Rant...women who love to tell you all about their birth horror stories :(

[Cherryblossom200]

Hello everyone,

Thought I would have a little Sunday evening rant something has been bothering me recently! I'm nearly 33 weeks pregnant with my first child and obviously starting to become anxious about the birth. I know it will be painful, but friends/women I've met in antenatal just LOVE to tell me about their birth horror stories. I'm now expecting hell on earth, I haven't come across one woman who has had a normal birth

I almost feel that some of the women get some kind of 'weird' enjoyment from telling their stories! I think they tend to forget that they are scaring the living daylights out of me!

Anyway rant over! Hope you all have a lovely Sunday evening xx

Thanks Pacific. You have been really helpful with your advice

Glad to have been of help.

I am aware that unfortunately I have been lucky in all my obstetric care (including several MCs and the investigations as to the causes).

You will be fine. You will.
And the prize at the end is a baby. That you will get to keep!
I know, I still cannot believe that they let me keep mine - and DS4 is now almost 5!!

Oh crap, I should go to bed: I meant to say unfortunately it is not a given to have good obstetric care, but I was lucky in that I did.

It sounded ok in my head…

Be well informed.
Either speak up for yourself in the planning of your delivery or have a good advocate (your DH/DP or other birth partner).
Keep an open mind.

Then be woman and roar - giving birth is amazing

I had a fantastically positive birth and would tell a pregnant friend that. BUT I tend to keep quiet in front of ither mums in case I sound smug as I know a lot of women are still quite traumatised. But if I hear someone saying to a pregnant woman "it will be awful" I will quietly tell them after that it might not be awful at all.

Awww thank you Pacific! Means a lot! And I understood what you meant!

I'm due on the 10th Feb, I will let everyone know how I get on x

OP I know what you mean, I hated hearing "ended badly" birth stories when I was pregnant, especially since for me most of them were coming from men (male dominated workplace).

But I think there is a hugely important continuum of women's experience of birth that we've become a bit detached from (modern times blah blah, history etc). It sounds a bit trite but I honestly found birth to be such a powerfully visceral and emotional experience that it made me instinctively want to reach out to other women who had been through it or were about to go through it and talk about it.

My labour was very straightforward (10 hour home water birth) but it was still something that is the single most physically challenging, psychologically taxing and painful thing I've ever experienced in my life. And I amazed myself by being mostly up to the task and able to cope - nothing really happened that I couldn't deal with, hence the straightforward part, for which I am eternally grateful. I was also quite befuddled by being presented with a baby at the end of it (yes I was expecting it, but theory and reality didn't necessarily align!).

I guess my point is not to hear "be afraid". That's not what women are trying to tell you (I hope and assume). They are just trying to prepare you with things they wish they'd known.

If it helps, the most important thing I read/heard when I was pregnant that actually worked in labour was "trust your instincts". What works for you might be different from what works for someone else.

I am with you in principle OP.

But giving the example of a section for a stuck baby as a 'horror story' made me wonder a bit whether you're being realistic. A section is obviously very common, and often this is (in simple terms) because things didn't progress or because the baby got stuck.

So simply saying that in quite a factual way really doesn't qualify as a horror story. It depends kind of how it was told.

Museum, I think that's absolutely the right attitude to have. I wish more mums were like you. Just being aware of how other new mum's or mums-to-be may react is the key thing

Penguin it was told in a much more detail orientated way, too long to explain on here. I'm just outlining it briefly. But the head was out and they had to pull it back through again plus loads of other stuff happened as well.

I'm not a drama type person so wouldn't normally get wound up about these stories. But I've had a pretty awful year tbh ( I won't bore you with it all) but I'm not exactly in the best way emotionally atm and only close friends and family know about this. So most people are being careful not to stress me out further. But other people I met don't know what I have been through/still going through and they are massively adding to my anxiety. So I guess it again goes to show that you should ask first. For lots of reasons, like my own. You don't know what the the situation is that mum-to-be, it may not always be a bed of roses for her. So just be sensitive, we are all very different.

I have a friend who told everyone her horror story.

Thing is, her long, horrible labour, including one point where she thought she'd need a section for failure to progress, was in fact a textbook, one cm an hour dilation, 10 hours from start to finish birth. The story includes the consultant attending and telling her she "wasn't built for birth". I just think she has no idea of what is normal, and seemed to be under the impression that you pop them out in a couple of hours. Could maybe have benefitted from a few horror stories!

I don't know how my other friend, who did have a section for failure to progress after 36 hours of established labour, kept her mouth shut.

Mine is a horror story, but with a happy ending in that neither dc or I died. I think only do and I know how close it was though. I figure no one needs to hear that as it's a one off, unpredictable event that had nothing to do with normal procedures. So the chances of it happening to anyone I meet are so low, and it's not exactly going to help them prepare is it.

I think people exaggerate too. Like people never have normal antibiotics, they always seem to have the "extra strong" ones, or need the industrial pain killers. Normal ibuprofen or paracetamol means they've got a boringly normal problem, so they big it up.

Like the example above of the straightforward birth retold as a horror story. Or the baby who "nearly died" 3x during induction. What exactly does that mean? How do they know a baby in utero has "nearly died". Plus I'd think they'd go straight to crash section after the first time if a baby really was that close to death. Maybe they mean the baby had some odd runs on the monitor and the medical staff were concerned about distress?

So take all the "horror stories" with a pinch of salt anyway. Learn what is normal, and what interventions and options there are, and know you'll be able to get through it, even if you do need forceps or a section or whatever.

I'm 34 weeks pregnant with Dc1 and everyone is telling me that it's going to be the most horrendous experience, someone saying it's so bad I'm going to want to die. It really upset me at first but now I switch off.
We can all agree whether we have a positive or negative childbirth experience, it's tough, exhausting and completely turns your world upside down.
Knowing what I'm like, the more I stress about it, the worse it will be. If you don't want to hear the stories, start humming a song in your head- works for me! Hahaha
I'm well aware it may be as horrendous as some make out, but until it's happening to me I can't worry about it!!

OP it's like therapy, it's such a huge event that you have to tell people about it and whatever happens you feel the biggest sense of achievement you could ever imagine.

You will find you do the same, firstly because going through it normalises the idea of birth, but also because very very few women actually have the normal birth they are expecting. It has to be shared!

Good luck.

YY newname I completely agree. I think some of these are being embelished to you. A medical team wouldn't leave a baby in serious distress and 'nearly dying' 3 times, if there was any sign of anything that serious it would be a crash section.

And cullercoats88 take 'it's so bad I'm going to want to die' with a pinch of salt too. Some women experience the pain in that way, but many many don't. My labour wasn't pain free, and I had some fairly hefty intervention with just gas and air - at no point did I want to die!

I haven't read the thread but wanted to say I had the most amazing birth with DS. Straight forward, gas and air, great MW, managed the contractions well.

I know lots of women who had uneventful births and it annoys me that the spot light ends up in those who had harder times

OP it's horrible. I had a work colleague keep telling me about her friend's baby that died inside her - when I was about 4 months pregnant ! I'm afraid I lost my temper with that one .......

And my hairdresser fgs was telling me ' ask them to cut you...because I tore and it sounded just like leather stretching ' , I was about 3 weeks from my due date. It still makes me queasy now when I think of that sound lol

Anyway I love it when people now ask me how horrific the birth was , because it wasn't at all. I love shutting them up by telling them it was over in 2 hours and I didn't need pain relief. Horror stories might happen OP but so do nice easy births. All the best x

I do think the English have a way of playing down what you might call good fortune and end up thinking that telling a positive birth story could be seen as boasting.

A month after I had DS I was sat with seven other new mums and the girls who had had bad births were so busy swapping tales I daren't sit there and talk about how I'd had the birth the NCT promised us.

So here is a nice story for you...I had a water birth with gas and air. I was tripping through the whole eight hours. The contractions felt like a cross between desperately needing a poo, that burn you get when the bath is too hot and also very very very slightly arousing. There was a moment at the beginning when I thought I was going to panic, I made a conscious decision to just go with the flow.

What I told my mother (second birth partner) about my nineties clubbing days, mid labour, is another story!

Good luck OP ??

I think it's worth remembering that some pregnant women (not saying you do OP) do wax lyrical about how they are going to have a natural, pain-free birth, and that it's perfectly possible to manage without pain relief if you get the breathing right, and they just know it'll all go perfectly if they just leave it to nature because it's what women's bodies are designed for . .. . and so on.*

This leaves women who struggled and ended up with interventions feeling judged and inferior by someone who hasn't had a baby yet, and thus they want to put across their side of the story.

As I say I am not accusing you of that OP, but there are plenty of women out there like that and maybe these horror-story ladies have met them.

*Kate Winslet said all this in interviews when pg for the first time, then had an EMCS and lied about it as she was so embarrassed.

However at 33 weeks pregnant I'm finding more and more women are telling me about their birth stories most of which were quite frankly brutal.

thing is OP, has it not occured to you that the brutal birth stories are kind of normal? That's the bit that got me afterwards having DC1 and chatting at baby groups. The 'straightforward' births were the minority.And what sounds brutal (for my example, someone cut my fanjo with a pair of sissors, and it was 20+ sitches to put it back together is what is meant by "you will need to be cut for a forceps birth"), is just a discription of the reality, but it's not really that bad when you are experiencing it.

And yes, it's bloody painful, but you can cope (even if at the time it feels like you can't), the hospital have lovely drugs, then it stops and then you get handed a baby so that's fine. Being prepared that 'things going wrong' is normal is important too - several of my friends who were determined to have a very natural birth who ended up with c-sections or very medicalised births did feel like 'failures' and might well have benefitted from being told "you might not have a textbook birth."

Plus remember, "one born every minute" is a relatively new programme and was ground breaking to show the reality of what happens. Anyone with a DC who's 6 or older might well have only had the NCT classes as prep and they do give the impression that instrumental births and EMCS are rare, but that's sadly not the case.

Balloon - yes I remember her doing that! Fabulous case in point - it's like all the people who were sniffy about Posh having 4 Csections, without mentioning that the first 2 were emergancies, and once you've had 1 c-section, it's unlikely you'll do it completely naturally the 2nd time round if there's not a big gap between pregnancies, and that 2 will pretty much ensure you've got to have sections for later ones, so why bother going through the labour first...

Balloon, I'm not one of those women you are referring to. I would love a water birth because I'm a water baby at heart but I will have on my birth plan I want all the drugs available including an epidural so if I need them I have access to them.

This really has nothing to do with judging a woman who has pain intervention or has had a tough birth. This is purely about a woman using her common sense and simply not saying anything about her horrendous birth to someone heavily pregnant. It almost sounds to me that when you have a baby it such an overwhelming, hellish experience that you lose your brain/common sense in the process. I'm sure that when I give birth I will naturally want to talk about it to my family/non-pregnant friends, I don't dispute that. BUT I think even after the birth of my baby I would hope I can use my common sense and not sit there blabbing about my birth to a first time pregnant lady due to give birth in approx 7 weeks time. Cathartic or not it's just not right I'm afraid.

We knew we had to go to hospital with DD1 because someone else has shared their 'horror story' - without that, who knows, she might not have survived. We didn't know that we should go to hospital with DD2 because we had never heard a 'horror story' about placental abruption - if we had, she might be alive today. Horror stories serve a purpose - by repressing them, we end up making everything from an emergency c-section at one of the spectrum to a neonatal death at the other an unspoken taboo, which doesn't do anyone any favours in the long run (other than those who have straightforward natural births and healthy babies, and can thus remain in denial about the fact that childbirth has always been, and still is, a messy and dangerous business).

"Started as natural birth and body got stuck, so had an emergency c-section to pull the baby back through and out"

You describe this as a horror story and literally your worst nightmare. I completely understand. It's not what any woman would choose. That was what happened to me and it categorically was NOT a horror story though, particularly with dc2. It was the happiest event of my life. The baby (both babies actually as have had two identical births though the first wasn't as positive as I was so unprepared/stuck on intervention as the thing of nightmares) did get stuck and have to be pulled back up and out. Them's just the facts. I can also tell you that the care I received was exemplary, I felt involved in the decision making, I felt empowered, I felt loved and supported and cared for and I went into theatre smiling and came out crying tears of happiness.

I wouldn't tell you my birth story if you didn't ask for it. I am always very careful to only answer the questions asked and to only give more information if a pregnant woman wants it. I don't describe any of it in emotive or horrific terms but the fact that my babies got stuck and needed to be helped back out the other way is just my experience. I don't like it being called a horror story or negative. My positive experience is valid and it's something I get to decide thankfully. The real story is in the brilliance of modern medicine and how the events of the delivery are not the deciding factor in positivity.

Believe me, I bounced back. I recovered from the emcs quickly, needed no painkillers, back running at 9 weeks and the scar is invisible.

Best of luck for February.

I agree. I hated that all I was told was it would be the worst thing I ever went through, after hearing enough of them I started to think i was lucky to come out alive! I never had 1 single woman simply say - it really really f***g hurts, but you'll do it. I know I was lucky, I had a 4 day early labour and a 3 hr active one. But for those 4 days, I was bloody terrified. And afterwards I was angry. So now I make a point of it. If a friend asks who is pregnant, I answer ' if nothing goes wrong, it's not the most painful thing ever. Its just up there!'