Content warning: this piece discusses birth trauma and PTSD. You may find these sources of support helpful:
Make Birth Better’s list of sources of urgent help
This post was originally published on Ashleigh’s Substack, MotherVerse.
Misdiagnosed and untreated, perinatal PTSD stole my postpartum experience, holding my body and brain hostage.
I remember the moment my mind descended into intolerable chaos like it was yesterday. I’d hit the home stretch of growing a small human during a global pandemic when COVID-19 invaded what was supposed to be my son’s safe vessel. Instead of soaking up the start of my final two weeks of pregnancy, I found myself isolated in a hospital room with only a bedpan, a suspected blood clot and a very distressed woman birthing next door for company. I had an innate desire to be held, but the midwives were head to toe in PPE and my husband wasn’t allowed in – a stark reminder that I was ravaged by this dirty disease, my every cell a source of contagion. I’d started to question reality. Am I playing a part in a drama series that I know nothing about? After several investigations and many puzzled discussions, a scan revealed no clot, my irregular ECG remained a mystery and I was sent home with a precautionary 10-day course of blood thinning injections. It was only a 24-hour admission, but what I’d seen, heard and felt so viscerally during that short time continued to haunt me.
The seeds of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) were sown – a mental health condition beyond comprehension to those who haven’t experienced it.
Still recovering from the virus and running on adrenaline, I endured a horrifically painful four-day labour with no respite. I felt like I’d been split in two as my baby’s head fiercely emerged, leaving me in a pool of blood. I’d haemorrhaged. An injection in my thigh sped up the delivery of the placenta. Only hours later, my husband was told that he needed to leave me and our newborn, in line with the COVID restrictions.
I went into a state of shock, left my body and watched the scene unfold from above.
The doctor rushed in. I couldn’t process what anyone was saying to me. My vision was blurred, my hearing muffled and my skin numb to touch. I was clutching onto survival. This must be what the first stage of dying feels like, I thought.
I now know this to be a severe form of dissociation. I had two “choices”: stay in the hospital alone or leave with my husband. The only option was the latter, because I couldn’t bear to have my human safety blanket torn away from me. How would I look after another life if I was too vulnerable to take care of myself?
When we returned back home, to a place that had formerly been my sanctuary, I still felt unsafe in my body – and I wasn’t sure if I ever would again. I hoped that would dissipate as “normality” resumed. But I soon suffered another frightening episode of dissociation, where the same sensation of my consciousness leaving my body took hold. In an attempt to ground myself, I stepped into the shower and gently tapped my face in rhythm with the running water. Relief surged through my veins as I’d managed to stay put, albeit short-lived relief as I was fearful this was now my future.
I couldn’t make sense of what was happening to me, or who I was anymore. Life had irrevocably changed, and so had I. There was no time to pause. My attention turned to my baby and his hungry cries.
The books made breastfeeding sound relatively simple, so why was it so f*cking hard? Another “natural” process that my body had failed at. It started to dawn on me that maybe I wasn’t cut out for motherhood after all. I looked at his precious little face and muttered “you deserve better”.
The trauma was like a ripple effect, snowballing out of control.
We were quickly faced with my son experiencing breathing and feeding difficulties. While in A&E, he suffered a brief resolved unexplained event (BRUE) in my arms, resulting in four days alone with him on the children’s ward, helplessly watching on as he was prodded and pricked, fitted with a nasal cannula and fed through a tube.
The crippling panic attacks and insomnia wheedled their way into my everyday existence, as I switched between states of hypervigilance and detachment. This was my fault for catching COVID in pregnancy, wasn’t it? Why can’t I breastfeed him? Will he become a limp, lifeless shell the moment I take my eyes off him? Why is my head full of cotton wool? Why am I floating around in a hazy bubble? The lack of oxygen in his blood was unexplained and I was sent on my way with a video on how to resuscitate my baby, just in case it happened again.
I was living in a nightmare that I couldn’t wake up from.
The next couple of months blurred into an endless battle to be taken seriously by the medical professionals… a distressed baby with silent reflux and cow’s milk protein allergy, which later saw him under a wonderful paediatric consultant for 16 months… the realisation that my chronic pain and fatigue were here to stay as I’d suffered irreversible damage to my immune system and pelvic floor, requiring two operations… my rapidly deteriorating mental health.
I developed debilitating health anxiety, stopped eating and sleeping, unable to tolerate bright lights, loud sounds and strong smells, triggered by everything around me. The world became utterly petrifying. My husband couldn’t leave me alone, but had to hold down his job. I was back and forth to the doctors, diagnosed with postnatal depression, put on antidepressants and finally accepted by a mental health team on the second referral attempt. I spent a year under them trialling different medications, but was denied any form of talking therapy, the main treatment for PTSD. I was told that the psychologist required my physical symptoms to be addressed first – a detrimental decision that to this day, is still questioned by everyone around me.
I was discharged feeling like little more than a neurotic nuisance, with a complete lack of trust for the healthcare system.
Out of sheer desperation and not knowing where else to turn, I went to A&E on multiple occasions, overwhelmed with shame and guilt as “Frequent attendance of accident and emergency department” was slapped on my medical record. But that decision saved my life.
My cries for help were finally answered in the form of a letter from the hospital’s High Intensity Use (HIU) service. Initially, I was in two minds about whether to respond, anxious that yet another medical professional would let me down. But something told me I had to, and kept me persevering through various administrative hurdles to actually connect with the sender. Maybe divine intervention was at play. What I’d spent years fighting for, a remarkable nurse coordinated in a matter of weeks. I had a shared care plan in place, an upcoming course of 12 cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) sessions with a psychiatrist arranged and in the interim, fortnightly meet-ups with a lovely support worker from a local charity. I was later diagnosed with PTSD and went on to do eye movement desensitising and reprocessing (EMDR) and parent-infant therapy with my son. As I gained mental clarity, I was able to demand the investigations needed for my unresolved physical symptoms.
With the right support in place, instigated by compassionate and understanding individuals, I slowly but surely was on the road to recovery. I’m still left with many unanswered questions, unable to fathom how maternal mental health is still being overlooked, but what I do know is that shared stories raise awareness and spark change. The damage is done and the trauma will stay with me for a lifetime, but I no longer relive it during my every waking hour. I’ll never get those robbed years of motherhood back, but I’m now grateful for the gift of being present in the moment. The decision to become a mother means leaning into the unknown, but also gaining a ferocious strength to overcome seemingly impossible challenges. With renewed hope and purpose, I face the next one: learning to live my life again, both as Ashleigh and a mother to my son, my reason to get better.
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