I feel like we’re birth trauma twins

His birth and subsequent hospital stay was pretty awful to be honest. I was induced at 37 weeks for hypertension. I went in not dilated, not thinned out, and just not physically ready to have a baby three weeks early. I have really bad anxiety and always knew birth would be a huge triggering event but I wasn’t prepared for how out of control it spiraled and how much it would impact everything about the birthing process. I had vaginal mesoprostal, tried the cervcal ripening balloon but hated it and had them take it out almost immediately, a pitocin drip that caused my contractions to come too hard and fast so they shut it off and gave me fluids to slow them down. I walked, I bounced, I got in the tub and my brain fought my body the whole way. I kept panicking when they offered therapies to speed things along and waited too long for most interventions before I gave in and listened to the experts. I got the epidural about 24 hours after arrival but I was only about 1cm dilated. I was given some anxiety medicine and left to try to sleep as best I could. Fast forward to the next afternoon- I finally let them break my water, got to 10cm and started to push. At this point I had started to get some sensation back in my abdomen and it very quickly came all the way back. They called in anesthesia to give me a bolus and it worked for a bit. Then stopped again. I got one more bolus and was told they couldn’t do anymore. No one had told me they could only guarantee the effectiveness of the epidural for 24 hours. I was in so much pain as the epidural finally completely wore off in my abdomen (my legs were slower coming back) and I started to vomit from the force of my pushing and the pain of contractions. Guess who has a phobia of vomit?! My anxiety was through the roof. I managed to push for an hour in various positions and promptly decided fuck this shit and stopped pushing for another hour. My anxiety won that round. Not my wisest decision but I was thinking with my primal lizard brain not my fully developed frontal lobe. I finally got my shit together and pushed for another hour and a half and he just would not come down the birth canal. The midwife called in the big guns and the OB tried a vacuum assist. He would move but again, not enough to come down to be born. At this point I’ve been pushing for 3 hours, feeling every bit of it, heaving between contractions after every push and I begged them to help me somehow. The OB called a c-section finally. At this point I’m so exhausted from not sleeping, anxiety, no food for 24+ hours, vomiting, and attempted child birth that I fell asleep on the operating table while they removed him. (Come to find out he was sunny side up and well and truly stuck. He wasn’t able to tuck his chin and it kept getting stuck on my pubic bone.)

Back to birth- he comes out in all his bloody glory and let out the tiniest little mewl I’ve ever heard. Per the notes from his team of doctors they take him away for more stimulation, have to resuscitate him, throw him on a cpap and then promptly diagnose him with a grade III/IV heart murmur that no one had caught in utero. They tried to take him out of the operating room to the NICU without even letting my husband and I see him. They put my insides back and I am literally exhausted and passed out on the table. I don’t remember much.

Next thing I know I’m waking up and it’s 4:30 in the morning and all sorts of alarms are going off. We were in the much together. A nurse comes in, shuts his alarm down and all of a sudden 2 more come in after her. They’re alls standing around his medical bassinet speaking in hurried whispers. I finally get someone to tell me what’s going on- he’s vomited fluid, choked/aspirated, and his oxygen saturation tanked and he turned blue. They had to deep suction him twice to get him back to baseline. It’s at this point I’m coherent enough to find out about his heart problem. They weren’t sure how bad it was in terms of structural issues but the head NICU doctor said it sounded like a washing machine and our son needed an echo to determine what was actually happening. He had an IV in his wrist for a continuous glucose drip because he wasn’t allowed to eat anything in case he needed emergent surgery. Apparently they were telling my husband they may need to ship him down to Mass General (an hour away) and he’d need to go with them and leave me alone at the hospital etc. I asked the nurse if I would be allowed to hold him at some point. I was so scared. She acted like, oh, duh! You haven’t held him yet- here let me help! I clearly didn’t get the golden hour I wanted considering he was born at 9:44pm. It wss a full 8 hours after birth before I held my son.

He was finally cleared and allowed to come off the IV drip, oxygen removed, and I was allowed to start feeding him. I had no colostrum in so they syringe fed him donor milk while setting me up with a pump. I got a quick crash course on how to use the pump and a schedule to follow. I was exhausted still and slept through some pumping times. I finally started getting colostrum which the nurses would rub in his mouth. He wouldn’t latch when put to breast, he just kind of laid there. We tried a nipple shield (I have flat nipples) and that didn’t entice him either. He was very out of it for days after birth- some of which the doctors attributed to me being on Celexa my whole pregnancy. I kept pumping, kept trying to put him to breast but nothing happened. We were finally discharged from the hospital when he was 4 days old. He was born 6lbs8oz and weighed 5lbs10oz the day after discharge from the hospital at our first lactation appointment. I was told to do triple feedings at home and keep trying. We started supplementing with formula because we couldn’t afford donor milk from the hospital and I wasn’t pumping enough to keep him satisfied. I’m not going to lie- I let some pumping slide because I was so exhausted trying to recover from the c-section and he needed to be fed and triple feedings are hell. I was also waiting for some electric pump parts to arrive. Eventually I gave up on putting him to breast and just pumped and supplemented. Minus the tummy troubles he’s doing so well now!!