A Note Before You Read: This is an honest account of childbirth, child loss, birth trauma, postpartum PTSD, and recovery. It includes graphic medical details and discussions of the emotional impact of a traumatic birth experience. If these topics are difficult for you, please consider whether now is the right time to continue.
As the elevator doors closed, I glanced down at the discharge papers and read, “Postpartum PTSD.” And I knew with CERTAINTY that someone was going to take my children away from me. That I was so irrevocably broken, that no one would ever think of me as a “good mom” again, that someone would see my medical chart and know with that same certainty that they were better off with someone else. And that’s how it starts. I couldn’t call and ask for help because then people would know. How broken I was. How in the desperate, heart-wrenching process of becoming pregnant, staying pregnant, and giving birth, I had become someone that I read about in headlines.
Here’s how it happened to me.
I had my first miscarriage the same day I found out I was pregnant. It wasn’t a “planned” pregnancy. But at the first swipe of blood, I would cement a pattern in my head that pregnancy meant, for me, fear, anxiety, heartbreak, disappointment, and failure. Over the next few years I forged a new pathway in my brain. A Great Wall. Every month, every cycle, every false and positive test, every time I wiped and knew that another was gone.
My first two live births were relatively “trauma-free,” one was even a beautiful hospital water birth that, for a while, made me feel empowered by my body that had been betraying me for years. Each was bookended by days, months, and years of reassurances in my brain that I was on a train to broken.
Then there came my sweet sleeping boy.
I had a scan on a Friday; they couldn’t keep him still enough in my Maternal Fetal Medicine appointment to get all the pictures they needed. Right before my doctor turned off the monitor, he raised his hand, with his beautiful five fingers, and waved to me. At some point over the next three days, he would go to sleep. He had been waving goodbye to me, I would think, the following Tuesday when they couldn’t find his heartbeat with the Doppler. So we went to “just check.” I had light-up reindeer ears and a toddler decked out to go caroling, but I knew with the same certainty that I had been cementing in my mind for years that he would be gone. And he was. So still on the screen. So quiet, no sound, no beating heart, no somersaults. And there are just moments afterward that are gone. My brain protected itself the best way it knew how: dissociate.
And then there are “choices” that don’t ever feel like choices; they feel like my just reward at this point: punishment. Give birth to my sleeping boy at almost 18 weeks; something I knew within the depths of my soul would break me irrevocably. Get to hold him. Or save myself, save my two boys’ mom, save any chance I had to have our hope-for three children. Be put under and have my cervix forcibly dilated and my baby aborted, declared medical waste. And I knew, even then, I didn’t really have a choice. So I went home with a dead baby, in my maternity clothes, and explained to his brothers how my tummy may still be big but their brother was gone. And the next day I walked myself into the OR, barely able to hold myself up from the sobbing, and the broken, and I lay on that table, and I said goodbye.
My first thought when I woke up was that I hadn’t made them check again and maybe they had been wrong. That I had killed him. That they were wrong. And that I killed him. Because my brain had re-wired itself years ago.
Over the next month, my milk came in. I had postpartum night sweats. I had to wear maternity clothes for a month. People would look at me in the aisles of Aldi and give me the smile they give when they see a pregnant woman, and inside I would be silently screaming that I was broken, empty, a failure. I would wake up weeks later to a gush of blood, a fever, and cramps that would lead to my uterus being suctioned while I was awake. Infection. You see, you don’t get a postpartum check when your baby dies. No one checked on me. No one insisted that I might need help.
And then it started. It started with this maniacal need to make the beds every morning and to always have empty laundry baskets. Then the dreams started. I would wake up from a dream that wasn’t a dream; my boys had died. I would shoot out of my bed at all hours, running, yelling, throwing open their doors. I would KNOW that their bodies would be cold. And my husband would quietly usher me away, telling me they were ok, we were ok. Then it started happening while I was awake. My husband took both of our boys somewhere, and I sat on the floor of the family room and watched his location, our van moving closer to home. But I KNEW that they would crash and all die. So I slowly moved to the laundry room, and I tried to tell myself that they were ok because I could see them moving. Then I was suddenly in the garage. As they got close enough to turn into the neighborhood, I started running into the street because I knew they wouldn’t make it home.
And here it is. It’s depression. Anxiety. PTSD. And. No. One. Checked. On. Me. If you’ve ever been depressed, imagine finding the ability to call dozens of offices looking for help. For medication. For validation. Waitlists. Telling receptionists some truncated version of my trauma. It took months for me to find a psychiatrist. A therapist. I used every single cent of my white, insured, suburban mom privilege to get it too.
Four months later, I was in twice-weekly therapy appointments. I had the kind of medicine cabinet that I was terrified for anyone to ever find out about. And then the two lines came. Three weeks later, the world would go into lockdown, and I wouldn’t acknowledge my pregnancy. I took my prenatals. I had a midwife close a clinic for my first scan because I physically couldn’t walk in without my husband. My husband had to hide the fetal doppler from me so I wouldn’t check hundreds of times a day. I zoomed my therapist between e-learning sessions, and I worked every day to survive my terror and utter certainty that my baby would die.
And after weeks of prep and plans, I let my husband, at 34 weeks, get a baby swing out of the attic to wash it. He crawled up, and I felt a pop and gushes of blood. I had a placental abruption in my kitchen. In front of my boys. And this is the part that I tell you: at this point, I wasn’t even supposing my baby would die. The evidence was very much supporting my psychosis. Hemorrhaging blood, contractions every minute, I knew the result; who wouldn’t at this point?
I delivered our daughter within moments at the hospital. She could have died. I could have died. I held her for a moment, and then they took her away. Three teams of people, screaming, chaos, terror. Then silence. Everyone left me with my nurse, and no one thought to ask about the screams inside my head. The certainty that had been routed into my being. Except that nurse. He asked me to fill out a mental health form. It was the first time. Three days later they made me leave her in the NICU. We walked out with an empty car seat; I watched the downtown skyline disappear in a rearview. In COVID, I could only stay with her alone, no husband, no friends; the other moms and I weren’t allowed to interact in our masks. The NICU is a level of trauma that is indescribable and unimaginable. Weeks of monitor alarms, teams of doctors, inescapable fear. And eventually, a 24-year-old NICU nurse thataby alive, I think, was supposed to be keeping my b must have realized. She saw me every day, and she slipped me that form again.
And right before discharge, they brought my husband into a room and told him not to leave me alone with my children.
It took a year for me to get a formal diagnosis. For someone besides a therapist and a psychiatrist I begged, borrowed and stole for to realize what was happening. So, no, I will never think ill of Lindsay Clancy. I will think ill of everyone else; they are the ones that should be on trial. Our country. Our medical system. Insurance providers. Bureaucracy. She was screaming. She was drowning. She was crying out for help. And I know, with utter CERTAINTY, that she was re-routed on a road she couldn’t get off of. We fail women every day. Because someone reading this is going to think I’m a bad mom. A woman is going to read this and think to herself that she could never get to that point. Someone is going to think my husband should have done more for me and that he could have somehow, in his professional experience as a Sales Rep for electrical transformers, re-routed my brain and supported me so much that he could have “fixed” me. I haven’t watched her sham of a trial. I won’t. Because even though it didn’t get there for me, we were on the same road. We still are. We were failed. Our babies were failed. Our husbands. Motherhood didn’t break us; the system did.
