Good births are possible.

The story below is the extended version of what happened, which you do not need to read if you don’t want to or don’t have time. I couldn’t omit parts without feeling like I was trying to make the experience smaller for other people. And women everywhere, all the time, are required to make their experience of birthing smaller and insignificant because we live in a society that asks us not to make a fuss. This has to stop. And this is why I am writing this and running for this cause.

All you do need to know, if you are to stop reading at this point, is that the story below is by no means unique, and relatively speaking it’s not even that extreme. Since April 2024 I have spoken with many women who have experienced their own horrendous levels of trauma at the hands of maternity units. Specifically at the hands of obstetricians. Gaslighting, downplaying pain, and verbal insults have been prominent throughout these stories. And because it all falls under the umbrella of childbirth and women’s healthcare, it has been overlooked and silenced for too long. It has taken me nearly two years to be able to speak clearly about what happened to me. I have spoken to other mothers who have never been able to articulate some of what happened to them. I’m running this half marathon for myself and all of them, and for the stories heard and unheard about what is happening in maternity units.

I will say, at this point, none of this is directed at the midwives. Almost all of whom in my experience were fantastic. They continued to advocate for me in spite of the pressure being put on them by obstetricians. My memories of this birth are of midwives working in broken systems under intense amounts of stress that most of us will never know.

The story

Before 26 April 2024, I had already given birth to two healthy baby boys following two straightforward labours. Indeed, the home birth of my second son in a birthing pool was the best moment of my life. There is no feeling like the moment your child enters the world and you scoop them up into your arms and onto your chest. The first person to touch them, smell them, and know them. This is real magic, happening every minute of every day all over the world. And it is why, approaching my third labour, not only was I certain I knew what to expect, I was also excited for it. I was going to experience that feeling again.

Nothing could have prepared me for what was about to happen.

My waters went on the 24 April when I was exactly 39 weeks pregnant. I was already under pressure to be induced due to my 36 week scan showing Isaac was measuring as a large baby, and I was a polyhydramnios, which means I had too much amniotic fluid. I refused to be induced or to have C-section because I desperately wanted a home birth. Being in hospital, surrounded by people I didn’t know and under bright lights, was not going to work for me. And, whatever the current cultural narrative is about C-sections, the truth is they are brutal, massive operations that require months of recovery. I had birthed two babies with minimal pain relief; I knew my body could do this naturally.

However, 24 hours after my waters had broken, I still was not in active labour, so I lost the support of the home birth team due to a now increased risk of infection.

When we arrived in the hospital we were allocated a bed in a room with one other labouring woman. There was a large, black clock on the wall, with each minute passing denoted by a red flashing dot. When the dot stopped flashing, that minute had passed, reminding me once again that I still hadn’t gone into active labour and I was one minute closer to medical interventions I absolutely didn’t want. At the start of each hour, all the dots would reappear and the flashing would recommence for the next hour until there were no dots left again. And again. And again.

Red dot, red dot, red dot. In a haze of long periods of being left on our own, interspersed by serious conversations with obstetricians about how much more risk myself and my baby were in according to the data, hours had passed. At this point, and throughout, my baby was fine. He was moving, his heartrate was fine, the only one in distress was me. I felt increasingly out of control of the situation. The obstetricians were becoming more vulture-like by the hour. They wanted me to agree to a C-section, or an induction, or anything that got this underway. The pressure was palpable. I was adamant that if Isaac was fine, we were waiting.

The next 36 hours, all watched continuously on these clocks, which adorn every bay in the labour ward, consisted of a catalogue of interventions, pain, and terror. We were moved to and from the birthing suite, because I still was not in advanced labour. We were put in the labour ward and, after another visit from the obstetricians, now six of them surrounding me while I lay on my back as one of them examined me, it was decided that they would break my remaining waters with a hook.

This was the first of several interventions. No one explained what was meant by ‘hook’, and being completely exhausted I went into a panic that caused every nerve in my body to convulse. Ian held my hands while a small, white pic (the ‘hook’ ) was used to fully break my waters.

The next intervention came in the form of the FSC clip. This clip, which would be lightly fixed to Isaac’s head, would give a consistent, accurate reading of his heartrate, which was essential because I had finally agreed to be medically induced. A baby can quickly become distressed when a mother is induced, so consistently monitoring the heartrate is non-negotiable. It was this understanding that I held onto while the midwife inserted as much of her hand as possible through my only slightly dilated cervix to attach the clip. I cannot fully express the intensity of the pain caused by this procedure. It was as though an iron hand was delving into my body, pulling it open and pushing itself through into a place where no hand should be. I screamed and gagged and screamed until a silence descended over me. I knew I was in incomprehensible levels of pain, but I had disappeared. All I could really discern was Ian holding my hands and the ceiling tiles. Always the same ceiling tiles in NHS buildings, have you noticed?

It took three attempts for the clip to be successfully attached, three experiences of this pain, at which point the midwife went to attach it to the machine, only to discover the hospital had the incorrect attachments, so those FSC clips were never going to work. It had all been for nothing.

As an aside, none of this is recorded in my discharge notes, where it only states there was one unsuccessful attempt to attach the FSC clip.

With the induction underway and me being hooked up to the monitor via the doppler belt around my bump, there was a frequent confusion as to whose heartrate the machine was picking up: mine or Isaac’s. But I was now labouring, so the pressure was on to get this baby out. The contractions on the induction drip were nothing like contractions in a natural labour. The pain was unbearable. I knew I had done this before with my other babies, but I had done it by breathing. Slow, methodical breathing. Trusting the process. Trusting Ian, who was with me for every second, holding me through all the pain. We had even laughed at points during the previous births. This had been possible because there had always been a break, albeit tiny towards the end, between the contractions. It was a space to lean into, to dig deeper in order to push harder in the next wave. But this pain, caused by the induction drip, was something entirely different. It stole breath. I felt like my uterus was being squeezed in a vice. There was no let up. It had to be over soon. It had to.

By this point I had requested that the obstetricians leave me alone. They were irritated with me and kept telling me how much more statistically likely it was by the hour that my baby would develop an infection. This wasn’t helping anything. Informed is best practice, but what none of them – not one – spoke to me about was the risks associated with C-sections.

Eventually, an obstetrician came in to say Isaac’s heart rate was 200bpm, and we needed to get him out. Now.

I agreed to a C-section on the spot, and within no more than three seconds the room was full of people and my bed was being pushed out into the corridor. Someone was yelling at Ian that he had to stay behind to clean the room. I was yelling that he had to stay with me. Someone whose face I didn’t know rolled their eyes and tutted.

Everything from that point was hands and restraint and panic. Someone yelled ‘why is her bra still on?’ while someone else shoved their hand down my gown and wrenched it off as we were rushing through the corridors. When we arrived in theatre, I was manoeuvred onto the edge of the bed and physically restrained by four midwives. I was having violent, agonising, contractions with no pain relief because the gas and air had been removed when we were wheeled into theatre. The anaesthetist couldn’t get the spinal into me during a contraction, and I was being shouted at to stay still, but the contractions were so intense and I couldn’t stop them coming. Every second that passed was a second closer to Isaac maybe not surviving and I couldn’t do the one thing I knew I needed to do to be able to get him out: stay still.

The spinal was finally in, and I was led down. Activity everywhere. People everywhere. I asked for them not to put the screen up. I needed to see what was happening. I was ignored. I asked again, louder, and I was ignored. They left the screen up. Then it was pulling and pushing and two male obstetricians talking to each other as though I didn’t exist.

Then: ‘He’s here! A baby boy!’

The screen was pulled down for a second, and I got a glimpse of my baby, not even long enough to really register him as more than a slimy, bloody, choking blur. Then he was gone and Ian followed. Something was wrong. Isaac was making noise like he was trying to come up from underwater.

‘Where’s my baby? What’s happening?’

No one answered. The obstetricians were muttering to each other. I asked again, louder, then Ian was back by my head again.

‘He’s okay, just struggling a bit.’

I didn’t know this until after, but Ian witnessed Isaac struggling for every breath. His stomach being sucked up under his ribs over and over again as he tried and failed to get enough oxygen in.

The obstetrician said: ‘He probably has an infection because you laboured for too long.’

He probably has an infection because you laboured for too long. He probably has an infection because you laboured for too long. He probably has an infection because you laboured for too long.

It was my fault. Whatever was wrong with Isaac was my fault. I didn’t know it, but at this point I was also haemorrhaging. I wouldn’t have cared. All I could and can still hear is Isaac choking and gagging. They started to wheel him out on the trolley and I grabbed Ian: ‘I have to see him. I have to touch him! Please!’

Ian stopped them, all of them, as they went to leave.

‘You have to let her touch him.’

And, they did. Someone lifted him off the trolley and placed his cheek against mine. And something happened that I will never forget. Not ever.

Isaac started to breathe. Properly. He stopped panicking, started breathing, and so did I.

The room went quiet and the paediatrician said ‘oh, did you just want mummy?’

For a few seconds we breathed together, his cheek, like an organ that has just been removed and is therefore still a part of my body, on mine. Then he started to deteriorate again and they left with him. Ian followed.

The obstetricians continued to repair the damage, chatting with each other now over the top of my body as though they were tradesmen on a building site. ‘Don’t put that there,’ the one on my left said at one point to the one on my right. ‘You always do that and I don’t know why.’

Put what where? Those are my fucking insides.

Eventually I was stitched up by someone else and moved onto a trolley like a carcass. No one spoke to me and I wondered if I was perhaps dead and if that was why no one was saying anything. In truth, I was just another woman on this train ride out of another emergency C-section. Only I was one of the bad ones, who wouldn’t have ended up in this situation if I had just let them cut me open at the start.

I was left alone in the Recovery Bay with no alarm in my hand. I was incapable of moving below my shoulders and I quickly knew something was wrong. I was watching the monitor. My blood pressure was dropping, my heart rate rising quickly, and I knew I had a fever. I tried to speak, but the only word I could say – so quietly I could hardly hear it myself – was ‘help.’ No one came.

I didn’t know that inability to speak is one of the first signs and major indicators of sepsis until that day, but I will never forget that feeling of knowing this is bad, and not being able to shout for help. I was going to die in this recovery bay, with the curtains closed, on my own.

By coincidence, a midwife opened the curtains to check who was in the bay. She saw me, ran, and suddenly there were people all over me again. When Ian returned from Isaac he found me almost out of it, and hooked up to several lines. He sat with me, exhausted, while I shook violently from head to foot, in shock, and then started to scratch and itch at my skin because I was reacting to the spinal medication. I felt like I had ants inside my body and I scratched my arms and chest so hard that I broke the skin. No one seemed very concerned. Ian asked why I was like this and they shrugged. ‘This happens quite a lot, she’ll be okay soon enough.’ I was given an antihistamine and told it would pass, and that I would need to stay in recovery for the night to stabilise.

Ian showed me a video of Isaac in the incubator. What had happened was that, because I was polyhydramnios, Isaac had ingested more amniotic fluid than babies in a regular pregnancy. And because he wasn’t born naturally, there had been no chance for him to be squeezed out along the vaginal canal, which would have helped him to get rid of a lot of this excess fluid.

Having been pulled out without being squeezed meant he came out drowning in the fluid in his lungs, which were now being forcefully aspirated using the highest possible level on a specialist machine. We still didn’t know if he had an infection.

‘I am so sorry,’ I said to Ian. Again and again I said I was sorry. I had caused all of this. I should have listened. Ian told me I never had to apologise, and that this wasn’t my fault. But I didn’t believe him.

I would eventually be moved to the maternity ward, where the midwives were beyond fantastic. I was finally with people who were listening and responsive. And kind. One midwife in particular, called Sophie,* took me at face value when I told her I would not recover unless I was taken to see Isaac, in spite of being deemed medically too unwell to go. Sophie stared at me with these big brown eyes, calculating, understanding, then she left, and a few minutes later a health assistant called Melissa arrived to help me out of bed and into a chair.

‘I thought I wasn’t allowed to go?’ I said.

‘Nobody argues with Aunty Melissa.’

I laughed. Melissa helped me up to sitting, and then into the chair. The pain relief was still working enough to allow me to do this, but I felt like I had lost all the strength in my core.

‘Here’s your designer handbag,’ she said, handing me my catheter bag.

Melissa wheeled me into the toilet, removed my bloodied gown, and washed me like a child. Then she handed me my hairbrush and told me to brush my hair.

‘I can’t do it,’ she said, pointing to her afro, ‘look at mine. You need to do it.’ I laughed again. With each laugh I felt myself coming back a bit more.

Melissa wheeled me out into the hallway and handed the chair over to Ian.

‘Don’t bash my princess into walls,’ she said.

We all laughed, and in this laughter was a relief that will stay with me forever. In just minutes, this woman had entered our lives and will never be forgotten. She saw what other, highly qualified, highly paid medical staff had ignored: human contact, kindness, patience and humour are tonics that cannot be bottled but are no less life-changing than the most advanced medicines.

My memory of seeing Isaac in the incubator for the first time is dreamlike. I was allowed to touch him, but not to hold him yet. His chest was moving up and down rapidly, as though he had just run a marathon. The guilt was crippling. Had I really done this to my child?

I was told he would be in the NICU for some days, but that I might be able to breastfeed him later that day. I was wheeled back to the maternity ward, where I passed out due to a drop in blood pressure. Once back in bed and stable, I fell asleep, finally, for the first time since Wednesday. It was now Saturday.

That night I spent 12 hours breastfeeding Isaac in between being wheeled back to the maternity ward for the next round of antibiotics. By the Sunday, he was strong enough to join me in the maternity ward.

‘You’ve done this,’ one of the nurses in NICU told me. ‘He wouldn’t be back here with you if you hadn’t sat with him all night.’ I knew it, and Ian knew it, but it was good to hear it. I also found out about that time that Isaac had never had an infection, that the risk to life was caused entirely by the C-section, and had nothing to do with how long I laboured. That also meant, I deduced, that even if I agreed to have the C-section right at the beginning, he likely still would have been just as unwell.

No one, at any point, explained this to me and apologised. Not least the obstetrician who had compounded every second of trauma by blaming me for something that wasn’t my fault.

I have spent almost two years recovering from what happened over the course of that 60 hours. And what makes it worse, in every way, is knowing that what happened to me isn’t even uncommon or considered to be that extreme. It is happening, right now, in a hospital down the road from you.

I am raising money for Birth Trauma Association because we all need to be aware of this, and actively pushing back on the culture surrounding birth. I am doing this because I know good births are possible, and they need to be the norm, not the exception.