MY HEALTH EXPERIENCE: SOPHIE PARKERfelt traumatised after having an unnecessary Caesarean
IN 2010, I became pregnant unexpectedly. It was my first pregnancy, and problem-free, and I felt that when the time came I would be able to trust my body to do what it was physiologically designed to do. But my body wasn’t given a chance.
My baby was born in Argentina, where my husband and I have been living since 2006. We went the route that most middle class city-dwellers here do, settling on an obstetrician recommended to us and covered by our health insurance.
It was my intention to try for a birth without pain relief – though I wasn’t about to be a martyr either. I made it clear that I did not want a routine episiotomy. The possibility of ending up needing a Caesarean seemed so remote that I skimmed through the short section dedicated to this procedure in my pregnancy bible.
Two days before my due date, I woke with the sensation that my waters had broken. As instructed, we called the midwife who would be assisting our obstetrician. She asked me to come to the hospital where, after examining me, she pronounced that I was not dilated and the doctor probably wouldn’t want to wait for a “normal” delivery.
Her argument was that there “could” be some meconium in the amniotic fluid, though neither my husband nor I saw anything unusual in its colour. She sent us to admissions and disappeared, leaving us confused, nervous and full of unanswered questions.
While my husband filled out forms, I revisited those paragraphs on Caesarean sections in my book, desperately searching for answers in the absence of someone to provide me with them.
The next time I saw the midwife I was lying on my back being hooked up to an electronic foetal monitoring machine. (Routine continuous foetal monitoring is standard procedure in many clinics here, even for low-risk mothers.) There was another internal exam.
This was all happening without explanation. At no time was there any indication of urgency: the midwife and a nurse joked with each other as they wandered in and out of the room.
Before being separated from him, I had asked my husband to call our obstetrician to tell him I did not want a Caesarean and wanted to wait. The obstetrician said no problem – we would see how things were going that afternoon.
When the midwife reappeared, I questioned her about alternatives. Could we not try to induce labour first? She dismissed this, adding, “Who knows, it might have the cord wrapped around its neck or something.” I suspected that this comment was a scare tactic. But there is nothing like a casually delivered insinuation of possible danger to her unborn baby to quieten a woman into acquiescence.
So I smiled limply as this midwife made “vroom vroom” noises while brandishing the electric razor she would shave me with, and I returned my obstetrician’s customary greeting of a kiss on the cheek when he arrived in the operating theatre as I was being anaesthetised, despite the overwhelming sense of betrayal I felt towards him.
Hadn’t he told us we would wait to see how things progressed? I lay on the operating table, a compliant, controllable body, listening to the football banter and thinking, “let’s just get this over with”. Anaesthetic or not, I was now numb.
Our healthy baby girl was delivered at 1pm, just four hours after we set foot in the hospital. I still use the passive voice to talk about her entrance into the world: “she was born”; “she arrived”; but never “I gave birth to my daughter”. She was shown to me briefly before being taken off, accompanied by her dad, to be washed, weighed and given routine tests. After being stitched up, I was left alone in the theatre and then again on a trolley in a corridor – disoriented, immobile and anxious to see my child – until my husband came and found me.
In those first photographs with my daughter I look incredibly awkward. I felt extremely protective towards her, but a little frightened of her at the same time: I wasn’t quite sure where she had come from.
The following weeks were filled with the typical chaos faced by new parents. As I recovered from the surgery, I was struggling to establish breastfeeding after a difficult start and worrying about our daughter’s slow weight gain (both of which, I discovered later, are not unusual after a Caesarean). But I was also dealing with something else.
Weeks after the birth I was still very distressed about what had happened, experiencing crying fits and dreams about the event. I was constantly tense and would check my daughter’s breathing obsessively as she slept. I could hardly sleep and became consumed with reading about medical intervention in childbirth and other women’s birth stories.
I was angry with the medical team who had attended us and had fantasies of them getting their comeuppance. I also felt angry with my husband, unfairly imagining that he could have done more to prevent the situation from happening and frustrated with his guilt-inducing response when I attempted to voice my feelings: we should be grateful for a healthy baby.
It was through this compulsive searching for information that I came across the terms birth trauma and post-natal post-traumatic stress disorder (PN PTSD). The inability to “get over” the experience, the sense of a loss of control, the descriptions of obsessive behaviour, irrational fears and fantasies of vengeance all resonated with me. I felt an affinity with those women whose accounts of traumatic birth litter the internet and detail their anger over an absence of informed consent; their belief that they were manipulated when most vulnerable; their perception of being utterly disregarded.
The guilt reared up again. Surely what I’d been through wasn’t traumatic enough to “qualify”. I hadn’t had to endure a tragic outcome or the heart-stopping terror of something suddenly going very seriously wrong. But birth trauma is subjective: it is, as Prof Cheryl Beck, an expert on the topic, maintains, “in the eye of the beholder”.
Both “normal” and surgical births can lead to trauma. There are no rules, though a common denominator in many cases is the way the woman was treated. And, as I discovered, you don’t have to experience all of the criteria traditionally used to diagnose PTSD to suffer very real distress.
During those sleepless nights I began to put what I was feeling on paper. I wrote and wrote. I’m still writing. I requested my birth notes from the hospital following a suggestion from another mum on a forum.
These actions have helped somewhat, allowing me to feel I am regaining some sort of control by acknowledging what happened and looking for answers. I contacted a local independent midwife via email and recounted my experience (I wasn’t up to doing it face to face at the time). Indignant at the treatment I had received, her conclusion was that I had been subjected to a “totally unnecessary Caesarean”.
These days I don’t like to accept anything without a second opinion, even when the answer confirms my thoughts. So at some point soon I will sit down with someone else and go through my notes in their entirety.
Almost 18 months on, I’m finally feeling brave enough to do so.
For further information and support: birthtraumaassociation.org.uk
