Conditions that threaten women’s lives in childbirth & pregnancy

And obviously I didn’t see my son for four days. Such an odd feeling. I mean not expecting to have the baby so early and then I wasn’t a Mother. I was just some useless person lying there.

 

I did have some physio on the fourth day when they finally got me to sit up and I felt really sick. [ But I couldn’t walk anywhere because I was so wired up to the machines, so I could go about a metre and then I couldn’t move any further. Just the lack of dignity was tremendous. You know, people having to wash you everywhere and I could feed myself eventually, which is good. But they kept saying, you know, you’ll look forward to seeing your son. And I thought what son? What do you mean? Didn’t really mean a lot to me.

 

 

He was in neonatal.

 

 

No a different hospital a few miles away. But the nurses there were ever so good. They, they wrote a little diary from my son to me and of course that got me. So he wrote about what he’d been doing that day, but it was not real to me. And my partner showed me photographs and I actually said, “Have you got the right baby?” I didn’t recognize him. 

 

So I didn’t have this maternal side to me, because I wasn’t allowed to have that. So I worried, I worried about when I’d see him again. Would he know me? Would he like me? Because I felt like I’d let him down.

Yes, it was just odd to be handed a baby from the Caesarean, I found anyway. Whether it was just from the epidural or… I think it was the whole rushed thing, that it all… I just remember being rushed down the corridor, in there, these big green sheets up. Tugging and she’s born. And then I was handed her. And it just felt like she could have come from anywhere.

 

 

Well it’s so difficult because I was just so exhausted, so it took a while to recover from I suppose the anaemia. I could see straight away in fact when she was born, the consultant held her up and said “you’ve got a big bouncing…” and I thought he was going to say boy, and he said “girl”. Because she was a big girl and she looked exactly like her brother when he was born. So that’s how I knew she was mine.

 

Did she stay with you for the whole time after she was born, or did she go off to another part of the hospital?

 

No they did take her off actually and also at that time. Yes, I did feel a bit out of control. I should have insisted she stayed with me. They took them away at night which was why they were giving her bottle feeds, which I don’t think I was aware of for the first couple of nights. And I should have insisted which I think they do now, you keep the baby with you. I think I’d have found it better and I should have asked to have her

 

 

Of course I woke up just thinking really, like thick head, and thinking, you know, this is really dark and then immediately just said, “How’s the baby?” Because as far as I was concerned it was like minutes ago so … It took a good few minutes. I mean somebody was there immediately, somebody was there. Right away. But that person… I think I had the same person actually, through the time I was there, who was a chap who I still to this day don’t remember his name which is awful but he was wonderful and he was immediately very calmly telling me “You’re okay, you’ve had to have a bit of an operation. You’re… the baby’s fine, but you are in Intensive Care” He was just kind of going through the motions of very calmly telling me. And then started asking me certain things about did I feel, you know, presumably checking me over. I remember saying, “Oh can I have a drink of water.” And things like that, you know, just gradually computing as to what’s happening and I think I probably asked again, “Are you sure the baby’s okay.” Because I suppose what was immediately dawning on me was that something serious must have happened to me.

 

 

Therefore how could I be this bad, and the baby be okay. You know, so that was, I think that’s the confused thing that’s going on immediately you know, and also the fact that you have no concept of time, or how much time has passed or any of that.

It was awful experience to wake up, and you know, you’ve had a baby. You can’t see the baby. She was in in the neo natal unit. I couldn’t see because I wasn’t even on site then, because I was at the hospital. I woke up, my husband wasn’t there because it wasn’t visiting times and they weren’t flexible. And you know, my leg had swollen up, my whole body had swollen but my leg had swollen up and a few, I think he next day they ended up having to take me into, into surgery again because I’d got a , I think it’s called an embolism in my leg. And they had to do a fasciotomy which involved three more operations, to open up, to close one side, close the next side and which is in the end resulted in me having drop foot. I can’t move my foot. I need to wear a brace in my shoes now and things like that.

 

I was in the High Care Unit for, I think it was four or five days. I do remember the day I came round. It was very, very traumatic for me. I had a visit from my Mum, my husband and my brother in law brought them along. And I hadn’t seen my daughter at that stage, and I was very upset because I thought, I thought personally that something was wrong with her that they weren’t letting me see her because there was something wrong and I got to the point that I really got myself worked up and eventually. They weren’t very, the neonatal unit wasn’t very accommodating. They said to me, “Look she’s not in any danger. She’s there because first of all you can’t take care of her, and because had been, she didn’t breathe for the first ten minutes they had to give her oxygen.” So it was just a standard procedure. 

 

Eventually after a lot of me being hysterical I think, they agreed to bring her for literally ten minutes. It really was literally you see your baby and that’s it. It was like that for the five days I was in. I never saw her for more than a few minutes every …. Not even every day. It was a very unpleasant experience

 

Yes, a bit. Yes. I was chatting quite a lot to one particular you know, the kind of nurse in overall charge there of that part. She was very good and you know, we chatted. I suppose she was doing distraction stuff, you know, chatting about other things. And she was certainly finding out whatever information I needed to know. She was doing her best to keep the communication going because of course, with the unit where my daughter was, you know, a completely separate building, a completely separate place from where I was. So she was doing checks and all the rest of it and feeding information back to me about, oh yes, either she’s sleeping or she’s had a feed or whatever you say, stuff like that, so that was reassurance.

 

But then of course when my partner did turn up, before he’d been in to see me, he’d gone in to see her anyway. So he was able to come in and he’d got photos as well and stuff, so … we just sat and kind of tried to piece things together a bit for a while.

Those first two days were a bit of blur, but the Friday the paediatrician said that she was starting to become unwell and that she was going to need some help breathing and that she would need a blood transfusion. And so they put her in CPAP and they were going to give the blood transfusion and then she became even more unwell.

 

I was obviously getting most of this third hand from my husband, because he was down, going back and forth from special care, and in the end he asked the paediatrician to come and explain it to me on the labour ward. And they said that they’d done an x-ray and her lungs were quite under-developed and they felt she needed to have some surfactant and that they would have ventilate her to do that, and that one of the risks of ventilation is that it’s so much easier for the babies being ventilated because they’re not working so hard, that they don’t then want to come off.

 

So they ventilated her on that Friday night and gave her a dose of surfactant and she was too sleepy from the morphine to come off, so they had to keep her ventilated, and their plan was to give her another dose in twelve hours and then try and extubate her. Meanwhile they gave her the blood transfusion and of course, I then asked a stupid question of, “Oh my gosh, is she going to die?” To which, quite rightly, they said they couldn’t give me that answer and of course you then think they’re not answering because they think she is. Which is not what it was at all… but I was lying there with this balloon up me, the catheter and drain coming out and I couldn’t even cry. It hurt so much. So I was sort of trying to cry while holding myself and I’d only seen her once. They wheeled me down in the bed and I held her that first night.