6 months ago I found myself googling the internet for information about what to expect after a fourth degree tear. Finding very little information from mums who'd experienced it and all the medical leaflets I found said the same thing but didn't deal with the emotion of it. I swore if I got through it positively, I would share my account of it to help women, someone like me who may experience the same in the future.
So here I am. With a 7 month old baby girl, looking back over a turbulent roller coaster of emotions and experiences. It's healed, I am at peace with the experience and with my new bits, which will never be as they were but they are mine for the rest of my days.
You will heal, you will feel like you can go to the toilet without crying, you might have to deal with some unpleasantness, but you will get through it. My biggest piece of advice, get some counselling early, nip it in the bud.
My second baby, the labour that caused my tear was an hour and 15 minutes of active labour following an induction. So when I was in the control of midwives, how was I allowed to go so out of control that she literally crashed out of me? Why could they not slow me down?
The speed of my labour meant that there was no time for pain relief, that I wasn't even in the right place to deliver my baby and had to be wheeled screaming down a corridor to the labour ward. The excruciating pain of it all left me feeling traumatised and in fear of dying in all honesty, lost all control and intimacy of the event to the point where I just didn't feel anything when I was handed my daughter. Just numbness.
I resented that numbness that was caused by the experience I had had. On one hand I celebrated the fact I had survived without pain relief only to be told I had torn badly and then all of a sudden I felt like a huge failure. Not just a third degree but all the way through. How was I going to get through this.
I was robbed of my positive birth experience, I looked at photos of myself with my new baby and just saw terror in my eyes. I resented my baby for doing this to me.
Fortunately after suffering a panic attack as a result of PTSD and high blood pressure a few days later, me and my baby were readmitted and it was then that I got my chance to bond with her. I cried, a lot, as I realised she didn't choose to enter the world in this way and I had not wanted that for her. She endured trauma with me, being catapulted out of my womb at breakneck speed at 9lb 5oz, she was lucky to come away relatively unscathed. So we were a team. We went through it together.
I had finally bonded about a month later as my initial worries about my health subsided as I started to get better. People couldn't understand why I didn't want to see them, but I couldn't recount the "birth story" without fear of experiencing another panic attack. I got breathless whenever I talked about it.
But now, it's almost like it didn't happen to me. I go to the gym and do too much and can feel it in my pelvic floor for days afterwards. Will I get back to my hobbies of snowboarding and mountain biking, ironically biking seems the best option for fitness right now as it holds all my bits in place lol.
Pelvic floor exercises every day for the rest of my life. Pray not to have a prolapse one day. Don't lift too much weight and eat plenty of fibre. All a permanent way of life for me and I accept that now. Even without a tear I think itd be difficult To have two children without any damage whatsoever.
So to the lady reading this, I hope my experience might spur you on to be hopeful and have faith. Keep clean and everything will be ok.