Who gave me PTSD
I still can’t forgive the heartless midwife
Am I allowed to admit I feel vindicated by new research that concludes that a heartless midwife can cause post-traumatic stress disorder in new mothers?
Not in a triumphalist way. More a sorrowful nod and jolt of empathy with those women whose births – lives – were blighted by a minority of horrible staff whose treatment fell far short of the professionalism practised by the majority.
Truthfully, even after my clinical diagnosis of PTSD 15 years ago, I struggled to accept that was what I had. My symptoms were classic: morbid depression, flashbacks, anxiety, insomnia.
I planned my own funeral. I struggled to cope with muscular pain and stress headaches. I stopped eating as well as sleeping and wrote a list of single friends my husband was to consider marrying when I died.
That wasn’t how it was supposed to be. We were so excited about the birth of our first and much longed-for baby that my husband even brought along The Penguin Book of Love
Poetry to read aloud as I laboured. Yeah, right.
But the midwife was incompetent, overworked and under-skilled. She gave me a double dose of the drug used to induce labour and then she just walked away.
My uterus immediately went into excruciating spasm, but she refused to acknowledge my pain levels were excessive and would not examine me. Her colleagues gossiped at the nurses’ station as my husband begged for someone to come and help.
Eventually, she came, stood at the end of the bed and stared blankly as I writhed and screamed. Again, she insisted I was not in labour. How could I be after just over an hour?
My husband shouted at her to “at least pick up the bloody sheet and have a look”. The baby’s head was crowning. The midwife was in tears. “Oh my God! What am I going to do?” she cried. “Nothing” was the answer; it was my panicked
husband who seized the bed and wheeled it down at top speed to the labour room.
The baby survived. I survived. I should just be grateful, right? The world wanted me to move on, but I couldn’t. If I’m honest, I’m still trying to defuse the bitterness about what I lost.
Almost one in 20 women experience PTSD after childbirth. Shockingly, this has far less to do with the difficulty of the birth than the attitude of the midwife.
According to this new study by Edinburgh Napier University, mothers reported feeling “abandoned, humiliated, ignored, dismissed or violated” by midwives, whom they often described as “hostile” or “incompetent”.
It’s so tragic because it’s needless and entirely preventable. Yes, we all bring our stress or bad moods to work some days – but it is unforgivable to inflict them on a woman in labour.
Incidentally, a friend of mine gave birth in the same hospital on the same day; hers was a wonderful life-affirming experience. Why? Because her midwife gave a damn.