BIRTHdays
I always find that birthdays are a time for reflection as well as for celebration. Today is my youngest daughter’s birthday and in addition to having a lovely day and trying to make it special, I am reflecting on this date four years ago and what was happening then. It is also almost impossible to think of the birth of one of the children without reflecting on the birth of the other.
Pregnancy and childbirth is such a strange process, packed with highs and lows; hopefulness and fear. The excitement for the future and the worry that something might happen that could take that happiness away. The fear of the unknown and then, the next time, the fear of the things that you do know.
I appreciate how incredibly lucky I am to have two happy, healthy children, and that I was able to conceive them very easily. I have many friends for whom this part of the journey has been complicated, lengthy and difficult, or for whom this journey never got started at all. Before I had my first daughter I lost a baby at 14 weeks, so I appreciate how precious and precarious it all is.
That said, it wasn’t all without complication and my memories of my two childbirth experiences are very different, both in terms of content and recall. My memories of my eldest are fragmented and have holes in; a function of general anaesthetic, blood loss and trauma. It is still piecemeal and doesn’t hang on a particularly coherent framework. Whereas I can remember everything about my second. I had a lovely trainee midwife and my daughter’s birth was her second ever delivery. I remember congratulating her and telling her how well she was doing and her saying “thank you, but I think it’s supposed to be the other way around – me telling you how well you’re doing”.
I had horrible sickness with both girls, a blight which many of us have to bear. It’s so awful and debilitating but it’s so common and it is largely ignored. Which is a weird situation isn’t it? You’d like to think that the commonality of it would mean that there is more support out there but there isn’t. I was signed off work for a few weeks with my second when driving to Bournemouth with a bucket balanced on my lap became too much. I remember this as such a miserable time and I would sit on my kitchen floor and cry. My three year old would come and sit with me and read The Gruffalo to me to make me feel better. I still felt just as sick but it cheered me up. And at three she couldn’t read but knew the whole book by heart so would recite it to me. This helped me to remember how lucky I was at a time when I was feeling unlucky and morose.
After about 24 weeks the sickness disappeared and I remember enjoying the next couple of months. People are really nice to you when you’re pregnant; they hold open doors, offer you a seat on public transport, chat to you about your baby, it’s really nice. Although I remember being up in London on a course when obviously pregnant with my second and carrying my case up and down the many many stairs at Russell Square tube station and only one person offered to help – an Aussie guy – but at that point I’d almost reached the top anyway.
I think in general it continues to be a nice time of expectation up until you get really big and then the realisation dawns that this big bump has got to make its way out and it suddenly no longer feels viable – surely the laws of physics make it pretty much impossible that something so seemingly big can make its way out via an exit that now really doesn’t seem fit for purpose in terms of size.
I developed Cholestasis with both girls at around 33 weeks. That sucked. I still don’t really understand it but it’s some kind of weird symbiotic poisoning where the pregnancy hormones interfere with your liver functioning which in turn affects your ability to process bile salts and poisons the baby, ultimately being linked to stillbirth. That was very frightening. I remember fitting the symptoms and walking in to see my new GP and bursting into tears saying I thought I had Cholestasis and I was scared of losing my baby as I’d lost the last one and I couldn’t go through that again. She assured me that it was relatively rare and was probably fine but she’d test anyway. The test came back positive, as it did in both pregnancies.
The upshot of this is that you need to have bloods taken weekly and have your baby’s heartbeat monitored to make sure it’s doing ok in there. It’s a case of having a blood test then receiving a call the next day telling you get down to the hospital to be monitored. And you feel a bit yucky and very very itchy. You end up pretty much allergic to your own blood due to the build up of bile salts and you itch from the inside out. No sleep for days kind of itching, it’s awful. I scratched so much I was bleeding all over the first time but by the second time I had discovered that a hairbrush makes an excellent scratching apparatus, relieving the itch without cutting the skin – bliss.
I had to take a lot of medication with ‘do not take in pregnancy’ written all over it and then be induced early at 37 weeks – trying to balance the risks of prematurity with the risks of stillbirth. You have to be monitored continuously during labour and childbirth so you have to wear a heart rate monitor across your bump in addition to all the tubes and wires necessitated by induction. Later on the heart rate monitor on your bump is removed and fastened instead to the baby’s head in the womb by a clip. At one point I became so tangled up in all the wires that they had to cut me out of my gown to free me. Using tiny scissors. Really tiny scissors. Which felt particularly ironic later when it came to having an episiotomy and they whipped out what looked like a pair of garden shears. Where were they when I needed freeing from all the wires?
It also turned out that I had placenta accreta. This has been made well known thanks to Kim Kardashian and she says it is the reason that she used surrogates. I’m not entirely convinced by this, I suspect she just didn’t want to go through the process again, plus she’s all plastic, there’s probably a danger that she could just burst, like a balloon. Anyway, it’s a condition where the placenta attaches too deeply to the uterine wall and won’t come out. Whilst the hospital staff are wrestling with it you continue to bleed heavily so it’s a game of cat and mouse where they are trying to get the placenta out before you bleed to death. Cut to emergency buttons being pushed, bumper cars in the hallway as they rush to theatre whilst telling you that you might die but they will do their best to save your life but you may need a hysterectomy for them to do so. It was terrifying but handled so incredibly well by a phenomenal team of doctors and midwives who did indeed save my life. Five and a half pints of blood and a chopped up bag of placenta later, all was well. They kept the chopped up placenta, which resembled dogfood by this point, for me to see.
My poor husband had over two hours to wait, holding our teeny wee baby, to see if I pulled though. It must have been awful for him. It still upsets him to this day. I ended up with symptoms of trauma, that I didn’t recognise as such until much later. The upside however was that I ended up on the High Dependency Unit for a few days with my very own personal midwife, which was lovely. And my husband was allowed to stay with me rather than being kicked out in the middle of the night once the baby had arrived.
My second experience of childbirth was much better thankfully. I had a toilet in my room for starters. The first time around I had needed a wee and hobbled down the corridor with all my drips and wires and stands and had to wait there, in labour, for a dad to finish his lengthy poo before I could go in. It stank. I was not impressed.
Anyway, all the pitfalls of the first time were avoided, the complications were anticipated, and my placenta came away after a few vigorous tugs, a tense 15 or so minutes, and a drip full of nasty liquid that made me vomit. A lot. Firstly over my newborn baby’s head into a hospital hat-bowl, then handing the baby over to somebody else so I could continue the vomiting caused by the chemicals pumped in to get the placenta pumped out. It was amusing (once it was all over) as the midwives and I had had a thoughtful conversation several hours earlier about what to order for lunch and deciding what meal would be the least offensive in reverse given the high likelihood of being sick. We had decided that noodles were a definite no-no but cottage pie may not be too bad. As it turned out I felt too sick mid-labour by the time it arrived so opted for toast a little bit later instead.
Despite this, the whole scenario ended with me telling the midwives what a lovely experience it had been – not nearly dying meant that this was a dream in comparison – and the midwife telling me that she has never heard a woman, so soon after giving birth, describing the experience as lovely.
These are the things that I have been reflecting on today. I am enjoying my girls growing up, seeing them flourish into little ladies and leaving the baby years behind them. Getting to see the awesome little people that they are turning into, becoming my two little best friends with whom I love to hang out. But each birthday I find myself thinking about the days that I met them both for the very first time and what those days looked like. Birthdays for me are a time to reflect, remember, and be thankful for how lucky I am. Because in another time, another country, we might not have made it through at all.
