Post Birth Trauma?

[Cybercere]

hey all

I posted a couple of weeks ago after my daughter was born that she aspirated meconium, got pneumonia, and had to be transferred via ambulance to NICU (she was born at a birth cetner). She came home last Thursday and is doing great. Nursing well, although I am also pumping but she is doing great on both breast and bottle. She saw her pediatrician Monday and is 1/2 lb over her birth weight so no worse for the wear.

But, I'm sort of a mess - I have anemia due to post-birth blood loss so that's not helping, but I keep thinking what could I have done differently. My labor was very fast (to me) - went from 7 cm to baby born in about 1 hour 15 minutes. When she was born, she was stained green from the meconium and I have a very vivid image of her lying on the bed at the birth center when they were rubbing her to get her to cry to get the meconium out. She never really cried after birth but her APGAR scores were 7 and then 8 so they waited to see if warming her up, nursing, rubbing her, suctioning, etc. would get her to come around. But about 2 hours after she was born, they decided to transfer. Her dad went with her in the ambulance as I was still a mess and my blood pressure kept dropping really low - I went in the ambulance two hours later and was also admitted due to the blood pressure problems and the blood loss. She will be my last child and I really want a beautiful birth experience - which is was until the aftermath. I am sooooo grateful to the midwives that treated me and her but I feel sad about the birth. Can anyone relate? advice?

[Gimme Pineapple]

I can completely relate. I had a hospital birth, but the staff was incredible. I don't blame using a hospital or an OB for the things that happened to me. But here is my little story:

I was scheduled to be induced on the 23rd (a Wednesday). The night of the 21st my labor started. I had a completely drug free 16 hours of labor. Then...I stopped progressing. I was stuck in transition at an 8 for four of those 16 hours. Baby wasn't dropping down. I kept waiting for the pressure...and it just never came. He was still high up and REFUSED to engage. I finally agreed to an epidural. I wasn't allowed to have anything to eat or drink and I was getting so tired. After the epi, they pushed some pitocin- doing anything to help me progress so I could have a vaginal delivery. Two hours later, he still had not moved down and I had not dilated. My OB did discuss with me that he would let me keep trying for a vaginal, but it may just not happen. He warned me that I might need to think about a C-section.

THEN. His heartbeat dropped from a steady 120 to the 50s. I lost my sh*t. So the nurse come running in the room and I said "Get him out NOW!" In less than ten minutes, I was on a table being cut open. And then I had a freaking anxiety attack. It wasn't going the way I planned, I was scared about his heartrate, I was completely unprepared for this. So they completely knocked me out. I woke up an hour later. My mom has been in the room with me while I got my c-section. She told me that he had the cord wrapped around his neck twice and it took them two minutes and lots of undesirable smacking/suctioning/God knows what else to get him to breathe. His initial Apgar was a 2. He came out blue and not breathing. I was very thankful to be completely under because there was no way I could have handled that.

I "had" him at 2:10 PM, but due to having to monitor him, I did not get to see him until 10:30 PM that night. It was rough.

I was very upset, but now I just feel happy knowing that although I did not get the birth I wanted, he is here and he is healthy. If I would have kept insisting on natural blah blah blah, the story could be a lot different. I could have lost my guy. For me, I just realized that just like all of our pregnancies were different, all of our births are different too.

[lalemma]

hi mama,

I'm sorry your baby's entrance into the world was so tumultuous.

I wanted to have a homebirth. We hired midwives, we started looking at birth pools, I did Hypnobabies... and then my husband's work moved us across the country, to a city where there are zero HB midwives. So I was going to have my baby in an in-hospital birth center. I had a hard time coming to grips with losing the birth I wanted.

And then, although my pregnancy was textbook healthy and normal, one morning in the 33rd week I woke up with blurry vision, called my OB-GYN to see if I should come in, started to get dressed to go see him... and after that I remember nothing for several days. Because out of nowhere, I had eclamptic seizures: my blood pressure was insane, 280 over something crazy. I had to be rushed to the hospital, where a crash C-section was performed. My heart stopped beating on the table. (It was very dramatic, haha.)

I was under general anesthesia. My husband wasn't allowed to be in the room, because, you know... it pretty much looked like I was going to leave us. Nobody but the doctors saw our baby come into the world, and they were busy saving us, not basking in the moment.

I woke up a day later in the ICU, remembering nothing. I didn't understand that I wasn't pregnant anymore for hours. For WEEKS, even after my baby came home with us (he spent two weeks in the NICU) I would feel phantom kicks in my now-flat belly. One of the NICU nurses saw me about two weeks after my son arrived and went on and on about how I was already fitting into my regular clothes. Meanwhile, I was so sad about the loss of my pregnant belly.

Anyway - that probably rambled in a boring way. But I mention it because I know where you're coming from. And I don't have any answers, but this is what helped me:

*Look, I still think that pregnancy and birth are normal biological events that get heavily overmedicalized, and I still think that people are really scaremongery to pregnant ladies. But I almost died. My son almost died. I can choose to think of what happened as something terrible, maybe even something I somehow caused, or I can choose to think that in some tiny percentage of cases, sh!t just plain happens. Isn't it wonderful that high-tech medicine is here when we need it? How lucky am I that everything turned out okay, that my heart started beating again, that my son was able to breathe on his own?

*I got almost unbearably sad in the beginning whenever I would think about how I didn't experience any kind of labor or birth at all. For some people I think that really examining those feelings right away can be helpful, but for myself, thinking about it more just made me terribly, terribly sad. So I put it away for a while. Maybe later I will want to read more about it or talk to a therapist, but for right now my healthiest course is definitely to just accept that this is the what is, and try to move forward.

*Similarly, I realized that I really don't want to be a woman whose life as a mama is defined by how her baby arrived. That just doesn't seem like a joyous way to move through the world to me. This is one facet of my life - one part of one day. "Eclampsia and crash c-section and premature baby" is not who I am.

*Not many people have perfect mothering experiences! So I didn't get a home waterbirth - on the other hand, my 33 week preemie was perfectly healthy, came home from the NICU after two weeks, has never had anything to eat but my breastmilk, is a champion nurser, grows like a weed, and has a delightful personality. My relationship with my husband is so strong after this event. Heck, I love my MIL! She helped me figure out how to breastfeed in the NICU!

How many moms have trouble breastfeeding, or have a baby who won't sleep, or have relationship troubles at this stage? It's so easy to assume that everything should be perfect, and then to blame ourselves for every facet of our lives that isn't.

I want to be thankful for what works. I don't want to spend all my time feeling bad about what doesn't.

*I also found that thinking about the eclampsia and the c-section too much led me to do stupid things like google research papers on eclampsia and cry hysterically to my husband about how did he think that by being stressed about finding the right midwife, or moving in the third trimester, etc., I had caused the eclampsia, because I read this research extract, see... again, sometimes stuff just happens. Who knows why. Life is hard and rich and there's an element of chance. This whole thing has been a really powerful spiritual lesson for me in terms of compassion (toward others, toward myself) and letting go of my pointless desire to control circumstances.

I think - I don't always manage to really believe this, but I'm making peace with it - that what happened to you, or what happened to me, is just an experience. It's no better or worse than if I had had my perfect home waterbirth: I can fixate on what went wrong, or I can take all the learning I can from it and then do my best to let it go.

I don't know if any of that was helpful: if nothing else, just know that I relate.

Hugs to you, mama.

[mymary]

Originally Posted by lalemma

hi mama,

I'm sorry your baby's entrance into the world was so tumultuous.

I wanted to have a homebirth. We hired midwives, we started looking at birth pools, I did Hypnobabies... and then my husband's work moved us across the country, to a city where there are zero HB midwives. So I was going to have my baby in an in-hospital birth center. I had a hard time coming to grips with losing the birth I wanted.

And then, although my pregnancy was textbook healthy and normal, one morning in the 33rd week I woke up with blurry vision, called my OB-GYN to see if I should come in, started to get dressed to go see him... and after that I remember nothing for several days. Because out of nowhere, I had eclamptic seizures: my blood pressure was insane, 280 over something crazy. I had to be rushed to the hospital, where a crash C-section was performed. My heart stopped beating on the table. (It was very dramatic, haha.)

I was under general anesthesia. My husband wasn't allowed to be in the room, because, you know... it pretty much looked like I was going to leave us. Nobody but the doctors saw our baby come into the world, and they were busy saving us, not basking in the moment.

I woke up a day later in the ICU, remembering nothing. I didn't understand that I wasn't pregnant anymore for hours. For WEEKS, even after my baby came home with us (he spent two weeks in the NICU) I would feel phantom kicks in my now-flat belly. One of the NICU nurses saw me about two weeks after my son arrived and went on and on about how I was already fitting into my regular clothes. Meanwhile, I was so sad about the loss of my pregnant belly.

Anyway - that probably rambled in a boring way. But I mention it because I know where you're coming from. And I don't have any answers, but this is what helped me:

*Look, I still think that pregnancy and birth are normal biological events that get heavily overmedicalized, and I still think that people are really scaremongery to pregnant ladies. But I almost died. My son almost died. I can choose to think of what happened as something terrible, maybe even something I somehow caused, or I can choose to think that in some tiny percentage of cases, sh!t just plain happens. Isn't it wonderful that high-tech medicine is here when we need it? How lucky am I that everything turned out okay, that my heart started beating again, that my son was able to breathe on his own?

*I got almost unbearably sad in the beginning whenever I would think about how I didn't experience any kind of labor or birth at all. For some people I think that really examining those feelings right away can be helpful, but for myself, thinking about it more just made me terribly, terribly sad. So I put it away for a while. Maybe later I will want to read more about it or talk to a therapist, but for right now my healthiest course is definitely to just accept that this is the what is, and try to move forward.

*Similarly, I realized that I really don't want to be a woman whose life as a mama is defined by how her baby arrived. That just doesn't seem like a joyous way to move through the world to me. This is one facet of my life - one part of one day. "Eclampsia and crash c-section and premature baby" is not who I am.

*Not many people have perfect mothering experiences! So I didn't get a home waterbirth - on the other hand, my 33 week preemie was perfectly healthy, came home from the NICU after two weeks, has never had anything to eat but my breastmilk, is a champion nurser, grows like a weed, and has a delightful personality. My relationship with my husband is so strong after this event. Heck, I love my MIL! She helped me figure out how to breastfeed in the NICU!

How many moms have trouble breastfeeding, or have a baby who won't sleep, or have relationship troubles at this stage? It's so easy to assume that everything should be perfect, and then to blame ourselves for every facet of our lives that isn't.

I want to be thankful for what works. I don't want to spend all my time feeling bad about what doesn't.

*I also found that thinking about the eclampsia and the c-section too much led me to do stupid things like google research papers on eclampsia and cry hysterically to my husband about how did he think that by being stressed about finding the right midwife, or moving in the third trimester, etc., I had caused the eclampsia, because I read this research extract, see... again, sometimes stuff just happens. Who knows why. Life is hard and rich and there's an element of chance. This whole thing has been a really powerful spiritual lesson for me in terms of compassion (toward others, toward myself) and letting go of my pointless desire to control circumstances.

I think - I don't always manage to really believe this, but I'm making peace with it - that what happened to you, or what happened to me, is just an experience. It's no better or worse than if I had had my perfect home waterbirth: I can fixate on what went wrong, or I can take all the learning I can from it and then do my best to let it go.

I don't know if any of that was helpful: if nothing else, just know that I relate.

Hugs to you, mama.

DDC. Sorry I had to quote this whole post but I just need to say that this is great advice to EVERY mother who is either newly pg, at the end of pg, or has had their baby. Things happen. And, isn't it great that there was help for you and your baby when you needed it!

[Cybercere]

Thank you everyone!

thanks everyone - you are all absolutely right. I think that I am suffering from postpartum depression (again) and am hoping that it doesn't get as bad as last time. I am trying to get rest (yeah, right :-)) and hoping that we get some warmer weather soon.