*The following article is a long read. It was originally published here.*
I was twenty-three years old when my husband and I finally overcame mild infertility and a history of early miscarriages, and I brought my twelve-pound daughter into the world. The experience was life-altering on such deep levels that I have yet to find a way to discuss it properly in one sitting.
I had had a rough pregnancy. My heart has issues and mimics heart attacks the entire time. I had bleeding, swelling, protein in my urine, and eight and a half months of vomiting at all hours of the day. Labor had started around 36 weeks and was stopped with seven rounds of medication that caused me an allergic reaction.
At 38 weeks, I was told that I could choose an induction or a cesarean section. Our doctor did not break it down more than that. He just put the choice on me with no other information. Of course, I was going to try to do this on my own. His only other words were that he wanted to induce me because he felt my daughter would be around nine pounds, and we don't want to wait to forty weeks and end up with a ten-pound baby.
I found out years later that his notes indicate that I was admitted for having preeclampsia. Reading that infuriated me because I was in and out of the doctor with intense swelling, headaches, blurry vision, high blood pressure, and other symptoms. I had read up about preeclampsia and made the point to ask. I was told not to worry about it, even when the results came back that I was spilling protein.
I was admitted on Monday morning but left in the hospital lobby for forty-five minutes. When my husband asked when someone was going to take us upstairs, we were finally remembered. I arrived at my room and my doctor's nurse-midwife. She asked me what had taken me so long, and said that our doctor would not be happy if he had to be awake in the middle of the night to deliver me. She got me hooked up to the Pitocin drip and had it turned up to full in thirty minutes flat.
Contractions hit me like a full-scale assault, coming three at a time and thundering through my body like a million blades of fire. I always found it interesting that one of our organs, the uterus, could grow large enough to allow you to feel everything happening inside of your abdomen. I was burning up and my blood pressure cuff was going off during contractions, even though I was told it would only set off in between. In fact, I had a long, wide, deep black bruise on my arm from the cuff afterward.
I wasn't allowed to use my birthing ball, walk, or otherwise move because of my blood pressure. I got to use the restroom twice before they caught on that I was using these short trips to sway naked in front of the open window. It was only open a few inches and the blinds were mostly closed, but the snow-cooled air was life. The small fan in the room wasn't cutting it.
I labored for a very short (for my family) twelve and a half hours that felt like a million years. The last two and a half of that was spent pushing. I was a goddess at pushing, just ask me. *eye roll* Eventually, with much effort, I delivered her head and was rewarded with my husband's gasps, "She is here! She is so beautiful!" I didn't get to enjoy his elation for long.
"WHO JUST STUFFED ME WITH A CABBAGE?!?!?!"
The words seared through my mind as my body rent apart.
I was confused about why I was even having that thought. Where did it come from? My body was in hell and my mind had apparently gone down the hole after the white rabbit. I did not get time to process it, however. The room, suddenly overflowing with strangers, burst into urgent chants all around me.
"PUSH, LYNN! PUSH!"
Above them all was the voice of my sister. I did not know that she had been shoved off into the bathroom to keep her panic hidden from me. I only knew that she was my support person; the woman I chose to have with me, representing the strength of all life-givers who came before. It was of paramount importance to me to have a beloved woman in the room who had already given birth. My husband was important because he was mine and this baby was ours, but my sister spoke for all of the womankind; she knew this journey we call childbirth.
Maybe that sounds cheesy and pretentious, but that is exactly how I felt. I was deeply connected to myself, my child, my grandchildren (because by twenty weeks the female fetus already has her own eggs in utero), and every woman preceding me down the family line. I was experiencing the entire universe. Please do not think me delusional. I have simply never felt more connected to life than this. I did not have daydreams of a perfect, drug-free, God-blessed, kissed-by-angels birth. What I did have was confidence that I was strong, physically and mentally. I would get through whatever labor and delivery, rewarded with a healthy child at the end.
Back to the point: my sister yelled for me to push, and so I did - like a champion. These were my most powerful moments as a human being, to date. Again, my ears were blessed with my husband's motivating declarations that our daughter was here and was beautiful. I was so relieved, so proud! I could finish this thing! I could...
"WHO JUST STUFFED ME WITH A CABBAGE?!?!?!"
It seemed impossibly absurd to me that I could have this thought a second time in my life. I was not a person in the room. I was a stranger in some kind of bizarro world torture chamber. They say I was emitting blood-curdling screams. I do not remember, but I don't doubt it. I could write all day and still never describe with accuracy what I was experiencing within my person. I have said ever since that it was hell, but even that term doesn't seem to carry enough weight. By that point, nothing physically existed but myself, my daughter, and our intense struggle for life. The room exploded around me again,
"PUSH, LYNN! PUSH!"
I honed in on my sister's voice and drew from depths inside of me which had never existed before that very night. Then I felt it happen: that indescribable flood of my daughter's body passing through mine and out into the world. It was followed by the unmistakable tugging weight of the clamp on the end of the umbilical cord dangling from me.
I did not get my eyes open in time to see my daughter. My husband and sister said that she was completely blue and purple, limbs dangling like a rag doll, with her chest caved in. They will never forget the sight, so perhaps it is good that I did not see it myself.
The scene that greeted me when I did open my eyes was the host of people off to my left, surrounding the baby warmer that had been standing empty, waiting for our daughter, only minutes before. I remembered that I had seen the face of our birth class teacher and recalled her words that she only shows up if absolutely everything has already gone wrong. Where is my baby? Where is this person I have felt moving inside of me?
"She isn't real yet." I thought, "She won't be real until I can see her."
My husband and I remained calm and motionless, silently watching the solid wall of bodies surrounding our invisible daughter. My thoughts uttered the same prayer on a loop, asking God to let me see her so I would know that she is real.
"I need a bigger respirator."
The doctor was working furiously to resuscitate her somewhere in the mosaic of hospital garb pulsing before us. Moments felt like hours; minutes like days.
"I need a bigger respirator."
Those words stick in my mind as clearly today as they did that night. He said it twice more after that. For a split second, the scrubs parted and I caught the barest slip of a heel. She was here! She was here and more, she was real!!
Suddenly the room was empty. Chris and I remained in place; statues on this odd and dramatic night. For the most part, we stared at the door. However, I have a vivid memory of time standing still on a group of wee face masks left laying in the corner of the warmer where my daughter had just been. In hindsight, it is almost amusing because she was so large. At the moment, it was only tragic. Was she breathing? Did they get her heart to beat? The silence was finally broken by a nurse popping her head in to tell us the birth weight: twelve pounds, one point three ounces.
"How many pounds, twelve ounces?" asked Chris incredulously.
I grinned. It was to be my only smile. The nurse did not even bother to tell me that our daughter was alive, or what state she was in. She was there in an instant and gone again, taking Chris with her to update him somewhere else on what was happening. I was left clueless and alone, bleeding onto the floor, the forgotten mother in an empty room.
The doctor suddenly returned, plopping down abruptly between my legs. Without a word, he shoved his arm inside of my body. From my vantage point, it looked (and felt) as though he was in up to the elbow. (I can never again watch cows being assisted with calving the same way.)
I distinctly remember the sensation of his watch ripping against my insides under his glove; I can still feel his fingers individually scraping away at my womb. I shudder, shake, and try not to throw up recalling it. I gripped the bed and half sobbed, half gasped, "Isn't the placenta supposed to come out on its own within five to thirty minutes?" (Fat lot of good my birth research had done me!)
Dr. H sneered, "Yeah. In a textbook delivery."
There wasn't anything more to be said at that point. I gripped the bed, sobbing as quietly as I could and trying not to bother him while he stitched me together. I can tell you with precision where each stitch went. To this day, I cannot figure out why he didn't at least give me a shot to numb me. Maybe he figured I could handle it. After all, I am a very accommodating person. I had a lot of respect for the medical community. What the doctor says, goes. Besides that, I had just gone through hell and survived.
I should probably hit rewind and put details here that I left out above. There really is far too much to tell, but I can at least give you the gist of what happened. I was laboring back to back, on a spine curved multiple times with scoliosis. I had tried to have an epidural - twice, actually. They did not work. I felt every blessed thing. Having gone into natural labor a few weeks before, I was familiar with contractions. They were beautiful compared to the Pitocin-induced labor of this birth night. This was torture.
When it came time to push, the nurse had me labor in different positions, from using the squat bar to lying on my left side. It was at that point the contractions hurt the worst, and I cried. I asked for a c-section, and the nurse told me that Dr. H would not appreciate it if he had to wake up for surgery. (Why did his sleep keep coming up?) She even quipped that she had given birth to an eleven-pound baby and if she could do that, I could do this. She later apologized.
I am not sure how long it was before the doctor showed up for the delivery. I was on my back and fighting the oxygen mask and pulse oximeter by then. I had had too much, and that was the last straw! The nurse popped it on my toe where I could see it but not get to it. Time to focus on getting this baby out.
The doctor initially started with forceps, but abandoned them after one use, declaring me a 'good pusher'. (That is where my massive amounts of pride came in. The whole night went to hell, but I was a good pusher. I felt for a long time that it was the only thing my body did right. I inflicted myself with so much blame and guilt for our birth.)
When I got my daughter's head out, she was initially facing the wrong way. I couldn't see any of this. My eyes were pinched tightly shut. My husband and sister saw it. The doctor shoved her back inside and told Chris that she needed to be facing the opposite direction. This was my first experience of feeling that I had been stuffed with cabbage. It was also my first experience having both of his hands and arms inside of me. You can see why the word 'hell' doesn't do it justice.
Upon pushing her back in — known to the medical world simply as 'reducing' — the doctor then rotated her to face the way he wanted. Again, I have no words to accurately describe how that felt. I later learned that this was called the Zavanelli Maneuver. (You may rest assured that I put a lot of time into trying to figure out what had happened to me once I got time between myself and this night of horrors.) Even more recently, I have come to understand that the broken clavicle was also done intentionally. This is known as the McRobert's Maneuver. I have to fight intense anger within myself when I think of our doctor making the active decision to break my child.
I pushed again and delivered her head for the second time. The internal rotation of her body had caused her cord to wrap around her neck. The situation was growing dire. He shoved her back in to unwrap the cord, causing my second stuffed cabbage reaction and further rending my already-shredded body with his hands and arms.
I pushed her head out the third time. The doctor tugged at her, trying to coax her out. When she wouldn't come, he called for a c-section team. She and I were locked in shoulder dystocia. She would not fit. Someone in the room told him that the team was half an hour away.
He said, "She is not going to survive that long."
Chris recalls the experience to me, looking sick at his stomach and completely disgusted. The doctor's words were still in the air when our daughter flat-lined. He put his foot onto the bed and pulled with everything he had. He pressed with his thumb and broke her collar bone, collapsing her shoulder and setting her free. It is a sight burned forever in the minds of my family.
The results of that night were catastrophic. My daughter wasn't breathing on her own, and there was no ventilator at our small country hospital. They had to manually bag air into her for five hours while they waited on an ambulance to come from the Children's Hospital with a ventilator and experienced medical staff. The ambulance had a police escort to get her to the N.I.C.U. faster. We did not know yet just how bad her injuries were. We only knew that she was not breathing, and she had to be transported to save her life.
Things were quiet on my end. I remember the nurse using smelling salts on me when I began to fade. I remember her and my sister putting on my underwear, and getting me into a wheelchair.
I was afforded a small peek at my daughter on the ride between the delivery room and postpartum. The angle of the photo Chris took of me looks as though I saw her properly, but my line of sight was actually just below her forehead. I could only see that she was covered in tubes and wires. I could see the back of her head, which spread like mush instead of having a defined head shape. I know from looking at the photo that I touched her, but I have no recollection of that. I never even saw her eyes or face.
Once in the room, I was set up with bed pads and they resumed my Pitocin drip for the next eight hours. My uterus wouldn't clamp down and I was losing too much blood. Frequently a nurse would pop in and mash on my uterus with incredible strength. I remember wondering how such a tiny woman could be so strong.
One thing that stands out from my pregnancy and birth experience was how little information was shared with us. It was not for lack of trying. I like to really get to know about things, so I was full of questions and observant. The birth night was no different. My daughter's lifeless body had been dragged into the world, just beyond half after midnight Tuesday morning. I spent the hours my daughter was still in the hospital begging my husband and sister to go spend time with her. They were exhausted and kept returning to my room to fall asleep.
Eventually, the EMTs from the children's hospital arrived and took over. They briefly rolled my daughter's incubator into the doorway of my room. Again, I could not really see her for the angle, the encasement around her, tubes, and tape. Where was her face? I was dying to know what she looked like! Is she okay? "Not breathing on her own" is not a real answer. I am a mom now. I need to know what is going on!
A kind man gave me two identical Polaroid photos they had taken of my baby, her face still hidden by tape and tubing. I could see her, but I didn't feel that I knew what she looked truly like. He asked me her name and the exact spelling of it. He made me feel it was his most important mission to make sure that they knew who she was when she arrived. I could have cried for his thoughtfulness and generosity. Nobody else had treated me like a person that night, myself included. Once my daughter was born, I was an afterthought. For a brief moment, I was human again.
Our journey continues from here. It has, in fact, gone on well over a decade. I was discharged only fifteen hours after giving birth. I had a prescription for Tylenol with Codeine that I couldn't take because my family has a storied history of allergic reactions. I both looked and felt like ground chuck.
My body continued to swell until my ankles spilled over my shoes and I had a lot of dizziness and migraines. There was nobody to check on me, though, because at the N.I.C.U. I had just the wheelchair to sit in through the day. I was passing clots the size of jelly jars, and still, Chris and I stayed by our baby's isolette from seven in the morning to midnight the following morning every day. I pumped every two hours, furiously fighting to make colostrum and breast milk for our daughter.
She was so badly broken. Her head was almost entirely covered with the largest hematoma her team of doctors had ever seen. No baby is meant to pass under the pubic bone five times. She had bruises up and down her body, and what we were told could be compared to a body-wide migraine. Her clavicle bone was broken, as mentioned above. Her heart was "pumping blood backward in panic" (their words). She failed hearing exams and stepped down from her ventilator to a machine that regulated her apnea. Her heart had a murmur (a little thing, compared to the rest). She was being treated for Group B Strep. Her wee liver and kidneys were "spitting poison" (again, their words... I wrote them down). She had a cyst on her face from the initial use of forceps, and her belly button was rolled back so they could try to place the central line. They nourished her through a banana bag for several days before allowing her to take my colostrum through the NG tube. The nerves in her neck were shredded by the angle and yanking the doctor did, resulting in Erb's Palsy - paralysis of her left side affecting her shoulder, arm, and hand/fingers.
The list goes on and on. Every time we thought we were headed home, we were sidetracked by more bad news. The word 'handicapped' was thrown around by the nurses with seeming abandon. It was so much to take in. Our short five-day stay felt like a million years. We were nearly always hovering around her. I would sing to her through the holes in the incubator. We each held her one time per day; we didn't want to continue to hurt her with the pain she was in.
Booh Bear (our nickname for her) had the tiniest mewl of a whimper I have ever heard from an infant. The humble sound stood in stark contrast to the massive size of her body. She was the largest infant that that N.I.C.U. had ever seen. The rest of the babies in the room could have each fit into a coke can. The stricken looks on the faces of their parents when our child could cry and theirs could not is something I will never forget. It added another layer of guilt to my already burdened heart.
I cannot begin to tell it all in one post. Even here, I have left out a great many details, in spite of having written this lengthy article. I sincerely apologize for the length. We celebrated every time our daughter graduated down to a different room. We practically didn't know how to hold her the day the cords were all unplugged. Who holds a baby without her leads?!?! Even there, her cries were minuscule compared to the lungs of the little four-pound babies who shared the step-down wing with her. So many contrasts existed in this hallowed place of life and death.
The day we were allowed to go home was both an immense relief and also terrifying. We were leaving without the round-the-clock nursing care. What if she stopped breathing again? The doctors gave us a huge stack of papers covering the many upcoming doctor visits, information to set her up with therapy for her arm, further hearing tests, where to find help, exercises to do with her daily for her Erb's Palsy, and more. She is a teenager now and thinking about those days is still completely overwhelming.
I know that reading this has been a marathon effort. My apologies. I hope that if you have managed to read this excerpt from my life that you will understand one thing. Birth trauma is very real and very personal.
When you read birth stories on this blog, you are not reading from a medical journal. Giving birth is the most intimate thing a body can go through. It is not merely the stripping of a fetus from its vessel. It is the deep mental, emotional, and physical experience of intertwined lives. We are human beings.
Birth trauma demands respect which has too long been absent from much of the birthing world. In cases like mine and so many others, it takes decades of hard work and intentional effort to recover. My body will never recover. My mental health is still being addressed. My daughter's health was impacted for years, including the stripping of her immune system by all she went through. She has Essential Tremor to this day that they tell me is unrelated. How can it be? Her nerves were so damaged. It will get worse until the day she dies.
Birth trauma is not a joke. It is not a story. It is intense and personal. It is not to be shoved aside with trite phrases like, "At least mother and baby are healthy." Cloaking birth trauma in statistics and medical terms when we discuss it serves only to further victimize parents and infants the world over.
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Lynn is a mother of two children and eight angels. Her journey into birth trauma and coming out the other side inspires her every day to walk with someone else through this darkness. She had enough of seeing people shame persons who've experienced birth trauma online in mom groups and founded TBSS in October of 2013. Supporting other people is her passion and has, along with her children, become her life's calling.
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