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brokeandbaffled · 10 years ago

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Important, but read at your own risk. It is affecting.

There are many reasons enumerated to support legal, free abortion that cite statistics - for me, of the supporting research, the most compelling is that we know that women will continue to get abortions regardless of safety or cost. That countries with restrictive laws have massive maternal mortality rates, and that as many women seeking abortions already have children, this leads to people losing their mothers. Women and girls die from sepsis, from beatings by enraged partners, from botched operations, from terminal pregnancies, they die in their thousands and hundreds of thousands, as they always have.

The fetus always dies as well. Making abortion illegal, or having it be legal, and restricting access to it, never seems to save anything at all.

We know that overwhelming numbers of research papers are produced on the effects of abortion on women, but that they show, again, that lack of abortion accesses causes vastly more negative health outcomes than the abortion itself.

We know many things, and we also know that logic, or science, will be made up or perverted by people attempting to end access regardless. That they will cite statistics from religious pamphlets, never a peer reviewed study from an important journal.

And I have had people say to me ‘But adoption’, as if pregnancy and birth are nothing. As if they have no monetary cost, nor job loss attached, no long term effect on superannuation, no permanent changes to your body.

This is how I feel about ‘but adoption’, and this is long, and also grotesque.

When my partner and I decided to have a child, we were ‘old’ parents - I was positively ancient, decrepit at thirty eight, and my sheet said ‘advanced in age’. We had tests done, and to everyone’s repeated shock, my trisomy chances were astronomically small - I had the carrier-health of an 18 year old. There were miscarriages, which were physically painful. But there was, in the end, a success.

At nine weeks pregnant, I was having odd pains in my hips. Sometimes it hurt to walk. I could afford a good series of doctors, and we were already looking at a hospital which did natural water births with midwives. I saw my doctor, who told me that it was impossible that PGP - Pelvic Girdle Pain - could show up at nine weeks. I would have zero symptoms of anything at nine weeks. The doctor tried to refer me to a psychiatrist because I was imagining it.

At twelve weeks, the pain was resonant, like a vibration. Scans diagnosed me with PGP of the sort one gets in the final trimester. I was losing weight, because I was always nauseous and exhausted. I felt miserable all the time. My dreams were tired and painful, everything ached while I was awake, and I constantly felt like someone with food poisoning.

People reminded me you cannot have painkillers or drugs while you are pregnant. Everyone goes through it. It is natural, nothing to worry about.

The pain steadily grew, and with it, my blood pressure dropped, in a weird reversal of the normal state of things. I was too tired to breathe, I was utterly reliant on a partner who was not entirely certain that all of this was usual.

Everyone told us that it was all normal. I used to joke that some women glow - I was just incandescent with rage. I felt terrible all the time.

If I had been in another country, with a less understanding job, I would have been fired. I could no longer remember things. I found it incredibly hard to eat healthily as the only items on the massive sheet I was handed that were ‘safe’ around where I worked were deep fried food - no salads, no vegetables, no fruit, no deli meat. No soft cheese. No fish. I stopped wanting to eat anyway. I would vomit on public transport.

The critter started kicking, which was initially pleasing, but was then outright painful. Not a little thump, just jarring pain in my too-flexible hips. I stopped being able to sleep in more than little segments, breaths caught when the critter slept itself.

I wanted this child, but it was eating me, drawing everything out of bones and skull and brain into itself, it was hard not to feel resentful. People talk about insomnia, but they are seldom not eating - with insomnia. While being in pain. While being breathless and dizzy. For months. Unending. All of it all the time.

I dropped a knife on my foot while washing it, too tired to think properly, and it went through a tendon with a surgically precise slice that was greatly admired at the hospital. They had to explore through muscle for the twitching ends to reattach them, and blood pooled under my foot, and I could not have the normal anaesthesia lest they risk the pregnancy. It was agonising. They said I was very brave. The pharmacist, tired, wrote down ‘panadol’ post surgery instead of ‘tramadol’ and when the mild locals started to wear off, my ward nurses panicked.

My blood pressure collapsed to fifty over twenty and they could not keep me conscious. I was vomiting again, this time from pain, and they could get me awake, for me to throw up in agony, and then black out again. They had no legal authority to get me anything to stop it, they were pumping icy cold saline in to try to keep my pressure high enough, by hand.

Later, there were no foam boots available, they had to wrap my foot in a plaster cast. With the PGP making my tendons stretch, my leg began to loosen in its socket. The weight of the heavy plaster pulled it free. The other leg started to compensate, my spine would audibly crunch and creak.

Gradually, I went from hobbling, to crutches, to a wheelchair. I suddenly put on vast amounts of weight, the midwives told me I was fat, the baby was small, and I was doing pregnancy wrong, so wrong. I had to quit work early, as I could no longer manage crossing the floor to it.

The stitches eventually came out, but my kneecaps were popping out of place. The scar was impressively large over the top of my foot. Now, I could not risk moving if my partner was not home - if my leg dislocated, I would fall where I was, unable to move until I could be rescued by someone else. I was seeing physiotherapists, who would physically strap my body together with tape, to try to keep it functioning. I was taking tramadol and other painkillers by the handful, so I could sleep, and I was hardly eating, but the weight continued to pile on.

My body was ruined, but it was now starting to destroy my mind as well.

I began to get oedema. Normal, natural, ‘beautiful because it is a sign of pregnancy’, said the midwives. My toes would disappear entirely in huge puffy masses of flesh. My skin split, swollen to the point where it could not contain the fluid. I wore sometimes oozing compression bandages all day, all night, but I could no longer even wear socks - shoes had long gone. Sometimes I would just weep because of how appalling the experience was. I was grotesque and failing. I could abide nothing touching my hands.

I had heartburn, pelvic girdle pain, terrible oedema they called medical students in to see, gestational diabetes, nausea, insomnia, very low blood pressure, and no one knew what to do. The medications for one would make another worse. I was told by the midwives that I absolutely must walk, that being in a wheelchair was contributing to the fact the baby was malpositioned, but I could barely stand. If I did, a leg would dislocate by simply falling out of the socket, leaving me in spasming pain. My physiotherapist told me that I absolutely must not walk - that I could destroy my hips completely.

The baby was tiny, I had to eat better, I was massively overweight, I had to diet. Whatever I did, I was wrong.

My hair started to fall out.

Preeclampsia showed up. But any treatment would lower my blood pressure, which was ghastly already. I had headaches, and the usual aches, but I had jagged, terrifying pain as well. I was anemic, and fragile, and healing slowly from any injury.

I went into prelabour for weeks before the critter arrived. Before the time she was ready, I was enquiring timidly about a cesarian - after all, I could no longer walk.

They told me it would all be fine, and not to be a coward, and not to worry. We were confused. I had preeclampsia, but they told me to wait, even though I was weeks overdue.

I went into labour, naturally. But something started to go oddly an hour in. Contractions should roll in, build to unbearable, and fade, then roll in again. The fading did not happen. I was having double contractions - without the ‘rest’ part in between that helps someone position themselves and deal with the birth.

It was like being stabbed, with a knife - except I had experienced that quite literally a few weeks earlier, and this was worse. Every second or so - BANG BANG BANG BANG - and ‘excruciating’ did not cover it. It was nauseatingly painful. It was worse than any snap of any broken bone I had experienced, and it went on for hours, and hours. It was worse than the feeling of someone shoving a knife into my foot in surgery.

I ended up with various drugs and slightly confused doctors and loss of a heartbeat. I became more or less numb towards the end, in shock, only able to experience pain with no awareness of anything else. I wanted it to end, and was waiting to die. My heart rate was at 155 for a long, long while, then it started to slide down. I had stopped making noise a while back.

I was aware people were panicking a bit, but it was hard to care. The doctor told me that I had one chance - ONE - to get the baby out RIGHT NOW.

My file had ‘No episiotomy’. He told me he was doing an episiotomy.

I asked for nitrous. The doctor said no.

The midwife and my partner said to the doctor: Give her the fucking nitrous.

They did an episiotomy but I tore anyway. I tore back to the anus, around it on both sides, and the tear continued on from there as well and stopped at about my tailbone. They used forceps, and I tried to push.

The baby was huge. Not tiny. Not weak from my terrible body. The baby was gigantic and malpositioned, and there was no way I could ever have given birth naturally. It was impossible. My body was too tired, and too damaged from the pregnancy.

The baby was a 9 on the APGAR scale. Perfect health. Aside from the huge forceps bruise.

They handed me the baby while I tried to tell them: No. No I cannot do this, I am too tired, please let me rest. Eventually I convinced them to take it back. What I really wanted to do was die.

I heard the doctor there say: I do not know how to fix this. I do not know what joins with what. I can’t see anything under this, there is too much damage. It looks like meat.

There was a visiting doctor at the hospital, an expert in reproductive repair. My midwife got him. It took him two hours to work on me. I was lying in a pool of blood over an inch thick. Blood was all over the floor. My partner was walking in blood. Dozens and dozens of stitches. I lay there and I thought: Hopefully I will die, and this can stop.

Much later I was waking up in my hospital bed. This is what happened: The baby was fine, I was fine, according to the paperwork. Birth is natural.

I had a ward nurse tell me off for not getting up to nurse my baby when it screamed. I could look at the baby and see nothing. I felt nothing. I was not feeding my baby properly - lactation consultants came, grabbed me without asking, manipulated me. I realised I was essentially a cow.

People would come and put needles into me and walk away and say nothing.

A hospital physiotherapist came by and asked why I had not been out of bed yet. Cheerful. Gave me a book of exercises. I took them, and she convinced me to get up. Go exercise! It is good for you!

I stood up, and I was spinning, head nodding like a drunk man. I said I had lost what I thought was a lot of blood, they said: Everyone loses blood.

A phlebotomist came by later to take tests, to check iron levels in case anemia was the reason I was so exhausted. There were no veins, she felt down my arms, across my legs. She stuck needles in me.

No blood came out.

People got excited. A little while later, they were running in with cold bags of purple-red, hooking me up, trying to pump blood into me. I sort of watched them and I wondered: Does anyone read the file? Does anyone read it?! I asked them what was in it, and they said: Second Degree Tear. Natural Birth.

It said nothing about what had happened. Because I had torn around all the openings, and through muscle, but not through sphincter walls, it was only second degree. What I had gone through did not exist. Forceps were natural.

Nothing existed except for the baby. The only one who seemed to care about me were my partner, and my friends and family. My mother saw me and was horrified.

What happened to you?!

I lost twenty kilos in under a week - it was all fluid, and a huge baby. What do you know. I went home early - after three days - because the nurses were angry at me for lying in bed and not doing enough for the baby. I was miserable and frightened of being yelled at. The midwives would read the file and see a pretty normal birth with minor tearing. My surgeon came back, briefly, and he said “You are the poster child for why home birth should be utterly illegal.” I really did not care about that, I should have asked him to make a note on my file, but - possibly understandably - I was not thinking clearly about anything.

We had a meetup, a couple of weeks later, with everyone from my pregnancy ‘group’, and a midwife said to me “Aren’t you glad you didn’t have a Cesar!”

“No,” I hissed, horrified.

She looked at me, disgusted.

“You’ll change your mind.”

It took me eighteen weeks to heal. I never did manage to breastfeed properly, either gross incompetence on my part or possibly my body deciding: what the fuck, man. My hair went grey. I didn’t try to ask for support, at least until I started showing PTSD symptoms and developed Postpartum Psychosis. The experience had taught us that I was essentially disposable, and I didn’t trust the hospital enough to return. I sought help from other services instead. I heard voices, ringing in empty rooms. I heard constant crying while the baby was asleep. I did not sleep for weeks, until a sensible doc said:

“I don’t care if we get you addicted to painkillers and sleeping tablets - we can get you off them, but we can’t fix someone who is in too much pain to sleep.”

My partner was nearly fired, repeatedly, from his job for taking care of me and the child, and being too tired to work. His boss lectured him on how it was his wife’s job to get going on that whole kid thing ASAP.

Now it is some years later. During my cycle, my tendons lengthen and my legs attempt to dislocate. My hips ache and stab with pain. I don’t really feel heat, or cold or pain in normal ways any more - my senses are permanently distorted. I have extremely decorative scarring that tends to hurt in cold weather. Thanks to my medication, I do not currently have flashbacks, but if I stop taking it, my brain stops behaving again. Everything is utterly altered. My body is, in short, kind of a mess, but about as good as medicine and modern science is going to get it.

My partner said this:

Imagine you are almost disemboweled - torn apart at the groin. You are in agony and have lost a lot of blood. You have to lie there for hours. You are sewn back together. Your family is terrified you are going to die. You are given very good painkillers and you are treated carefully in hospital. You are there for a few weeks, then sent home with a structured plan. People call you a hero for surviving. This is what happens if you are in an automobile accident.

If you get these injuries giving birth though, no one gives a shit.

And then I read about people acting as if pregnancy and childbirth are nothing, that women who do not want to be pregnant should just ‘have babies and put them up for adoption’.

And I want those bastards to go through everything I did - health destroying pregnancy, and sanity destroying birth - before they dare tell another woman that.

PS: My Kidlet is of course the best child on earth, but possibly part titan, as at age three, she is in five year old clothing.

PPS: My foot scar is awesome. Even the stitching area on it scarred because I developed oedema while it was healing so it looks like a crazy centipede curling up my foot.

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