Conditions that threaten women’s lives in childbirth & pregnancy

And to me, you know, mine was the worst thing you could ever do. To them it’s just one of the things. Like my doctor said, “Look,” he said, “You know, you’re the third person in this hospital that’s had this.” You know, so it’s not, you know, it’s all square at the time. He said while he’d been doctor there he had had one more experience. So it’s not something that’s completely new and out of this world, but to me lying there it’s the biggest thing that’s ever happened to me, you know, its… you know, very traumatic and that and I think it had an effect on me. As I said, I stopped driving. Well I couldn’t drive for a long time. Then when I went for assessments and I had a couple of lessons. I never had the courage to drive again. And I think that took away from a lot of you know, independence for me, for the rest. It was a really tiring time, because everything had. I couldn’t do a lot of things for myself. And my husband had to do a lot of things, and things that you don’t want your husband to have to do for you and that. Yes, no I think the main thing is I lost independence. It took that away from me and also the ability to take care of [second daughter] by myself. Because nobody wants to feel that they’re reliant on everybody else to do things.

 

 

It did have a great impact. As I said my husband you know, he still to this day says he can’t… he doesn’t have a normal weekend. That he spends all his time carting the kids to… Because we tried to keep their lives on track as much as we could, which meant keeping all the activities, moving them to the weekends. I do all the activities that involve the school or karate that is within walking distance. He then has to do things like swimming and gymnastics and football which is further away. I do feel that he had a lot of pressure. There were a lot more things that you don’t think about, but everything changes. Insurance on things. They go up because you know, it costs you, I mean you don’t think about these things, but everything costed more. We had to you know, take into account things and you know, my husband his work suffered. He had to be, he was a person who always used to go to work half past six and come home around you know, seven. It’s only now that he’s starting to regain that. Because I can now, you know, apart from not being able to walk without, I mean I can walk around the house without a brace, but I can’t walk out of the house, because I will trip up or things like that. So, I can, other than that, and a few ongoing gynaecological things which are not affecting me physically, you know, I can take care. But my husband’s work suffered. He couldn’t, he had to wait and go in late in the morning. He’s into, finance which means you might be told you work from 9 till 5 but essentially you need to be there from 6 till 7, 8, 9 you know, at night. So you know, he had to take off extra time, unpaid, unpaid leave, you know, to be with me. He couldn’t progress because he couldn’t stay you know, in his career couldn’t progress for a good time because he had to be home. He had to be home to bath [second daughter]. He had to be home to help put the children to bed and sort them out. You know, things that nowadays I can do. But then I couldn’t.

 

Now I took the decision when I woke from coma still in A & E to change profession. Because I had dreams about my CD rom in purple colours, my hallucinations were about that partly and I thought it can’t be that on my death bed but this is what I thought about. Nobody would care if the CD looked less good because I’m in a coma. But I want to make a difference, so the next time I die people will mind. 

 

And that’s when I decided I’ll go to psychology because I always was interested in psychology. And I got offered based on my Masters in Multimedia, I got a sort of fantastic job at the university where I did the Masters, which is a very good university and I couldn’t refuse it. So I took the job. I was managing a team of multidisciplinary designer kind of team, and during that time we tried surrogacy a couple of attempts it didn’t work out. We then decided to adopt and we then started the journey of adoption and… by the time the referral of the twins came up, I decided I’m going to chuck my job and I’m going to go, international adoption and so I’m going to go and leave the country while my twins are growing because I wanted to be there with them. 

 

So we did that. For a long time we lived there. We changed countries. And then we came back. Seven months later I changed profession indeed. I started a conversion to psychology and after a couple of years when I’d done that I became an assistant psychologist etc and I worked my way up. Did, worked as an assistant researcher etc. It’s a long journey.

 

During that time, my partner’s career changed dramatically and that had an effect on the dynamic of the family because whereas before we had a kind of control over his time and he was a very involved Father to [son] from zero to five. With the twins he wasn’t. So there was, there were some issues there for me.