared me for the moment, at 28 weeks pregnant with my second child, that my own world came crashing down. 

We’d gone for a routine scan to check if the placenta had moved from over my cervix, which had been of some concern. The scan confirmed placenta had moved, but the sonographer explained that he had other concerns about how small our baby was. The next day, we made our way up to the Fetal Medicine Unit at Guy’s Hospital, London, to be re-scanned. The words we heard that day would change everything: our baby had Achondroplasia, the most common form of Dwarfism – a random 1 in 30,000 genetic mutation. I sat in that hospital room with my partner, both of us numb, dizzy and in total disbelief. 

My mind started racing through everything I thought I knew. I began to grieve the journey I thought we were meant to have- the one I’d imagined ever since becoming a Mum during the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. I went into my own world, frightened and in despair, trying to picture what life would now look like for our little boy, and for us as a family. 

When Care Fails the Carers 

As a clinician, I’ve always believed that empathy and communication were the backbone of good care. But being on the other side of the table opened my eyes in a way I could never have imagined. Aside from my amazing Midwife, our care from the point of diagnosis was so poor- fragmented, inconsistent, and painfully lacking in compassion. 

Being someone who needs to see things in writing, we waited for around 2 weeks for the formal results from the amniocentesis that was done in London. I then received a call to tell me that the amniocentesis results had come back negative. Relief flooded through us; however, this was to be short lived as we were called back the next day to be informed there had been a mistake and that the result was, in fact positive. 

That moment, being catapulted from total relief to complete devastation, is one I’ll never forget. I remember thinking: how could this happen? I was exhausted, terrified, and losing faith in a system I’d once been proud to work within. Comments like “Was it just bad luck then?” from a consultant still echo in my mind. Nobody seemed to know much about Achondroplasia locally, and I found myself repeating our story again and again to new faces, new departments, each time reopening this fresh wound. This carries on to this day. 

Despite all the staggering love and support around us from family and friends, I’ve never felt so alone and overwhelmed in my life. No one called to ask how we were and we continued our extra appointments day by day, putting all our energy into keeping things as normal as possible for Alba, our 2-year-old little girl. 

Losing My Role, and Finding Myself 

By the time my beautiful son, Arlo, was born, I was on maternity leave from a senior leadership position in the NHS. I’d been in leadership since 2015 and had always been career-driven alongside my passion for a high standard of patient care and experience, managing services, leading teams, and supporting others. Halfway through my maternity leave I was told that my role was being removed as a result of a consultation. This was a huge piece of news to digest at an already difficult time – I was quite numb by this point. 

After time to process, I opted to take voluntary redundancy. It was the most unsettling yet strangely freeing decision I’d ever made. It bought me time to try to relax and enjoy the rest of my maternity leave and rethink my next steps. This chapter was closing, but in the space that followed, something new began to grow. 

The Birth of Postnatal Minds 

In the quiet, messy, beautiful chaos of those early months with Arlo, I started reflecting on everything that had happened. The system I’d worked within for so long had failed us, not out of malice, but out of a lack of understanding and true connection. Parents deserve better than that. They deserve to be heard and seen. I knew I had the skills and experience to make a dent in this gap. 

That’s when Postnatal Minds was born. 

I trained as a Health & Wellbeing Coach and combined this with my experience as a mental health nurse, leader and mother. My mission was simple: to give parents the emotional support we never had.  

I started offering mental health coaching, support sessions, and wellbeing workshops. Creating safe spaces where parents could be honest about how they were really feeling, without judgement. 

As Postnatal Minds has grown, so have I. I began to rediscover the passion that had drawn me to nursing in the first place- helping people to heal, not just clinically, but emotionally and mentally. I launched affirmation cards for mums and children to encourage positive self-talk and even developed emotional wellbeing workshops for pre-schoolers which I deliver in Nursery settings. 

Turning Pain into Purpose 

In its first year, Postnatal Minds has become more than I could have ever imagined. We’ve delivered online and in-person support to many parents across the UK, rolled out workshops for pre-school children around emotion in nurseries and raised money for Little People UK and the Dwarf Sports Association– organisations that mean the world to our family. We were honoured as a family to work with ITV and Ellie Simmonds this year on her latest documentary which explored disability diagnoses and the experiences of families like ours. And through my podcast, I’ve been able to open conversations about postnatal mental health topics that so often go unspoken. 

There are still hard days, of course. Moments of worry about Arlo’s future, illness, the practical challenges and the never-ending appointments. But Arlo has taught me more about perspective, love, and resilience than any textbook or leadership course ever could. Things that I thought were important before no longer are, and I take so much from the everyday little things. 

Redefining Success 

If you’d told me five years ago that I’d be self-employed, running my own business from home, hosting a podcast, and finding joy in the everyday, I’d have laughed. My old idea of success was built around career progression, status, and the next leadership opportunity. Now, success looks like flexibility. It’s walking my children to school, having time to rest (sometimes!), and feeling deeply fulfilled in the work I do. 

I’ve never felt so aligned in my career and it all came from a moment that, at the time, felt like my world had ended. 

Finding Light in the Darkness 

When life throws you something huge – something that changes everything you thought you knew upside down – it’s easy to feel like you’ll never recover. But I want other mothers, parents, and women to know this: you will. What feels unfair and unbelievable, will make sense soon. 

You might not go back to who you were before, but maybe that’s the point? Because sometimes, the most painful moments carve out space for something more beautiful to take root. For me, that’s been perspective, awareness, community, and love. 

Strength and love really can get you through. 

Arlo’s diagnosis flipped our worlds as we knew it upside down, but in doing so, it also turned it the right way up. I may have partially lost the planned career I thought defined me, but I’ve gained a life that truly aligns with who I am: a nurse, a mother, and a woman who knows that even in the darkest chapters, there’s always light waiting to be found.