Hi
I had a crappy birth experience too with my ds this (gosh, no last) year which although I feel ok with on a daily basis I do break down every now and then and wish things had been different - especially when friends are pregnant or in labour and have a completely different experience. I really think it helps to talk about it and not bottle it up - my dh can't see the point of going through it when my son and I are broadly ok, but acknowledging what happened is a part of the healing process and moving on.
I was 4 days late with my first and started labour contractions 8 days before I had him. They were hard very painful contractions every five minutes and they would last all night and ease up in the morning. I was told it was a long latent phase of labour and told to take warm baths and paracetamol. Five days before my son was born my waters broke. I went to the local birth centre and referred to the maternity hospital where I was told that my waters hadn't broken but was kept in to observe my contractions.
I was told to rest, eat and have warm baths and was discharged the next day. My waters broke again and stained my jeans green. I was told to put on a pad and if it happened again contact the birth centre. That evening it happened again and I went to the birth centre where the midwife saw the pad and said that it was meconium and to go to the hospital straight away. I was gutted as I wanted a natural water birth.
The midwife at the hospital didn't look at the pad and said that my waters were still intact. I was prescribed pethadine for the pain but took some tranquilizers there to get some sleep for a few hours.
The next day I was discharged again and a few days later after more than 36 hours without sleep I came in again because I couldn't cope as the pain was so bad. I was told that it was spine to spine labour and sent away with a hired tens machine to go and rest. I had it up to the max and still couldn't rest so a few hours later they agreed to admit me.
There I had a sweep which increased the contractions and they tried to break my waters and found there was none. I was attached to the fetal heart rate monitor and they found that my son was in distress so I had to be transferred to the labour ward and told that I would have to remain in bed strapped to a monitor for the duration.
At this stage I asked for an epidural as I couldn't hack anymore pain and I couldn't soldier on for the sake of a natural waterbirth anyway.
A few hours later I got the epidural. Although my antenatal care had been really good until this point with lots of midwives explaining what was happening, it was different on labour ward as it was a very busy night and there were not enough midwives to go round. I was left on my own for almost all of the time.
At one point the canula for the saline drip for the epidural popped out as it was incorrectly inserted by the harassed midwife leaving blood spurting out my wrist. My hubby had popped out to make phone calls so I was completely alone. I was in a growing pool of blood so tried yelling for help but the door was shut and no-one could hear. The emergency button was a few feet away and I couldn't reach it. After a few minutes as no-one came I had to detach myself from my monitors, lower myself on the floor and crawl across the room to the panic button as my legs were completely numb. Lots of people came then (!) and the floor and I were cleaned up.
About an hour later my son got into real difficulty so they took blood gases from him and found that he needed immediate delivery via forceps or emergency cs. I was given two pushes to deliver him and he was born with forceps. He was stained in meconium which had been on him for so long that his skin was stained green, and the doctor delivering him had never seen a baby with so much meconium. Right away he had difficulty breathing so was whisked away with only time for a kiss to intensive care.
I then had a large pph and lost 2 litres of blood. I started to loose conciousness and my bp went down to 50/30. No one told me what was happening until they asked for my permission for transfusions and I was told that I needed to be transfered to HDU. I was left alone with my husband for five hours in the uncleaned room I delivered in until a bed in HDU was ready. When there I had amazing care but it really didn't feel that I'd had a son as I was too unwell to see him. I felt that I had failed as a mother and let him down by not having a 'natural' birth. And I didn't feel like a mother as I had no baby.
My son was in intensive care for five days and I was kept in hospital because of the birth complications. In addition the forceps damage was very painful and I couldn't walk unaided. I was encouraged to express colostrum for my son which I did, but he didn't really feel like my son to me, and he was so poorly that I was unable to hold him for a couple of days.
After six days he was well enough to be discharged to the ward. However, even when we were both discharged I still found it very difficult to bond with him and very quickly developed severe post natal depression as well as developing a severe reaction to medication that physically turned me into a robot unable to speak without slurring, constantly trembling, unable to hold my son or latch him on.
I was admitted into a mother and baby unit for seven weeks which was fantastic. The meds were tweaked and within a day I could speak and move properly, and slowly over the next few weeks I had the care and advice to slowly build my confidence with caring for my son. And very slowly he began to feel mine again, and I started to fall totally in love with him.
Now he is a little 7 month angelic baby who despite everything is a very happy little man! Somehow I continued breastfeeding which did eventually help with bonding - all those hundreds of hours just holding him alone.
He does have a permanent reminder of his birth trauma however; he has moderate hearing loss in one ear caused by nerve damage through lack of oxygen. We have another hearing test scheduled in a few days to find out the full extent. This was another thing that made me initially upset, however he does have one good ear and to him some hearing loss will be his normal and a bigger deal to us than to him.
The hospital refered me to their birth afterthoughts service and an independant midwife who was lovely came to my house and went through the whole labour with me which helped.
My husband and I do want another child, however what happened with labour and beyond has put me off. But already the bad memories are fading, so who knows in the future!
Things do and can get better. They are not perfect and perhaps never will be and I will probably always start crying whenever there is a birth on tv, but perhaps that's the legacy of being a mother along with peeing a little when sneezing