When you’ve been planning and dreaming of how your birth will go and it doesn’t quite go to plan, it can leave you feeling confused, scared and disappointed by your own body. Guilt can creep in. It can leave you with questions you might be afraid to ask. This is where a birth listening service or de-brief can help. You have no reason to feel a failure or feel guilty for how things turned out. Most UK NHS trusts will offer this sort of service, so that when you are ready, you can talk through your birth experience with a specially trained midwife. It can prove quite a healing experience. Some women prefer to go through it in the immediate aftermath, while others take longer and return to go through their labour when everything has calmed down and they’ve had time to process it.
The following is a guest blog post from Lucy, a Mum and a blogger at Muffin Top Mummy. You can also find her on Twitter and Instagram. Lucy describes her experience with a birth listening service.
Giving birth can be a bit of a big deal.
A huge deal.
It’ll probably go down as one of the most unmemorable moments in your life to remember.
Yet once it’s over, that’s it – job done. When you are patched up, sewn back together and padded up to the eyeballs with sanitary products, you are free to waddle out into the world with your new bundle. You’re expected to be relieved that it’s all over and never again dwell on what happened in the labour room.
I didn’t find that approach particularly productive.
If you’re anything like me (a non-medical professional basically), you will have had no idea what was actually going on for the majority of the long hours that you were in labour. If things started to go a bit tits up, you may have had a vague notion of the resulting action, but without being able to look up your own vagina, you probably didn’t get the full picture. I spent many an hour watching One Born in the run-up to my own delivery and felt like I was pretty down with the clinical aspect of having a baby. I thought that it might help to remove the emotion. But trust me, when you are in the throes of labour, emotion is really all you have going on besides a decent amount of swear-inducing pain.
When things started to go off-piste for me, I was afraid. I was a weird, detached afraid that very nearly asked the staff running into the room if we could call the whole thing off. No, I don’t want to push. No, I don’t want to feel the mounds of hair on my emerging baby’s head. Terms I didn’t understand were being thrown over the top of me. The consultant was getting arsey with the midwives. When I questioned what was happening, I was simply told my cervix was ‘weird’. So I shut down and just went along with the ride. The thrill and excitement I thought I’d feel for the very first moments of meeting my child were replaced with fear and total confusion.
What the hell just happened?
To be fair, the detachment I felt shorty after giving birth was most likely down to the infection I had contracted and the huge amount of blood I’d lost. I later had to have a blood transfusion – so it was a pretty significant factor. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I needed to know what had gone on. Waddling out of hospital a week later didn’t offer me the freedom I desired. All I could think was, my cervix is weird. What did that even mean? Why had I lost so much blood? And ultimately, would it be the same again if I had another baby?
After weeks of wondering, my Health Visitor told me about the Birth Listening Service at the hospital.
I’m not one to bury my head in the sand, so I jumped at the chance to sit down with a midwife and find out the gory details of my delivery. She went through every entry in my notes, discussing hour-by-hour what had happened. Some things I remembered, some I really didn’t. But with each entry, everything slowly started to fall into place. She explained the why. Why things got panicky (5cm to 10cm in 20 minutes apparently – I thought it felt quick!), why I experienced what I did, why I lost so much blood. Her straight-up, medical explanation of the whole thing started to replace the emotional memories I had created and painted the entire birth in a much more positive light.
Once I had all the facts, the fiction that I’d created for myself removed the fear.
She reassured me that there was nothing in my birth that would create any problems for a second baby. They would be prepared for any complications and deal with them accordingly. That was all I needed to hear. Like any mother, I’d do it all again as long as there was no risk to the baby.
I finally left the hospital feeling the freedom I had craved.
Thank you so much Lucy for your honest account. Have you suffered from birth trauma? Did you feel heard during or after your labour? Are you still left with unanswered questions? It’s never too late to go over your birth notes with a professional.
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