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My long traumatic birth story

Kristin • Mon, May 22

It's been almost three months now and I finally decided to write down my traumatic birth story to share. This is a long one so buckle in!

I had a very easy routine pregnancy, my only issue was that I had quite a lot of swelling in the last two months (mostly in my legs) and my blood pressure was creeping up (but wasn't so high that they thought I had pre-eclampsia). My due date came and went and at about a week late my husband was resting his hand on my stomach to feel the baby move and when he took his hand off it left a hand print (because of the edema).

We went in to get checked out and they decided to induce me since I was a week late and my blood pressure was getting close to the pre-e cutoff. They tried to put in the balloon to kick off labor but it was too painful so they gave me a pill instead, saying that I'd get two doses of the pill (I don't remember the medication name) and then they'd start pitocin. Seems my body was basically ready to go because the pill kicked off real labor and everything was going smoothly.

I got an epidural at 3 cm and slept basically all the way to 9 cm. I did notice that I was still feeling pain in my crotch with each contraction (and could feel when they'd put a catheter in) but it was still way less than when I didn't have the epidural, so I didn't question it. I told the nurses and they just told me to push the button if I felt pain (though It didn't help). Once I got to 9 cm the pain was getting pretty unbearable. The midwife realized that what was actually happening was that my epidural hadn't given my full coverage. They called the anesthesiologist back, who first tried giving me an extra dose of the epidural (didn't work) and eventually decided to give me a stronger medication. The side effect being that I wouldn't be able to move my legs at all. After that was done they started me on pitocin to get that last .5 cm.

Once that was finally done (it had been about 24 hours since I'd been admitted) I finally got to push! Even with the extra strong epidural I definitely still felt every time I needed to push. 3 hours later still no baby. The midwife called the OB for a consult and they told me they wanted to attempt a vacuum assist, but I needed to push the baby out just a bit more. So I tried with all my might and got to that point, they wheeled me into the operating room to do the vacuum attempt because if it didn't work I'd need to get a c section.

It did not work, so I was immediately prepped for an emergency c section and within minutes my baby boy, Julian, was born. The stitched my incision up as well as the second degree tears caused by the vacuum attempt. He had been sunny side up and his head was at an angle where the widest part was trying to push out. So he was stuck, He also had a head in the 95% so that didn't help!

I was whisked off to recovery and my baby was taken to the nursery to receive antibiotics and make sure he was fine. When he was finally brought to our room we breastfed successfully and we were both doing okay.

Throughout the next couple days at the hospital everything was going fairly well. My incision didn't give me a lot of pain but my entire body hurt from the intense amount of pushing I'd done, which made getting in and out of bed really difficult. I was recovering well, though, and looking forward to going home.

Three days post partum I noticed that I started to see some weird spots in my eyes, one eye had almost lightning bolts and the other little squiggles. My blood pressure was still rising. On the day I was supposed to be discharged (5 days pp) the midwife came into my room and told me that I had postpartum pre-eclampsia and I needed to go back to labor and delivery to go on magnesium to prevent seizures. That stuff is the worst! I was told at first I wouldn't be allowed to eat or drink anything but they did let me drink and have popsicles after I proved I was still able to swallow. By the time 24 hours was over I was barely able to walk and couldn't focus my eyes, but that went away as soon as I was off the magnesium. They started me on blood pressure meds and kept me one last night, it seemed my blood pressure was stable enough so they discharged me.

That night I got home and was settling in to sleep on the couch. I reached down to pick up a pillow when the vision in my left eye suddenly disappeared, it was like something gray had burst inside my eye. It cleared up a little bit and I called the hospital. They told me that they'd be consulting with the OB and would call in the morning if they wanted me to come back in. They did, so we headed back to the hospital. Lots more blood work, at this point I'd been poked with needles and IVs so many times I didn't have any good veins left so they had to call in the special IV nurse to do anything. Blood pressure still high, they gave me higher and higher doses of blood pressure medicine. A neurologist came and did tests to see if I'd had a stroke, which he didn't think I had. They sent me for a cat scan to see if I had a brain bleed which came back clean. They then told me that they thought I had brain edema, a syndrome called PRES and would need to do an MRI. The OB told me that "most women" recover from PRES which didn't leave me feeling great. Thankfully the MRI came back normal. I was finally admitted again (we had spent about 10 hours sitting in a triage room) and they still weren't sure what was wrong with my eye. The neurologist said he thought it might be an atypical migraine. More tests from different neurologists. Nothing conclusive. He ordered them to keep upping my blood pressure meds to get my pressure back to my "normal". Which had been about 115/70 pre pregnancy, it was in the 150s/80s since my pre-e started.

Eventually they decided to call an eye doctor to examine my eye, and after the examination they told me that I was having retinal bleeding, caused by my high blood pressure. Finally an answer! He told me that it's something that usually resolves on its own and the spots I was seeing in my vision were blood that would be reabsorbed over time. Not great that it was happening, but at least it was something that would resolve itself. At subsequent appointments I was told that I'd actually had a blood clot in my eye which is what caused the sudden burst.

I then started seeing weird shapes in my other eye, this was different than the bleed, it was very staticky and came and went in about ten minutes. I told the doctor and they said since my MRI had been clear they weren't too worried and that it was within the realm of normal pre-eclampsia vision issues. It still scared me a lot. I didn't want to lose some vision in both my eyes! This reappeared several times in the next few weeks but never stuck around very long.

After two more nights in the hospital I was discharged with a prescription for the max dosage of blood pressure medication. It was good to finally be home, but I soon noticed that the blood pressure meds made me feel really weak. I went in for a one week checkup and my blood pressure was 90/50 and I felt like I was going to pass out.

I've now been off the blood pressure meds for a few weeks and my pressures are getting back to "normal" 128/74 at my last appointment, hopefully they'll keep going down. My eye still has spots where I can't see but it's getting a lot better, it may never fully recover but I have high hopes that it will continue to improve. The spots in my other eye haven't returned for about 8 weeks. I've lost about 50 pounds of weight (40 dropped off in the first two weeks when the swelling went down).

My little boy is great, I couldn't ask for a better baby especially with all my health issues. My midwife says that pre-e tends to happen in first pregnancies and it's unlikely to happen to me again, but I'm definitely worried about trying to have another baby someday (we wanted two children.) We'll have to see how we feel when some time has passed.