My body is in a state of post-birth deflation. My stomach’s slowly shrinking but still looks second-trimester pregnant and feels like dough. I’m perpetually leaking; blood, milk and tears. As often as I change the baby’s nappy, I’m replacing my own sanitary towels, breast pads, and dabbing at my eyes with toilet paper. I’ve been a weepy mess for the first two weeks of my new son’s life; everything has felt utterly overwhelming.
A cartoon caption in the latest Private Eye magazine captures my mood:
My mental health is fine as long as I don’t think about anything
That gifted me one of my first laughs since pushing another person out of my vagina. I can’t think about much without crying. How can I meet the very different needs of my toddler and my newborn baby? Can I cope with the guilt about not being able to do this? Will my body ever recover? When does the ‘baby blues’ become postnatal depression? Every midwife, breast feeding support worker and health visitor who asks me, how are you?, is met with a tsunami of tears. I feel unbearably fragile.
Thinking about the birth is particularly tough. When I last wrote, I said that I was hoping for a natural birth in hospital, without the need for induction. Well I got what I wanted, but it’s been an object lesson in being careful what you wish for.
I’m still trying to make sense of my second birth experience, which was completely different to my first. Writing offers me a way to process what’s happened. Due to the trauma of the event and being off-my-face on gas and air, I fear I’m a rather unreliable narrator. Fortunately, my husband BFG had the presence of mind to make contemporary notes of events on his phone, so we at least have an accurate timeline on which I can hang my recollections.
Things started positively. I woke up just before 5am and felt a mild popping sensation and liquid seeping out from between my legs. My waters had broken. I smiled to myself. I wanted to experience how labour would feel if it started naturally. My body was delivering the goods. I got a maternity pad to absorb the water, laid some towels on the bed and snuggled back under the duvet. I told BFG and messaged my parents to suggest that they might need to come over soon. I was starting to feel some achy cramps, which signalled that labour was beginning and hopefully I wouldn’t need any artificial induction to speed things along.
I was in pretty good cheer as I enjoyed a normal breakfast with my toddler when he woke up around 7am. I called the hospital maternity department to inform them that my waters had broken and they asked me to come in. My parents arrived, we all chatted for a while and then BFG drove us to the hospital. I felt calm and positive. Things were good - our son was being looked after and we weren’t in an emergency driving situation. We were in control.
When we arrived at maternity triage shortly after 9am they explained that my husband couldn’t be with me due to their Covid rules. He had to wait outside in a corridor whilst they assessed me. The midwife dealing with me didn’t have a sympathetic bedside manner. She asked to see my pad so she could assess whether my waters had broken. On inspection she said, ‘I’m not convinced by that’. I explained that it was my fourth or fifth pad and I was sure that my waters had broken. She said she’d need to insert something up my vagina to check. I was already feeling distressed and panicky, especially as I didn’t have BFG with me. Why was I alone? I thought of all the people gathered at festivals, sporting events and in cinemas and theatres, and wondered why my husband couldn’t be at my side in my time of need?
The midwife confirmed what I already knew: my waters had broken. I explained that I was experiencing back ache and cramps and that’s how labour had felt before, when I was induced. She nodded but said, ‘I’m looking at you and you’re not in labour’. She advised that I go home and wait for things to progress and explained that if nothing happened I would have to return in the middle of the night to be induced. I was upset just thinking about being induced and asked if my husband could be with me for that. She said no, he wouldn’t be able to be with me for that either, and could only join me when I was in a delivery suite in full-blown labour. I started crying, frightened of going through the preliminaries alone. Anyway, I explained, I didn’t want to go home because I live half an hour from the hospital. She looked at me and said, ‘I know where you live’. I pleaded, look, I’m really scared and I feel like I’m in labour and I’ve chosen to give birth in a hospital. She shrugged. I don’t know if she actually shrugged, or if I’ve misremembered, but her response was a literal or metaphorical shrug. She offered no words of comfort, compassion or understanding. She was turning me away until things progressed. She said if I didn’t want to go home then I could always walk around town and see what happened. What? How could I walk around when I was in pain and needed to be near a loo to change my pads because my waters were leaking constantly? I felt rejected by the hospital, totally alone and terrified.
I waddled out of the triage department and into the corridor where BFG was waiting. This was around 11am. I was in floods of tears as I relayed what I’d been told. He couldn’t believe we were being sent away. I said I wanted to stay put as there was a toilet in the corridor that I could use. Almost immediately the cramps became more intense. I started pointing at my stomach and saying, That’s pain, that’s real pain. I was having contractions. I never felt them the first time around, assumedly because the drugs I’d taken during my previous induction had shielded me from the pain. I was pacing in the public corridor, wearing a sodding mask, pushing against the walls, inhaling deeply through my nose and trying to suppress the urge to scream. I told BFG to download a contractions app. The pain was intensifying rapidly and ramping up my anxiety. By the time the contractions app had downloaded, they were coming every three minutes and lasting over a minute. The app displayed the message: ‘Go to hospital’. At least we hadn’t left.
Around midday, after nearly an hour of excruciating contractions in the corridor with people walking past, we went back into triage. The same midwife asked me what was going on and what I wanted to do. I said, I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know if I want to do a wee or a poo or have a baby. I was petrified and confused. I went to the toilet and she told me not to lock the door. As soon as I sat down I started screaming. Primeval screaming. Noises I never knew I could make. I was out of control. I was yelling, this is a good position. I felt like I was having a baby. They told me to get out of the toilet and onto a bed. I couldn’t fathom how I could walk or get onto a bed. I was incapacitated by the pain. Somehow I did and they examined me. I was 7 centimetres dilated. I think there was already lots of blood. They wanted to get me to the delivery suite.
From this point on everything is a haze. I had to walk to the delivery area. All I remember is BFG’s hand on my back as I clasped the hands of a series of women who were urging me to keep walking. I was screaming and had to keep stopping due to the pain of contractions. I was naked from the waist down with a sheet wrapped around me, howling with abandon.
In the delivery room they urged me to kneel on the bed. I have no idea how I got on to the bed. I was in agony and had lost all control of my breathing in the fear and panic. They gave me gas and air and I gasped on it like a lifeline, sucking it deep into my lungs. I was so grateful to be able to mentally escape my body and detach from the pain but I was also aware that I was totally out of it. The midwives were shouting instructions at me but I couldn’t hear them. I knew I was screaming but I couldn’t hear that either. My recall has totally distorted audio, as if overlaid with static or an industrial form of white noise. Apparently gas and air can cause some people to have hallucinations or experience audio distortion, so that’s my best explanation for the nightmarish jumble in my head. When they asked me to do things I remember shouting I’m on drugs, you’ve put me on drugs, incredulous that they could expect anything from someone who was tripping out.
Somehow, through the screaming and the fog of gas and air, I heard the command to push and knew I had to do it. After two contractions I felt the baby come out of me. It was 12:40. I still felt totally high from the gas and air so I stopped inhaling for a few puffs to ask, was that the baby? Everything was a woozy whirling. Someone passed me the baby from between my legs and told me it was a boy. He was covered in blood and I cradled him and spoke some words of reassurance. I was back on gas and air to push the placenta out and then back on gas and air whilst someone stitched up my vagina to fix the tears.
When the midwife sewed me up she told me that my uterus was very low. ‘It’s straight after birth, so that might go back up by itself, but it might not. If you feel something like a tampon in your vagina, that’s your uterus and if it’s still there after six weeks then you’ll need to go to the doctor about a prolapse’. Prolapse. I thought that only happened to old women. It happened to my Granny. I remember as a child being told that her insides were falling out and being horrified. How could this be me at 36?
I stayed in hospital that night because the baby was full of mucus and wasn’t feeding properly. As he threw up blood and gunge I tried to exorcise my own demons. I held him upright all night so I could wipe away the sick and try and encourage him to feed. We were skin to skin. I was grateful for the long quiet night to decompress. I was struggling to process what had happened. I knew my recall was fuzzy and the sound was weird. I googled birth trauma. I googled gas and air. I started to piece together what had happened. Every time I remembered labouring in the corridor alone, I cried. I felt let down. When I was at my most vulnerable and scared, the hospital had turned me away. I grounded myself by looking at the baby. I told myself: You have one job now. To care for this baby. This baby only exists in the present.
A baby is a ball of unadorned need and vulnerability. It’s an extraordinary challenge to care for a tender infant when you’re tender yourself. I feel broken. My insides are trying to escape to my outsides. I’m constipated and on laxatives. Basic bodily functions, things that we take for granted, have ceased to work.
The baby is unrelenting in his demands. He is pure animal. He goes from sleeping soundly to gnashing at his knuckles to show that he wants to be fed. I watch his frenzied chomping and contemplate pushing his fists aside and pressing my nipple in between his jaws. I bite my lip with the pain when he gets a grip. I brace myself to do it again. And again.
It’s been like this for a couple of weeks but now, three weeks in, I feel myself re-emerging again. Things already feel better and brighter. I can talk without crying. I’m still worried about the prolapse and I’m still on laxatives, but I’m going to consult a physio and I’m sure that help is out there. I hold my husband’s hand. I lean on my parents. I reach out to a sisterhood of women. I have two gorgeous healthy children. I hope that sharing my experience honestly will help me to process it and move on. Being outside helps. I look to the trees and green things for solace. There’s much life to come.