My daughter is 11 and motherhood has been an amazing learning curve with many highs and many lows. I wouldn’t change that for a thing. I would change how she was born though, because even this many years later, I am left with mental and physical scars.
When my waters broke at 38 weeks I was being monitored for pre-eclampsia due to high blood pressure. I was admitted to a ward and told “it will be a while before you deliver this baby, we will keep an eye on you” and my husband was sent home.
In fact, it wasn’t long before I was having painful contractions every ten minutes or so. I called my husband to come back, despite the midwives insisting that I wasn’t really in labour. I was eventually moved into a labour room and examined - and yes, I was in labour and my blood pressure was rising.
I had an epidural and this, combined with medication for my blood pressure and to keep me hydrated, helped to calm things down. I could see I was having contractions on the monitor, but I could feel nothing. I slept and dozed for about seven hours.
When the contractions on the monitor became much more frequent, the doctor decided that it may be time for me to start pushing. I couldn’t feel to push, so the midwife would watch the machine, and then tell me what to do when a contraction came. I had no pain, but I also had no control.
An hour or so later, I started to make a huge effort to push, but something didn’t feel right. They told me to keep pushing so I did. Then I was told to stop. I tried, but at this point, all I felt was this massive desire to push and with what felt like a wave, the baby started to come out. She was face up and her arm was up by her face. As she came out, she basically ripped me open because of her arm position and the speed at which she came out.
She was fine.
However, a blood vessel inside my vagina had been lacerated as she was delivered and I had what was an almost 4th degree tear from front to back. There was a lot of blood and the placenta was not delivered. The epidural seemed to have stopped working.
My baby was taken from me and handed to my husband as I was whisked down the corridor and into theatre. One of the doctors explained that I was losing a lot of blood from the damaged blood vessel and despite medication, my placenta wasn’t coming out. I was given a full nerve block, so I was numb to the neck, and a very kind surgeon appeared and started to work on my ravaged nether regions and stubborn placenta. They extracted that manually. I could feel someone rummaging around, and it was unpleasant and horribly intrusive. They finally dealt with the placenta and then the bleeding vessel, then they repaired my perineal tear. I had 45 stitches inside and 35 outside by the time they were finished. It took three hours.
I was wheeled into recovery to an ashen faced husband, who had literally been left holding the baby.
I spent two days and nights heavily medicated, on morphine, unable to walk, a catheter placed because I couldn’t go to the toilet, and had a blood transfusion to replace the blood I had lost. I struggled to feed the baby, and had to call for help a lot, to feed and change and hold her.
I was sent home three days later, virtually unable to walk with pain, and unable to sit or lie comfortably. I was also utterly traumatised, emotionally, and the beginnings of the anxiety and post partum depression with which I would later be diagnosed were starting to surface.
It took 18 months for my physical wounds to heal. My mental health was in pieces. It hurt to sit, it hurt to pee, it hurt to try and poo. I spent six months taking laxatives so that I could at least go to the toilet without agony. I struggled with urinary continence and my self confidence was shattered. I had to see a specialist gynaecological physiotherapist to help to heal and retrain my body after the damage.
In all of this, not one person asked me how I felt emotionally.
What I went through tore me apart, physically and emotionally, and I don’t feel that anyone acknowledged that what happened had damaged me mentally.
Eleven years on, I still have physical scars and some lingering issues. I also have flashbacks and I remember the pain, still. What should be filled with happy memories and moments of joy, is instead a space filled with pain, and lingering fear and memories of people digging inside me and being sewn up whilst music from a Queen album played in the background.
I can’t change what happened, but I would change the way a traumatic birth is handled afterwards and I don’t think anyone should be allowed to tell a women that she “has a healthy baby and didn’t die” and expect them to just soldier on. There is an attitude that women should just put up with the damage and trauma that happens to them during birth, and to me that’s wrong. Yes, I am grateful I am alive, yes I am grateful I have my beautiful daughter, but birth trauma is real, and it happens and it’s not just about a few stitches and some pain relief and then getting on with life. It’s more than that. It damages women and I am convinced it contributes to why many of us struggle with our mental health and relationships after the physical wounds have healed. I was offered no support, no counselling, no comfort, and no recognition that giving birth almost broke me. No woman should have to deal with that.
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Guest post: “I had 45 stitches inside and 35 outside by the time they were finished.”
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MumsnetGuestPosts · 10/04/2018 10:40
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