Episode 2 | Ashley Brenninkmeijer | 1st Time Mom, Attempted Water Birth, 4cm of Placenta Sewn into Wound & D&C, Postnatal Depression and PTSD
I have a hard time sharing my story because it is… a saga. It’s a lot to put out there. It’s a burden for me so I imagine for others it is a doozy especially bc I don’t have a picture perfect ending to resolve it all…a “happily every after”, “a water vbac”, a “dot dot dot”. “Tell me a good birth story?” I sometimes cry because I all I wanted was to tell a really “good”, “positive” story. But I can only tell my story.
I don’t remember anything the day of my daughter’s birth after she was born. I know I started breastfeeding. What else happened that day?? I was so sore and weak from the birth and meds and surgery that I couldn’t even hold my own daughter. I was barely conscious. (Was I conscious?) That day of pain and soul-wrenching fatigue quite literally bled into a week, quite literally bled into a month, quite literally bled into 60 days of fighting to get the help I needed, quite literally barely surviving. I will never get that first day or week or month or 60 days back with my daughter, that beautiful first meeting or first forty days of thriving I had so deliberately planned. I will always rage inside that I was robbed of that (among other things.) I miss meeting my daughter.
I don’t think my friends or family knew how serious and dark it all was. I’m not sure if they even know now. My mom had to fly back and forth between California 3 times in the first 2 months bc we kept thinking it was ‘over’ and then a new chapter of awful would begin. Everyone loved to tell me “at least you have a healthy baby”, ”at least you’re ok, down there” or my favourite: “you did your best.” I was livid. I wanted to scream, and still do, I KNOW I DID MY BEST. ELLE DID HER BEST. And then as the sepsis dragged on and the postnatal care tapered off, people stopped saying anything to me. And then I was discharged from the maternity wing because it was post-28 days and then people said nothing. I had my surgery to fix my c-section in the general OB wing at ChelWest in London with a newborn and all I was aware of was that it was silent.
I feel there are a lot of women, like me, who keep their stories within bc they don’t want to burden others with it or else it just is too overwhelming for them to re-feel. Now, more than ever, I understand that the body keeps the score and telling your story, getting it out of your body, is healing. So, to all the women out there that have been mistreated by the healthcare community at any point along their perinatal journey or have their stories sitting on their hearts:
I see you.
My story has three parts: The Birth, The First 30 Days, and then The Postpartum Period.
xo, Ashley
Part 1: THE BIRTH
Where: the Kensington wing at Chelsea Westminster (aka the private wing)
Why: chosen for continuity of care, new birth centre and pools, the Kensington Wing is supposed to be amazing…maybe even the ‘best care I can get’ in London was mentioned while I was choosing which is obviously what any woman wants, and I was especially keen since I was so far from home, birth centre is amazing
Who: I was booked under midwifery lead care (but none of the midwives listed on TKW website who did my antenatal appointments would attend my birth, I found out mid-labour), linked w Dr Roshni Patel but Dr Keith Duncan preformed c section, midwives at my birth I had never met/seen/heard of before
When: April 13-15th, 2018
I remember my first shower after my 31 hour labour that ended in an emergency c-section. I couldn’t shower for 3 days after birth. I hadn’t been able to have a bowel movement in 5 days. It took me about 20 mins to brush out my matted and knotted hair in the shower. I had gone to battle and tried to fight like a divine warrior goddess, thinking my battle was over w the birth, and I came out with wounds to show for it all. Some you can see and most you can’t. I didn’t get the first 40 days of healing. Instead of 40 days of mothering the mother with care and warm soups, I had 40 days bleeding with hospital trips 3x a week trying to make male doctors listen to me that something was wrong. I spent a fortune on taxis trying to get help from my doctor. Elle didn’t spend very much time at home. None of us did. By the time anyone listened to me and my sepsis, I had already been discharged from the maternity wing (day 28 is discharge day). This is my birth story, and I hope it never happens to another woman again.
Elle’s Birthday cake, made by Rupert
I took castor oil on Thursday (April 12th, 2018) and it made me lose some of my mucus plug. I started latent labour that got pretty intense off and on for 24 hours and it fizzled out. I got a stretch and sweep Friday night at 9pm. Labour started at 11pm and my contractions lasted up to three minutes and came every min or two from the beginning. Rupert started making a birthday cake for our daughter when our Doula arrived. Labour slowed down between 10am-11am. Then it returned with force. I got to the hospital around 3pm on that Saturday. None of the midwives from my prenatal care are there. My doctor is not there. Nothing is familiar. Rupert and my doula set up all my birth mantras and fairy lights around the labour room. I got a VE bc I wanted to know how far I had progressed since I was having 5-6 contractions every ten mins and they were intense and would bring me to my knees every time. They began like that. I had no ramp up. The only way I can describe how labour felt to me is the way when you have stomach flu and you have to throw up and so your body naturally throws you onto your knees or bends you over and your body has this huge spasm and does something you can’t control. That was every single contraction. It threw me to my knees every time. And I barfed lots too.
I thought when I got to the hospital I would’ve been 8cm. It felt that way. But I was 3cm. And I couldn’t go to the birth centre w pools bc 4cm is active labour. My knees and wrists were already bruised and sore from the way the surges threw my body onto my hands and knees from sitting. It was so frustrating. I tried gas and air which sort of helped but mostly made my voice unbelievably low. Cruelly, I had chanted “ooopppen” on each exhale for about 8 hours. I finally made it to 4cm and was about to go to the birth centre when one of the new midwvies told me actually since I was 42 weeks, I couldn’t use the pool. This was new to me because last night at my stretch and sweep I was 41 plus 5 days. Turns out these midwives would be using a different scan to determine my EDD, mid labour. Rupert had to fight to get me into the birth pools. (What a ridiculous blanket rule by the way. EDDs were determined by a doctor called Naegele in 1812 loosely based on some moon cycle theories…but what about my actual moon cycles which are 32 days long and not 28 days? I knew I would always have a longer pregnancy. But ultimately what still makes me so mad about this 42 weeks = no birth centre is that I wasn’t 42 weeks. And the arbitrary line in the sand when it hit midnight and the midwife would then tell me my placenta was ‘old’ and I had to be monitored was…as I said: arbitrary.)
Regardless, Rupert got me into the birth centre and it was amazing. I was in another place. I didn’t have contractions for a while and it felt like transition phase. I didn’t need gas and air for a bit. I told everyone I was in outer space by Saturn going to get my baby. That was exactly what it felt like. The midwife put on gloves to catch Elle in the birthing pool. Only blood came out. Maybe more of my mucus plug. The midwife asked me to get out and I laid on my side on the floor and she did a check and my waters broke spontaneously and I was still only 4cm. That was it. It was time to call it.
It was at this time on April 14th, I left my body. I remember walking back to the labour room from the idyllic birth centre at 11pm at night after almost a full 24 hours of natural labour that had come to as fork in the road due to our failure to progress... by a room with a crying newborn and just thinking... I don’t even want to be a mother anymore. I am broken. Done. White flag in the air.
A part of my heart or soul died then.
I retreated, broken, back to the labour room I started in. My body limp and my eyes dead. I whispered, which was every bit of energy I had left, to my husband and midwife and doula...I can’t do it anymore. I am exhausted. I am depressed. I am broken. My body is done. I don’t even care anymore.
Everything that happened next, I was resigned, apathetic. I didn’t care. Rupert asked for me to get an epidural so I could rest. In prepping, an attendant made my right hand bloody with stabbing attempts at a cannula and my blood was everywhere. She had to take to my left hand. I even vaguely remember her asking someone else to do it. I don’t know, it was midnight and I hadn’t slept in 36 hours or more. Since Thursday night. It was now Sunday morning. The epidural went in (my greatest fear) and it instantly made my body inflate like a balloon and I barfed everywhere and the injection site on my back hurt so, so much, I couldn’t lay down to rest. Rupert fell asleep instantly; he was also broken. I sat in pain in darkness while my contractions continued with the sounds of the fetal monitor beeping loudly. I was alone.
(It is important to note here that I received my requested notes from Chelwest last week to review, in October 2020 for the first time, and it is noted at 1 am at this point in my story (along with a few times during my labour) that the people who attended my birth knew the position of Elle during my time at the hospital (“left occiput anterior”) AND failed to offer this information to me at any point, or provide any suggestions to encourage a change of position.)
Another new face came in around 1 or 2am, a man called a Registrar came in and recommended a c-section or drip. He said I’d need to decide by 6am. I had to ask what a registrar was. (It’s not fun to birth in a foreign country where it takes that much more emotional and mental labour to suss out everything, bc apparently there would still be something I missed- like what a registrar was. I didn’t even know they had them in the private wing. This was a small but frustrating theme of my pregnancy and birth. Everyone at the Kensington Wing (which is why I had specifically chosen to go private, for continuity of care) was new this weekend. I knew no one at this birth. Anyone I had met before in the last 22 weeks was MIA. My doctor was gone without notice, none of my midwives were there…and it was unsettling and I felt unsafe.)
I sat and cried in silence for about an hour, trying to know what I needed to do. Or rather, knowing what I needed to do, and crying with heartbreak. I’d no longer get to be a queen and her council like I had hoped in this labour. I realized I was a damsel in distress, and the doctor en caul would have to ‘save’ me and Elle.
I looked down at my inflated, tired body. I noticed my hands and knees really hurt and deeply ached from spending hours and hours of repeatedly being thrown from sitting up to all fours…I had numb and red flats discs of compression bruises on my knees and it made it hard to move. A deep, deep arthritic ache in my wrists and hands made me limp and my arms hang lifeless. My lower back was bruised in every way. Elle felt like she was posterior. (She was LOA, I only know now, in 2020.) My heart felt broken, like a crushed rock in a million pieces. Grey. I knew I had to choose that c-section. So I sat in the dark with this decision alone for a while, then woke Rupert and my Doula to tell them the news. And then plans were made.
Despondent and dead inside for the C-Section
I will always cry when I think about how my doula, Emily Roberti, amidst my tears of broken defeat and heartbreak and depression, said “let’s get you ready to meet your baby girl”. And she wiped my armpits w wipes and sprayed deodorant and wiped my face and brushed my hair and put lip balm and face mist on me and a little “serenity” essential oil before I went into the theatre. That was the only window of dignity I had in my labour and motherhood journey.
I met and spoke to the doctor who would be doing my surgery (Dr. Keith Duncan, again who I had never met…where was my OBGYN?) and he skimmed over my birth plan and scoffed/made jokes as he read my precious hopes and desires. (ie, re Quiet, gentle music… “I’ll not put on my rock music then” and re microbioming…”eh, that’s not very important” etc. It was important to me.) But I just nodded and went with it. I didn’t have any more fight in me.
I was despondently wheeled into the theatre on my hospital bed at 7am on April 15th, 2018 and then whaled onto a blue plastic life plank- the thing you see lifeguards carry someone who is really hurt at the beach on with the handles on it. I say ‘whaled’ bc they had to rock me side to side to maneuvere my heavy limp body on top of this blue surgery board. I had a spinal block by then and couldn’t move any part of my body aside from my neck and head. Four people or so lifted me onto the surgery table and people were shuffling around to get prepped. It was bright. I felt despondent and cold emotionally. I didn’t want this to be my life and I also bitterly couldn’t have cared less that this was all going to the shitter. I was like ‘whatever, I don’t even care if I die now’. That’s how dark of a place I was in.
The anaesthetist was doing cold tests on my stomach to make sure I was numb and had to bark at Dr. Keith Duncan that she wasn’t ready yet. The anaesthetist was actually my favourite person in my whole birth. Her name was Elsbeth Pickering and she was so on it. She told me every single second of expectations of what was coming. She was very woman-centered and I loved her.
One of the people who was helping held up clippers and said ‘I need to trim you now but I’ll only do it just a little’ and she tried to be friendly and sweet and I was so broken I just looked at her and said I don’t even care. It was so dark. Then the surgery began and Elle was born. It was bizarre. It was such a big life event, I knew deep down but no one was acting like it. There was no ceremony, no jubilation. Just business as usual. The rest of the day was a blur. I wasn’t conscious for most of it. I am emotional now thinking about.
Not really conscious, but trying to smile
I was wheeled back to TKW and my doula helped my first latch. Breastfeeding was hard and that first week was so dark especially. But I needed to be able to do just this one thing so I powered through. Or maybe it was that I was starting to sink/fall into all the health issues ahead and that was why it was so hard.
In the ‘end’, or beginning, I was diagnosed as FTP…which meant Failure to Progress. But I would argue that it was FTH/FTFS…failure to help (ie, the position of my baby was known to my team but no help was offered to me) and failure to feel safe. I still don’t understand why none of the birth facilitators at my birth helped me progress, esp. when they knew her position. I’ve read all of Ina May Gaskin’s books and all these wise women and midwifery books and have listened to so many birth stories where there are wise women occasionally in western medicine who are able to see the baby is OT and can reach up and twist then had and then suddenly everything rocks and rolls or else suggests a position that will help the baby turn or hold the mothers hips to create more space…but instead I had a bunch of silent strangers who didn’t take one ounce of responsibility for me. It was almost like they were seals waiting in the beach to jump into action when c-section was iterated. I am furious in hindsight that no one not one person suggested useful or tailored birthing tips for this first time mother in a foreign country. It was never my job to refer to page 67 of Active Birth for a possible new birthing position, mid-labour. I had a silent, strange council and now I am traumatised of the necessary hypervigilance I had to adapt because of the reluctance of medical professionals to take responsibility during my pregnancy, birth or postpartum. I couldn’t relax in birth or frankly ever since bc I have to have my encyclopaedia of knowledge at the cuff to spit off and protect myself and my family since the medical system had failed me so greatly.
I wanted to have a natural vaginal birth so badly. Or rather, I just wanted an empowering birth. Whatever that looked like. I wanted a positive birth. I really wanted to be able to tell that story for myself. I literally prepared for more than a year so that I could make that possible. So much work. So many perineum massages. So much hypno birthing. So much mental and physical therapy. And in the end it didn’t matter. Was it all for naught? That makes me feel useless and small. And powerless. And I wonder what it would be like to be able to bond with my baby without heavy meds or having a catheter in or being unable to do anything myself or having the next two chapter (coming below). Everything hurt. Mind body spirit. I couldn’t sit up in bed without searing pain. I felt labour pains in my back and the burning wound on my belly for months afterwards. There is also savouring of strong bitterness and resentment that I needed a man to help me complete the birth of my daughter, that a man had to rescue this damsel in distress. I wanted to do it myself as the queen who had a team of wise council around her.
My husband said in proper labour I must have had about 400 +contractions.
Part 2: THE FIRST 30 DAYS
The Aftermath, Sepsis and D&C
Who: Dr. Raza, Chelsea Westminster Hospital
When: May 15, 2018
On day 30, exactly one month since my c section and first uterine surgery, I had another surgery: a hysteroscopy and D&C.
How I was dressed for the first 3 months and barely surviving.
To backtrack a little, I was discharged from hospital on day 6. I had my stitches out on day 7 at home. On day 8 I developed a hematoma. (I know now that this was because one of the ward midwives injected my c-section anti-coagulant shot into my wound on day 4 instead of my thigh because “it was numb there”. Of course I would get a hematoma from a anticoagulant injected on my wound. Thanks for the health ’care’, Chelwest.) On day 9, it was looking infected. On day 10, I had an overwhelming feeling that something “was not right".” I told Rupert that something was not right. It was vague yet clear so I chalked it up to baby blues. I started getting hot and faint and dizzy. I couldn’t change Elle’s diapers without almost falling over. I developed mastitis, the kind where ducts visible from your nipple turn opaque green with infection. I went into the hospital around day 11 for one of my first ‘appointments’ (aka ‘ummm, something is wrong with me, help.’) I would go to the hospital 3x a week for the first 29 days to try to get proper help. He never booked me an appointment, he kept it very casual and ‘off the books’. (This would prove frustrating when I filed my complaint against ChelWest.) I saw another consultant, Dr. Vasso, for one of my drop ins when he was off and she took me seriously for the first time. I was finally tested thoroughly “on the books” and turns out, I had a UTI, an E.Coli infection, mastitis, an infected hematoma, etc. She gave me my new antibiotic and it helped a little. But I was still bleeding clots and infected and presenting all the symptoms of sepsis, so I still was coming every 3 days to the hospital. Dr. Duncan was my doctor for the rest of these ‘appointments'. He mentioned he may have to ‘re-do my c-section scar’ to fix the hematoma blip. We did lots of casual doppler scans. I was on various antibiotics for 24 days. I stopped bleeding at day 17, only to begin again with a clotted vengeance day 23. I called TKW and thanks to an Irish midwife who was firm w Keith Duncan on my behalf that this was not ok, she got me a proper scan w him on day 29. I had that appointment at 11am. He found something worrying but didn’t articulate further and instead told me I need to see his colleague who is a specialist OB. I had that scan at 12pm. Dr. Raza told me I had 4cm of tissue inside. We needed to operate immediately. So I booked in on day 30 for a hysteroscopy and D&C. There was a risk that I won’t be able to have kids again. I was so scared that this would take breastfeeding away from me. After the slowest month in history, help happened so fast.
I was discharged from the maternity wing on day 28. So now I was in the general OB ward with a newborn with no familiar faces for this birth-related surgery. Dr. Raza told me he’ll try to prioritize me and do me first of the 5 surgeries he as that day. He did me last. I felt/feel so bad for Elle.
Here I am, post-surgery with Elle. I had just woken up.
I walked up to the theatre alone with Dr. Raza, leaving my newborn behind for the first time in my life, with my plastic bag to put my eyeglasses and birkenstocks in once I’m on the operating table so they “don’t lose them”. I stood alone in the middle of the OR, under the fluorescent lights while everyone around me fiddles with machines and goes about their business. I just cry silently in the middle of the bright room alone with my plastic bag in hand, directionless in my hospital gown. This is the second time in a month I will have serious surgery on my uterus. I didn’t want either. I was not acknowledged by theatre staff. Then they were ready for me and I laid down on the table. The anesthetist who had a terrible bedside manner told me to “not cry because I would make him cry.” The nurse asked me my name and why I am having this surgery and I cried through the whole thing: “Ashley Brenninkmeijer, I am having this surgery to fix a botched c-section that I didn’t want to have in the first place.” She suddenly broke her business-like manner for a brief minute and stroked my hand. It was the first time I’d been acknowledged as a person this whole time. Then I was told to count backwards from ten, but instead I said out loud: “I love my family.” I was scared since I had been an outlier at every corner so far, it was very real to me that I could be the 1 in 100,00 who died, so just in case, I wanted my last words on earth to be about how much I love Elle.
Then I went under and I have no idea how they treated my body. If the team spoke kindly while I was under, if they were gentle with me. I hope so, but I don’t think they really were. They inserted the camera and scraper tool vaginally and pumped 3L of a special saline fluid to inflate my uterus so they could see clearly. They removed 4cm of placental tissue that was sewn into my wound from the inside. The reports were fun to show to Dr Keith Duncan at my 6 week appointment, who could only offer an “I’m sorry.”
I was so hellbent in my heart and soul to not let this take breastfeeding away. If the medical community took yet another thing away from me, I wouldn’t have recovered. Truly. I had been broken so many times in the last 34 days, I was barely a human. This last thing would’ve erased me completely. Even now with all my EMDR and work on this, I still cry when I look back. None of this should’ve happened and there will always be a very real authentic sadness about this. And there was no time to process this or grieve because Rupert shortly went back to work. We had spent our entire first 40 days at the hospital, his generous 6 week pat leave squandered on hospital visits. I didn’t get to enjoy being a mom for one minute of our babymoon together. I was sick, in pain and so tired the entire time. And suddenly, I was on my own. Still bleeding, still not well.
I bled for over 60 days postpartum. And I started my period week 11 postpartum. All while exclusively breastfeeding.
Part 3: THE POSTPARTUM PERIOD
The PTSD and Postnatal depression.
I remember crying around day 10 or 12 after Elle had gone to sleep next to me finally at 11pm and having to sob with a pillow over my face while only being able to muster “I don’t want to be here”. It was dark. And it stayed dark for a long time. I was continually met with: “you did your best”, “you have a healthy baby, thats all that matters” “yes birth is hard, and now you got to be strong for your daughter” and “some women don’t even get to come home with a baby”… which made me feel hurt, like my trauma didn’t matter, that I didn’t matter. I had just had this major surgery after a 4 day labour and I was in the thick of a yet-unnamed second trauma, having no medical professionals listen when I told them something was wrong. I had to forge forward like the books said in this very hard postpartum period…to “rest when your baby rested” or “outsource some of the work to your partner”…but I was going to the hospital for more checks, asking for more help, or I was crying alone when my baby rested. I was not resting.
I began to push away everything that I had began postpartum with a fervour in hopes of helping me heal; the healing frequencies on youtube, the stupid bone broths, the self-care ideas, the post-partum doula, that plans to really let myself rest. I was angry and bitter and overwhelmed by the most soul-wrenching grief & loneliness. I wanted to burn all my beautiful books I had gotten myself as a treat because I would bitterly yell inside just looking at them. The “self-care for new mums”, “the first 40 days”…all for a club of moms I would never be apart of. I would never have. And my main takeaway is that Nothing I Do Matters. Everything is shit. I was not within the parameters of any books I had read. I was exempt from a lovely postpartum period. Elle was traumatised too. She didn’t sleep and was terribly unsettled. I couldn’t sleep bc she couldn’t sleep either and I was going to the hospital/trying to get anyone to listen to me when she was. Also, I was dying. And soon, Rupert was headed back to work and I would be 100% alone. So overwhelmingly alone.
In that loneliness, my mind drifted to rage and deep bitterness at medical care, at England, at my partner, at everything.
In my 6 week GP appointment, I didn’t pass the mental health test. The GP printed out a referral letter for me to take home, and said, “you’ll need to find a therapist who can help you.” This is a continuation of my experience of going through a maternal healthcare system that not only refuses to take responsibility for it’s patients during the care period but also shows how maternity care drops off immediately after I had my baby. This was beginning of the my experience going through the underbelly of the mental healthcare system.
I have been super alone and isolated my entire motherhood journey so far. It wasn’t and hasn’t been fun to try to connect with other moms. I felt and still feel that in sharing circles I would be/am the Debbie Downer. I’d watch other moms chat easily with their new mom friends before, during, and after baby classes. But every social interaction reinforced that, yes, I was indeed an outlier and I don’t have anything in common with these ‘fellow’ moms. And for so much of my postpartum, I was only about 3 words away from crying. Even birth story platforms encouraged only the sharing of positive stories and usually there was a p.s. at the bottom of the webpage noting if you had a traumatic birth that you needed to get help. My social anxiety had/has reached new heights. I want to chat easily about fun things. But I can’t. I’m too angry, I have nothing in common with anyone. So I began rushing off after baby classes. Eliminating any potential opportunities for interactions. It has been hard enough hearing every medical professional I’ve since come into contact with say to me, “wow, I’ve never heard of that happening” and the heavy silence afterwards that I would just float and nod in for a few beats. And with other moms, I don’t want to be reminded that I am un-friend-able, that I have nothing in common with them, that I have such a hard time easing into social settings. I’ve been hurt too many times to have to be reminded that I am again, an outlier. A foreigner in every way. That I don’t fit in. It still hurts.
One cold, dreary January day in 2019, I headed to my NHS GP in tears because I needed help. I was not ok. I needed a therapist bc I wasn’t going to make it out of this. I was at my PND and PTSD rock bottom. The GP offered me anti-depressants with no supervision with the promise of a vague timeline of contact from the appropriate NHS therapy centers. The referral process was slow and not trauma-centred. I live in the Brent council of London and Brent IAPS does not offer EMDR or REWIND therapy, which are two of the only appropriate forms of therapy for trauma. CBT is not appropriate. It is desperately upsetting that mental health is so undervalued and slow in this country, in our world. There is no follow through and people fall through almost every hole on their quest to get help through the NHS. (It hurts my heart when people say “you should’ve gotten help!” to people struggling with mental health…do you effing know how hard it is to get help, not to mentioned THE APPROPRIATE help?) So as always, with no help from the medical community who had put me in this mess, I had to do it myself. I had to find my team. I also had to go private. I found the London Trauma Specialists who focus on EMDR and even birth-centered trauma. This was exactly what I needed. I couldn’t believe it. I might even get help for the first time in this country.
I had to adjust my breastfeeding schedule, hire a nanny which we couldn’t afford to hold my exclusively breastfed baby on Fridays so I could shlep across London with energy I didn’t have to go heal from a birth/postpartum period I didn’t even want, to run back in time to breastfed her. But at least I was finally in therapy.
Oh yes, here is the thing about therapy: it gets darker before it gets better.
So on another day in April 2019, I headed back to my NHS GP to get anti-depressants to stay in the ‘window of tolerance’ during therapy. I met with a locum nurse in my appointment who told me to “focus on my baby to be less sad” or even look into religion. This actually happened, and it is not exaggerated, or fluffed for story-telling sake. I was speechless. I filed a PALS complaint. Why is it that I continually am met with medical professionals who are so reluctant to help, to take responsibility for my health? Isn’t that really the scope of the job?
Therapy was and is slow. I still have weekly, sometimes bi-weekly, sessions. Insurance is the worst.
I single handedly would like to thank Rebecca Schiller’s resource page. It is the only reason why I am still alive to be honest. She had birth trauma specialists for EMDR and psychotherapy listed on her site. The healthcare industry time and time again was negligent and Brent IAPS was unhelpful. Postnatal care is actually not ok.
I filed claims with Chelwest and the Matron of the Kensington Wing, and a PALS complaint for the locum nurse at the Lonsdale Medical Centre. To try to make it different for the women and birthing people who came after me.
I’d also like to thank my body because in light of all that, I was still able to breastfeed for 2 years.
The bruises from the botched cannula during labour.
Looking ahead now to my next birth, I am trying to prepare myself for a different experience…which has been harder than I thought. Returned to the place, situation, of trauma isn’t easy. Oh yes, and it’s a pandemic. It’s harder more than ever to get the support that you need. I prepared thoroughly for my first birth. I look back and am amazed at myself, the level of self-education and birth prep (the first in my friend group) in a foreign country is impressive. I had no community and lived in a dead zone of London with no other moms (not joking.) But theres no way to prepare for falling through the holes in the system at every turn. I am re-reading holistic birthing books now and almost all of them begin with: “I had a bad first birth but I am educated now”…but what if you were educated for your first birth. The feelings of isolation continue.
When I read about VBACs now, and think about how much leg work I am having to do to make it happen, it feels similar to the way I used to feel when I read love stories until I was 25…I’d get teary, longing for how nice it must be to get to have that, but ultimately resigned to the fact that love stories are what happen to other people. Not me. I want a VBAC so badly, it hurts. But I also realise that I am an outlier for some reason, not just in stats but also socially and so it continues to be difficult for me. But this is also why I have started this podcast. Let’s take back our 2020, and reconnect.
I believe in making space for all emotions and stories. All stories matter and I am very anti-toxic positivity. Birth is amazing and birthing people are amazing, and our stories are amazing. They don’t belong in silence inside our bodies.
Being human isn’t binary. It’s not just happiness or sadness. It’s usually both. Yin and yang. Two or more contradicting things existing at the same thing. This is my main lesson from motherhood actually. Motherhood is not good or bad, it’s not easy or hard, it’s usually both or all. Birth is the same.
I think it’s time our stories reflect that.
xo Ashley