After a much needed break, The Perils of Hospital Birth is back and looking for new stories from women all over the country, as well as world. If you would like to share your story of birthing in a hospital, please e-mail HospitalBirth@gmail.com.

My story starts before I even began labor.  On a nice, sunny fall day, September 28, 1996 to be exact and I was 21 yrs old, pregnant with my first son.  I was spending time with my husband, his mother and younger brothers, when one of them noticed my feet were really swollen.  His mother suggested I go to the hospital, just to be safe.  Although I felt perfectly fine, she had 4 babies and I was working on my first and quite frankly was ignorant to the whole process of giving birth, so I went in.  The visit was pleasant enough because the wait wasn’t long before I saw a doctor and he thought everything was okay.  He was pleasant and even joked that surely after laying eyes on him, I would go into spontaneously labor! “But”, he said,” just to be sure you go into labor lets check you”.  I didn’t know what that meant, and I certainly didn’t understand why when he “checked” me it was so much more uncomfortable than all the other times I’d been checked.  Of course now I know that he stripped my membranes, without even telling me what he was doing, let alone getting consent.

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I was checked, I was 8cm and I was in pain, but still surprisingly manageable.  Once I was checked I was told I needed my water to be broken.  Again, I asked if that was necessary, and I was told, by a male doctor I’d never even seen before, either they break my water or I can go home.  No joke, I was actually told that.  I looked over at my ex-husband, helpless as I was laying there with legs opened and this guy frowning at me, my ex looked even more helpless.  Of course, before I even had a chance to respond, he broke my water.  I remember my feelings being hurt, but then I got a contraction and that contraction felt monumentally different from any I’d felt before.  I couldn’t relax during it as it did before, I was tense and hurt.  But after getting sick twice, I was told it was time to push in less than 2 hours of being in that hospital bed.  And so I began to push.  All my efforts were focused on just getting this over with so I get the hell out of this unpleasant cold place.  I really wasn’t thinking, I can’t wait to see my baby, I can’t wait to hold him, I want the pain to end, I was thinking, I want these people away from me. And then I heard my good friend who was present at my birth say something like, “Do you know she is going to cut you?”  Some other doctor, a woman this time, I’d never meet was giving me an episiotomy, something I knew I didn’t want, without so much as telling me what she was doing.  I pushed my son out in less than 20minutes.  He was 8lb 8ounces, laying in the warmer, and for the first 10minutes I had no interest in him at all.  I wanted her to stop tugging at me like a piece of meat, while she was stitching me up.  I wanted all my attendants to leave, and I just wanted curl in a ball and go to sleep.  I didn’t nurse my son for 12 hours or so.  I thought at the time, I was just tired.  But as weeks, months and years went by, I knew it was more than that.  I felt violated and instead of anger or tears, I retreated within myself.  The sheer beauty and pride of having birth my son, and his total reliance on me is why I didn’t sink into a depression about it.  And I think all the time how tame my story is compared to other women.

Thank you to P.B. for sharing her story with us.

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We have all heard the rumor of the “If you sign out AMA (Against medical Advice) your insurance will not pay for your hospital stay at all, so I went on a mission to see if I can find someone who was the victim of this vicious threat.

I was newly pregnant with my first child and went on vacation to Arizona to watch a week of spring training baseball with my husband and several friends.  Two days into the trip, I was sitting in the grass enjoying the game when I realized I was bleeding.  I was advised through a phone call with me doctor up in Oregon to go into the ER and get checked out to make sure I was okay.  I went into the ER  and told them about my symptoms of being 7 weeks pregnant with cramping and bleeding.  I was pretty sure I was miscarrying and in a flurry of emotions of being away from home, losing the baby, and not knowing what was to happen next.  Upon doing an ultrasound the doctors found an “unknown spot” near my ovary.  Since they found no baby in my uterus and my hormone levels were very low for being 7 weeks along, they thought I  might have an ectopic pregnancy.  Even though I had no other symptoms of an ectopic pregnancy they told me that they would admit me and do exploratory surgery in the morning.  I was horrified at this decision and said that I would just like to be released and go home.  The doctor then got very serious, sat down and explained that if I went home it would be against medical advice and that my insurance company would not cover any of the ER expenses that I had up to that point.  I was in disbelief that they could use money against you to get you to do what they want.  I had to make a decision based on money instead of the well-being of myself and my baby.  It was very scary to think that they could put people in this situation and therefore do whatever they wanted to you once you were admitted because you couldn’t leave without heavy financial consequences.

Luckily, my story ends well.  A few hours later they transferred me to a hospital that had a gynecology specialist present overnight.  It was weird, cuz I wasn’t in any pain, felt totally normal and therefore got up myself out of bed, walked over to the stretcher, hopped on and the Ambulance transfer team buckled me in.  I was transferred via ambulance with my husband following behind in our car.  I just kept thinking what a waste of money this all was.  The specialist at the second hospital checked me out and within 5 minutes told me I was not having an ectopic pregnancy, I probably had a cyst on my ovary which are very common and would go away on it’s own and that I should stay in town for a few days to have my hormone levels checked to make sure they were continuing to go down (as would be consistent with a miscarriage).  I just wonder what the on call doctor at the first hospital was thinking and why he wanted to do exploratory surgery.  Did he just want to use me as a guinea pig?  Hopefully I scared him off by being so assertive about what I would and would not allow.  I fear for other women in my situation who would just do whatever the doctor wanted.

-Mother of Three, Oregon.

Thank you for sharing your experience.

A Nursing student who wanted to remain nameless shared this story with us…. (After reading I knew why she did not want to share her name)

“There she lay … a stranded beetle tethered to the bed … a bleeping machine with wiggly lines on one side … another bleeping machine infusing some kind of ominous cocktail into her veins on the other side … and suddenly she sat bolt upright and cried, “I’m frightened!”

The midwife seized her by the shoulders and pushed her down flat.

“Now listen to me! Just lie still!”

“Deep breath, dear. Nearly there! We just have to give you a little pizzy,” came from the nether regions beneath the surgical drapes.

An aside to the student nurse: “Jab that into her thigh with the birth of the anterior shoulder. Don’t worry. She won’t feel it.”

Such was my lasting impression of birth during my rotation in an obstetric unit. That was enough to make any thinking woman run screaming down the road in the opposite direction.

I vividly remember my midwife mother tut-tutting, “These modern career women! They’ve no instinct, you actually have to teach them how to breastfeed – and the fuss they make during the delivery!”

In due course, I myself became one of these modern career women and in the fullness of time, got pregnant. My mind still echoed with the gory stories Mum brought home from the delivery suite. I winced at the memory of myself as the student nurse poised with the needle aimed at the trembling thigh of the stranded beetle (I never did believe that ‘she didn’t feel a thing’). I knew one thing for sure …. Wild horses couldn’t drag me into a hospital to have my baby.

To be humiliated and stripped of my clothes and my choices… Left shell-shocked and out-raged, struggling with ambivalent feelings towards the squalling infant in my arms… Swallowing rage at the loss of control and dignity, yet having to act grateful…  All banged up and cut and stitched and patronized and having all different uniforms peering at my intimate bits ….  Oh sure. Sign me up now.

There just had to be a better way.”

Thank you for sharing your story with us.

But since my own lovely homebirths, as a doula I have supported countless other mothers as they give birth in the hospitals. Birth trauma is never so terrible as it is for the woman who is going through it, but even witnessing it is pretty awful.

One obstetrician entered the room, grabbed my client by the hips without introducing himself or speaking to her (or me, or her husband) and yanked her roughly down the bed so her butt was flush with the end of the bed – in the position he needed her to be in for him to start cutting. As he wielded the scissors, he deigned to speak to me for the first time. And this is what he felt was the the appropriate first thing to say to me:

“And have YOU had any children?”

I wondered what sort of salutation this could be. I answered, “Yes. Four.” And then I thought why not give back a little of what he was handing out. So I said, “How many have you had?”

Keep in mind he’s cutting an episiotomy at this time. I was alarmed at how brusquely and roughly he was cutting. He replied, “5. But they were all c-sections, so we didn’t have any of THIS.”

Like, you really want an obstetrician who has put his wife through 5 ceasareans to be caring for you when you go for your “natural” birth in hospital.

I really, really wanted to answer, “I had my babies at home, so I didn’t have any of THIS either.” I wish I could have – but my heart was breaking for my client and she hardly needed to hear anything to help her feel even worse.

I could keep the stories coming. It is so depressing. One female OB told my client that c/section is safer for babies than vaginal birth.

How very few women and their partners know what the obstetric system in our hospitals are really like. Or what research like this is proving about the safety of homebirth for first time mothers:

http://researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz/handle/10063/851?show=full

-Sarah, NYS

Thank you to Sarah for for sharing her experience as a doula

Melissa shares her VBAC experience with The Perils of Hospital Birth….

During ante natal care for my vbac I was reassured by the words “as long as you progress there won’t be a problem”.   I did not realise that “progrees” was limited to 1/2 an hour of full dilation without an urge to push and then taken to theatre without consenting to the surgery and having a midwife forcibly encouraging me to remain on my back.  My husband had been sent out of the room.  I guess this was a way I couldn’t speak, with no husband to be my voice and an intense transitional labour….I was at there mercy !

As sad as it is, Iwish I could say this was the only VBAC experience I heard like this, unfortunately there has been so many restrictions put on this process, it is nearly impossible for a mom to have a successful VBAC.

Thank you to Melissa for sharing her experience with us.

Please send in your hospital birth experience to HospitalBirth@gmail.com to submit onto our blog!

As the doctor starts to tug at my baby directly out of my cut open abdomen, I am listening for my child’s first sounds and hear the doctor say ”C’mon little doggie!!”  My loopy, drugged response was “I hope its not a DOG!”

I also got an entire recap of show The Apprentice while on the surgical table.

-Tika

Thank you for sharing your experience with us Tika.

A.M shares with us

First birth, one of MANY things was that during a vaginal exam, while I was spread-eagled, an orderly walked in to check the trash bin and got a good view.  Then, a nurse w/ long fake fingernails did one of the many vaginal/cervical checks and it was painful.  Then after a long induction and  non-emergent cesarean (because doc was ready to go home after a long weekend),  baby and I got no sleep thanks to the JACKHAMMERing going on above our floor and pieces of rubble we’d hear falling through the walls.  It’d start early in the morning and go 10 or more hours, and was so loud it’d wake the baby.

As if that experience itself was not bad enough, she was subject to a second cesarean section despite trying for a VBAC.

I was punished for attempting a VBAC (different hospital, completely different area/town), thus lectured relentlessly by every doctor and nurse who came in my door.  I was rolled down the hallway to OR shouting “I do not consent to a c-section.”  I didn’t have the ability/strength to get up off the table (during contractions) and walk out, they were holding me down to get an IV in.  A week later, I had a raging infection in my incision, (probably from how terribly dirty the hospital was, my socks were black on the bottom, the floors were so dirty) that had to be reopened and left open for 2+ months, packed and cleaned by home health nurses and my husband.  All of this gave me and baby thrush from all the antibiotics, and I ended up with a large hernia at the incision cite, that I’ve now had 2 surgeries on to repair.

And just when you think it could not get any worse…

Third pregnancy and birth:  placental abruption and uterine rupture, loss of full term son and almost lost my own life…resulted in some lifelong lasting complications and hysterectomy at age 34.

So many women are choosing to have c-sections not thinking of the major consequences that can go with these choices. And the women who would do anything not to have another, live through these situations.

Thank you to A.M. for sharing her experience with us, may sharing her story help her in her healing process.