‘This is your fault’: The doctor’s words that left me with PTSD

Without fail, every time I’ve strongly held a belief, life has served me a painful lesson to aid me in loosening my grip.

I wanted a home birth, a natural birth – the ideal. Instead, I wound up with a code blue emergency caesarean. The gulf between these two realities served up a unique kind of insight.

One in three Australian women will experience birth trauma. Credit: iStock

I had concerns about hospital setting interventions, and with good reason. According to a recent inquiry into birth trauma in Australia, one in three women identifies their birthing experience as traumatic, while at least one in 10 women experience “obstetric violence” in hospital settings. Expensive and fraught with its own risks, I opted for a home birth.

While the medical health system approach seemed to focus on everything that can go wrong, homebirth practitioners almost glossed over birth-associated risks altogether – each vying for a coveted “I told you so” crown.

My homebirth midwife was a wild-eyed political animal who fiercely believed in the right to an autonomous and natural birth. What she lacked in sensitivity, she made up for with grit. Her activist edge seemed reasonable when faced with the extreme medicalisation of birth at the other end of the spectrum.

When my baby presented as a footling breech, my pro-home birth midwife found herself in a clinical hospital environment with an equally obstinate pro-intervention obstetrician. The circumstance sparked an ideological battle that played out over the course of my labour. Instead of wise or nurturing guides, I got blunt-force objects forwarding their respective agendas. As the two women spat venom at one another, I was entirely abandoned.

The obstetrician immediately wanted me to have a caesarean. The midwife continued to encourage me to birth vaginally. I was in labour, in pain and caught between two worlds. Unfortunately, neither seemed too concerned about the people enduring the experience – me and my unborn baby.

My midwife audibly tutted when I yielded to the obstetrician’s petition for a C-section. I chose not to let her into the operating room, yet the ideological war marched on.

When the obstetrician pulled my baby out, feet first, she was pink and her toes were wriggling. Moments later, she was unconscious and for the next 13 minutes, barely anyone drew breath as a paediatric code blue emergency unfolded.

From the operating table, I watched as doctors rushed in, not even in scrubs, and attempted to revive my newborn in every possible way. Manual resuscitation failed, the defibrillator failed, as did the first shot of adrenaline. The second shot brought the tiny alien creature back to life.

Moments later, the obstetrician marched over, leaned in and said: “This is your fault.”

If the birth hadn’t been traumatic enough, and while the wellbeing of my baby was still uncertain, the finger-pointing and looking to attribute blame for the near-death experience was just rubbing salt into an open wound.

Research shows midwives also carry the burden of witnessing birth trauma. The hospital midwife present that night took stress leave following the ordeal. As for myself, I was at home five days later and completely adrift. Apart from one follow-up visit, largely for help with breastfeeding, I was left to drown in an event that I had no idea how to process.

What transpired in the months afterwards was undiagnosed post-natal depression, PTSD and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) that manifested as the need to check my baby’s breathing throughout the night. The experience also went on to ensure I didn’t have more children.

I gave birth in 2000, and it’s only now that I am able to discuss it openly. Twenty-four years later, I still cry. Birth trauma is still vastly overlooked in the national conversation, but its impacts can last a lifetime.

There has to be a middle ground between the overly clinical and the dangerously idealistic, where the person giving birth is at the centre of their life-changing experience.

Although birthing centres fill some of the gap, they can only service a very small number of women, and lack the resources for complicated births and postpartum care. An emerging number of birthing recovery centres offer some hope for trauma recovery, but they are mostly financially out of reach for most.

The broader conversation needs to include mitigating the circumstances that can lead to experiencing trauma in the first place. While a difficult birth may have been inevitable for me, the treatment I received was unforgivable.

It doesn’t matter who was right and who was wrong, if indeed it’s quantifiable. There is after all, more than one way to skin a cat. Like other hot-bed topics with polarised opinions where fear, judgement and righteousness collide, all viewpoints offer gifts.

Beth Knights is a freelance writer.

Australian Birth Trauma Week runs from July 15-21, 2024.

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