Hannah Ballou interview: ‘The comedy film about my pregnancy took a dark turn’
When comedian Hannah Ballou lay back for her routine 20-week scan of her unborn baby, she wasn’t worried. In fact, she’d been thinking how much more relaxed she felt this time and was even planning to film a sequel to her stage show about her first pregnancy.
But the ultrasound technician had fallen quiet and, in that moment, everything changed.
“She told us there was something wrong with the baby’s heart - that it was too big and that she would be referring us to Great Ormond Street Hospital and we would be seen the next day,” said Hannah.
“What followed was 24 hours of being completely in the dark, just knowing something was wrong but not what.
“When we arrived at GOSH, the foetal cardiologist told me to go out of the scanning room and have a walk and wiggle around. At first I thought it was because they just couldn’t get a good look, but then I realised that behind the scenes they were basically saying, Oh, my God, I can’t believe it. Because this particular foetal cardiac anomaly is almost unheard of. There’s just so so so few cases. It’s called pulmonary arterial venous malformation, which is in the left atrium. And although congenital heart anomalies are relatively common, our baby’s was vanishingly rare.”
After that, Hannah was called to weekly scans at GOSH at a clinic with the foetal medicine team and foetal cardiologist.
“And so every Tuesday, even during lockdown, this was the only time my husband and I even left our neighbourhood. We would call them Terror Tuesdays because they were terrifying but also reassuring. And those scans, that process, is a big part of the film that I made about my pregnancy.”
Hannah’s movie of her stage show Goo:Ga II was filmed 33 weeks into her second pregnancy. The show follows her as she stares into the abyss, not knowing if her baby will survive. But there are also laughs and outrageous live art antics in this unique performance about pregnancy, resilience, and her battle against hope.
Originally, the film was supposed to be a follow-up to her first stage show about her pregnancy with her daughter, who has now turned six.
That first show was a riotous comedy made when she was eight months pregnant and at that time she was concerned about how to be a feminist parent and the way women’s bodies are objectified during pregnancy, especially celebrities.
Five years later, the biological process is the same, but everything else could not be more different; her five-year-old wants in on the action, one co-star is in an urn, she’s haunted by the ghosts of miscarriages past, the pandemic closed the theatres... It was supposed to be about how she just could not get as worked up about kid number two. However, the film takes a hard left turn due to the devastating diagnosis.
Hannah says: “I'd always wanted to do a second version of it if I had a second baby. So I was excited to revisit some of the old materials but also have fun with the fact that the second time around is nothing like the first, enjoying the differences between the two. Then, of course, the pandemic closed the theatre spaces. So live performances were not going to be possible.
“I decided then to make a film. But on February 4, 2021, I just had this enormous bomb dropped on me and I find out that this is a very, very different pregnancy. Maybe it's not even a comedy anymore. I had some really dark days there. But telling stories is the way I cope with things and so it would have been much harder to not go ahead and make the show. For one thing it kept my mind, and my creativity, really engaged. But also I wasn’t ignoring the problem. It was a way to help me through the process, the trauma, the terror. And, you know, in a way that has turned out to be really engaging and interesting and even entertaining for other people.”
You’re telling me you can carry out minute measurements of chambers in a heart but you can’t spot a penis?
So, included in the film are readings of her scan reports alongside the often banal updates from a pregnancy app which, weirdly, always seem to centre around fruit.
“The apps are like, ‘this week your baby is an ear of corn, or whatever,” says Hannah.
“So, we take that and then we physically move along the line of fruit of escalating size. And then I go through the narrative of what was happening with the baby’s cardiothoracic ratio, during mango week, that kind of thing. When the baby moves from a mango to pomegranate, that’s when your pregnancy crosses over from a miscarriage to a stillbirth. So, from a legal perspective your maternity leave is in the bag. This exciting update on your baby’s size became just grim and harrowing.”
Although there are bleak moments in the film, there is also dark comedy, including the time Hannah decided to ask what the baby’s sex was during a scan “so I could know a bit more about them when so much was still unknowable”.
”The foetal cardiologist said to me she might not be able to tell because she was not an expert. I thought that was hilarious - you’re telling me you can carry out minute measurements of chambers in a heart but you can’t spot a penis?” says Hannah.
“Anyway, in the end she called it. He was a boy. The film is very funny.There are also tear-jerking moments. But I’m a comedian at heart and sometimes the comedy is elevated by having to find it in the darkest of places.”
All of this happened during lockdown when Hannah was still trying to teach her university course to students online.
“It was a really busy time for me professionally, with all my students stuck at home with dodgy wifi connections so that didn’t leave a lot of time to with my own feelings about being terrified that this baby was now a big question mark. I had to schedule in time to just lay down and listen to David Bowie and cry.”
One decision she had to make was whether to explain to her daughter Georgia that there was a good chance the baby wouldn’t survive. In the end she felt it was the right thing to do.
“I told her the baby was poorly and we don’t know what’s going to happen and sometimes, you know, babies start to grow in tummies, but then they can go away and they can die. I didn’t want her to take on that worry. But I also wanted her to understand that that, you know, that’s something that can happen. And she just seemed to cope with it really well.”
They were told by doctors that soon after he was born, her son’s heart would start to fail and that he would need a procedure to correct the heart defect, but that they didn’t know if it would work.
So, here is the big spoiler alert that Hannah does not include in her film but, frankly, as an audience member we would all want to know - baby Wolfgang survives.
Hannah says: “Yeah, that’s a big question that you don’t find out at the end of the film. Because of course it was shot when I was 33 weeks pregnant, but he did amazing. He’s fantastic. It was truly like a Great Ormond Street miracle.
“I had a planned Caesarean at 37 weeks at UCLH and the team was so ready for him when he was born. We had a little finger touch and then he was transported straight away by special ambulance from UCLH to GOSH. And then on day two of life they implanted a little device to close the communication in the AVM and he has done just brilliantly. He has a check-up on Thursday, actually. And what we’re expecting to hear is ‘you don’t need to come back for a long time’.
Meeting him for the first time 50 hours after his birth, as I was in recovery from the Caesarean, was like going to meet a celebrity
“His heart was left stretched out by having to work too hard from having a problem in the first place and it formed an aneurysm, which is dangerous because the blood can swirl around in this cave and it can form a clot there. So we had to give him anticoagulant for his first six months, first with injections, and then he got big enough to have an oral anticoagulant, or blood thinner.
“I still thought he would need open heart surgery later, to correct that. Because it’s not sustainable. Then exactly one year to the day after we found out something was wrong at the really bad routine scan, his cardiologist phoned and said his heart has remodelled and the aneurysm was gone, and you can throw away your medicine and he doesn’t have to have surgery. It was unbelievable. The heart does remodel itself and that was a remote possibility but they didn’t think it was likely but it just could not have gone better.
“Meeting him for the first time 50 hours after his birth, as I was in recovery from the Caesarean, was like going to meet a celebrity, and there were some funny moments.
“I got the taxi over to Great Ormond Street and then there was no adult-sized wheelchair and I still couldn’t walk so I was wedged into this tiny child children’s wheelchair that they had at the front door. And then my husband wheeled me to the cardiac intensive care unit, which is called the flamingo ward. And I was so excited to turn the corner. It was a very, very surreal experience. And then suddenly he was there and I had not dared to hope that we would get to this point. And I finally got to hold him.”
It turns out that Wolfgang will be a little bit of a celebrity after his ordeal.
Hannah explains: “One of his consultants said there would be lots of medical papers written about your baby and I’m an academic too so I was like, OK. I do not begrudge them this opportunity and I hope his experiences can help others. I will be excited to read the papers when they are published.”
Goo:Ga II is showing at Cambridge Junction on September 11 and the artist invites the audience to pay what they feel.
