Near Miss

Ben

Sunday, 10 September 1995

It was with our first child Ben. You know how you think you’re invincible when you’re pregnant? And especially with your first. Well, I felt like that.

I had actually been seeing a doctor who I wish now I’d carried on seeing, but I was recommended this midwife through the Midwifery Resource Centre. They didn’t tell us that she had only just recently qualified. And she told me all the things that I thought I wanted to hear. You know; that you didn’t need pain relief, that hot towels would help and, you know, at the worst you’d use gas. Because you think, “Oh well, women have been doing it for years.”

… and then when I went into labour she tried to keep us at home to have a home birth but we pushed to come into town and had something like a forty hour labour with no pain relief. We thought we were using gas but the gas bottle was actually empty and in the end she got me to start pushing. She thought after all that time it was time to start pushing. She never did an ‘internal’ so I started pushing but I wasn’t fully dilated so that just made everything worse. Then she brought her midwife partner in and they did some pretty awful things like they were saying to me, “You can’t have this baby because you don’t want to have this baby”. I think that’s probably what hurt more than anything was the nastiness of all of that. I remember clearly she was saying, “Look into my eyes…” and everything like that, that the baby wasn’t coming out because I didn’t want it to, and just saying all these sorts of things. They told me that if I yelled and screamed then the baby would come out. So I did that and it didn’t work.

And then luckily a midwife who worked at St George’s Hospital came in and said to my husband, “You guys need help but we can’t interfere until you ask for help,” and so we did and the specialist came along and she just pretty much told the midwife to go away. Then she whisked us off to the little theatre and she did a Ventouse and then forceps and then she spent an awful lot of time stitching me up afterwards. I had second degree tears. It was just a nasty time.

I have still got all the notes and things from then. The midwives had re-written our notes to show that they had done internals and that they had checked the baby’s heart beat. In actual fact they hadn’t done any of that. One of the midwives had actually fallen asleep on the floor at one stage and just left us to it. She never did an internal, not once. Later on, the specialist said that perhaps my pelvis is the wrong shape or tilted funny. She said the difficult birth was because of something physical not just because of not wanting the birth to happen. She was great.

Afterwards I got extremely depressed. I felt completely humiliated and that it was all my fault. I did have real fear and lots of hang-ups. It’s sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Ben was extremely colicky and my husband was working long hours. With Ben I just felt extremely guilty for years after because I was the one who had chosen that midwife and I was the one who thought I was invincible. You live and learn.

The worst of it all is that the family using the same midwives a week later lost their baby. I’m not sure now how we came in contact with them. Then there was another family as well with the same midwives and their son got a pulled arm. The one that died, the midwives weren’t going to report it to the coroner. They tried to cover it up. They tried to say that the baby was stillborn. But my friend had heard her baby cry. And when she told her GP that, he said it should be a coroner’s case then.

OK we were fine in the end but my friend wasn’t and that’s criminal really. Her husband didn’t cope with losing the baby and he lost his job and became really depressed. It was really wrong. We were in contact probably for a couple of years after it all. I know for us we were all so vulnerable at that time and we were trying to get publicity so that people would at least know about these midwives but because we were quite fragile people it was hard to do anything too constructive. I guess we just let it go because it was just one of those things; it either just eats you up or you just get on.

One of the midwives was made to stop practicing but the other one continues to practice. I still feel angry. I guess we felt like if we had kicked up a bigger stink … but even so, I think that midwives can pretty much do what they want. It frightens me when I see people advocating home births because you think well you don’t know how your birth’s going to go. If we’d stayed at home, then we’d have lost Ben and I think somebody was looking after us. Ben was OK. I know with our second to youngest I went to see another midwife who just seemed very much like my first one. She was telling me the same things and saying like she doesn’t check the baby’s heart throughout pregnancy. She didn’t believe in doing that, never, because it increases the chance of a baby’s left handedness. So here she was telling me things like that and I thought my goodness you’re just like that other midwife.

What’s happened to our whole midwifery system that you people are qualifying with such stupid ideas? It’s the whole education of the new midwives coming through that I think is questionable. They don’t have any nursing training and the whole funding – the way that midwives get paid – they don’t want to call in anybody else because then they have to share their profit don’t they? So anyway I changed midwives. I actually think that the midwives who trained in England are the best. Because it’s not until things go wrong that you realize whether somebody’s good or bad. I think anybody can deliver a baby if it’s just going to fall out! Within reason, I know, but once things go wrong, well … we were just lucky that we were at the hospital.

At the end of the day giving birth is such a small part and unfortunately all our ante – natal classes focus on childbirth without intervention and with no pain relief or anything else, without being realistic that sometimes things just don’t go to plan. It must get worse as women get older. And there seems no preparation for when you’ve actually had the baby either. We assume that just because you’re a woman you know what to do and I thought, “Oh well, I’ll just go home and I’ll know what to do”. I hadn’t even held a newborn baby before. Then with all that other crap going on as well! I feel for women now who are getting sent home before 24 hours. It’s pretty frightening isn’t it? It seems to have gone from one extreme to another and even that whole staying in hospital thing in the past without getting out of bed was a bit extreme but now you’re going home within hours of giving birth…because now women are coming out even before 48 hours after the birth…it’s just criminal really.

Even now when I see stories in the paper of babies who have died I sit down and cry and think, ‘That’s so wrong’.

Jackie