My healing birth experience during the pandemic
This photo shows Emma after her most recent birth experience during lockdown.
The pandemic causes a challenge for women giving birth. Reports of birth trauma are on the rise because of this. For Emma, this is the more reason to share a positive birth experience. One she never dared believe possible before it happened. A healing birth after a previous traumatic one. In Covid times.
I know we are very fortunate to have experienced a positive birth during the current pandemic. It’s something which I know others have not experienced. My heart goes out to all those who’ve experienced a traumatic birth. I know what it feels like. Following the birth of my daughter in August 2018 I experienced PTSD symptoms.
Off to a good start
My story had started as a positive one. We had met so many wonderful midwives, we’d had a continuity of care provider and felt confident and able to make the decisions we needed to. My husband didn’t want us to have a home birth so we planned on a hospital birth. My labour began at 9pm (40+9) and we stayed at home for a while. Our midwife came and did a home assessment around 4am and advised us to transfer into the hospital a couple of hours later as I was in active labour but wasn’t expected to progress that quickly due to it being our first baby. We went into the hospital and met our first midwife. Shift changeover came and we were introduced to our new midwife and the student midwife who was working with her for the day. They looked after us all day. We hit a few bumps in the road (slow dilation, meconium in my waters) but they continued to support us and help us to try and achieve the birth we hoped for.
“In my head, I was not in that room”
‘The doctors can do it then’
At 8pm, 4 hours into my second stage the new midwife marched in. Her opening sentence, before she’d been introduced to us, was ‘right well this has gone on long enough and if baby’s not out in 15 minutes then the doctors can get it out’. Having already had to accept that my water birth wasn’t going to happen, my thoughts of my baby coming out soon turned to panic. My husband was waving clary sage oil around like my life depended on it while the midwife was shouting at me that I wasn’t pushing hard enough. Then 15 minutes were up and she left the room saying ‘the doctors can do it then’. She returned with a senior midwife and they moved us to another room on the midwife-led unit. Having never done this before and desperate to try and avoid the labour ward, I did as they told me. Unfortunately, this resulted in me lying on back with my legs in stirrups. They started to push my feet towards my head. I asked them to stop. They refused. During my second contraction, they pushed my feet towards my head. The midwife put her hand inside me and started shouting at me to push it out. When I asked her to stop she repeatedly shouted at me: ‘No, push my hand out’. I was shouting, crying and screaming at her, in my head I wasn’t in that room. When my husband shouted at her ‘that’s enough, stop’, she took her hand out of me and walked out of the room saying ‘the doctors can get it out then’.
This photo shows Emma after her first birth experience.
Great panic
We were transferred to the labour ward with the same midwives and in the end the doctors used forceps to deliver my daughter at 9:09pm after a 25 1/2 hours of labour. I didn’t remember most of what happened on the ward and I still couldn’t tell you most of what was said. It was like watching it happen to someone else. There were moments of great panic for me when all I heard were phrases or words such as ‘forceps’, ‘theatre’, ‘abandon and go to theatre’. I’d had no pain relief as I’d used hypnobirthing techniques but the level of pain and fear for my baby’s safety was very high. I didn’t know what was happening to me or why and I had no control over what people were doing to me. After the birth, I struggled too. We had difficulties with feeding and my daughter was readmitted many times due to failure to thrive. In the end we managed to feed but the trauma of her birth and those early days haunted me. It had changed who I was and I how I saw the world.
Pregnant again
I spent months going to therapy and then last October we found out that we were expecting our second child. I was terrified. We booked under the homebirth team at the same hospital as that was the only option for continuity of care in our area and I didn’t want to repeat our story over and over. We met our midwife and we told her our story. She supported us throughout many ups and downs in my pregnancy, like the closure of the homebirth team due to Covid restrictions, a potentially low-lying placenta and many anxieties around giving birth again.
“They knew my story, they knew our preferences and they supported us.”
Healing birth
At 7:40pm, at 40+12, I went into labour. It was much quicker than my daughter’s birth and we were fully supported to bring our little boy into the world in a calm and peaceful way using hypnobirthing techniques to help us. Our second midwife didn’t make it on time as my labour was too quick and my daughter ended up being there which hadn’t been part of the plan. So it’s true when people say birth doesn’t always follow the plan, but my baby boy was born in the pool at home at 11:39pm after a 4 hour labour. It was my healing birth. I made the decisions and we were so lucky to be supported by such a wonderful team of midwives in those decisions. They knew my story, they knew our preferences and they supported us to achieve something which I had never dared believe was actually possible until after it had happened.
This photo shows Emma after her latest birth during lockdown.