All that matters is a healthy baby...

[foxytocin]

no it bloody well doesn't. Well that is what I thought when I heard a health visitor tell a bunch of new mums this the other day.

I would have also liked to come out of it with an intact fanjo, and not felt like a survivor from the front line 3 weeks after giving birth. Not to mention the mental scars that persist till today.

was that too much to ask?

thanks for sharing your experience Cory. It puts a different new light for me on how women leave childbirth. Before I read the problems of your dd, this thread made me think that maybe what I wanted was to say in the OP.

I know that in retrospect my experience of dd1's birth was going to be pretty unpleasant anyway. That I did not have the most basic of midwifery care when it was necessary is what has scarred me the most. My most indelible impression is the closest thing I can imagine to a rape. Though now I realise that my physical state was more in immediate danger now, it is not where the scarring now lie. I think the majority of the trauma we experience in childbirth comes down to the lack of a caring person beside us who in my case anyway would have easily spotted that something was going very wrong and done something about it. Instead, warning signs were ignored and therefore deteriorated to crisis point and then it was all about damage limitation rather than care and respect for my humanity. I read my postnatal notes, not even thoroughly and part of it are complete works of fiction and that angers me even more.