"Disgusted with the care I received"

My waters broke in a gradual leaky method and irregular contractions began at 5:00pm. I phoned and was asked to come in after dinner time. I went into the QE, I was seen by a midwife but no one examined me. I was told to go home and wait until my contractions began despite me telling the midwife irregular contractions had begun.

I phoned back up at 5:00am the following morning as the pain was getting too much (my contractions were coming every 3 minutes). I spoke to the same midwife who had seen me at 8:00pm the night before. But was told I couldn’t be that far along as I could still talk on the phone. And to hold off until lunch time. I felt abandoned by the NHS.

11:00 am came and I was desperate for pain relief, this time I asked my husband to phone. I could still speak normally and would have called myself had I not been frightened of being turned away again. He was asked to bring me into the maternity unit. I felt enraged at the NHS for making me have to rely on my husband to speak for me.

I arrived into the unit and the midwife was surprised to see I was 8cm dilated.

I was immediately given gas and air once the midwife had made that initial examination. I felt relieved- at last someone bothered with me.

I was taken away to the labour ward to be greeted by the senior midwife. Now 9cm dilated, and the senior midwife told me that all options of my birth plan were still open to me. They definitely were not as I was too far gone.

I remained on gas and air until 2:00pm when morphine was given to me. After this I found the need to go to the bathroom, nothing came, and had to crawl back as my legs no longer supported me.

My contractions then started to slow to one every 10 mins and I remained pushing (from 4:00pm) until birth at 9:00pm. I was given a drip at 7:30pm and would happily have had this earlier. I felt exhausted and wanted my baby out. Eventually I was given a episiotomy and had an assisted birth to bring the baby out.

I didn’t end up on the ward until 1:00am, when I was shown to a bed however, I was not shown where a toilet or shower was, or where I could find cotton wool/water to clean my baby. The baby was checked at 3:00am but no one checked to see if I needed anything. I felt completely exhausted and isolated.

Next morning I woke up in a pool of blood. Due to my psoriasis my episiotomy was struggling to heal. However, no-one came to help me change my bedsheets or even noticed. I felt abandoned. Still no cotton wool or water to clean my baby. I had to improvise as I still couldn’t move and felt I had missed something. It must be my fault that I didn’t have anything to look after the baby with. My husband came in at 10:00am and walked around the department to source items for the baby. I could not walk due to the damage from the episiotomy and long active labour.

My baby was not weighed before we left hospital after the initial birth weight. I wish she had been. As she had poo’d 10 times over the first night and this impacted her weight loss.

Once we got home we had the first midwife visit. This went well however, we were told baby had lost 12.5% of weight and should work on it. Completely acceptable given the circumstances. The next day the baby’s weight plateaued and we were told the baby should be put on a feeding schedule with expressed AND top up formula. I was against top up formula as my breasts were producing LOTS of milk (60ml on the very first pump). My daughters weight slowly increased. However, the midwife in her notes seemed to criticise me like a child getting a poor report card on Badger notes: ‘name not following the feeding plan’. Instead of looking for the real problem. My baby had to adjust her latch because of a severe tongue tie (baby couldn’t stick out her tongue at all until tie was cut at 3 months) and couldn’t latch onto a bottle.

Not only that the midwife also looked at me, however, at no stage of me struggling to walk/stand up/hold my baby did she think to examine me any further than just have a look at my stitches.

I felt so unsupported.

At the 6 week GP check I was then told I had thrush. I was pretty sure I didn’t, I had lots of pain, but I didn’t have thrush. Looking back, I was struggling to heal. And was still taking daily pain killers to help manage my pain.

6 months postpartum I began to worry as after being very fit and able pre birth I couldn’t walk the same as I could previously. After being unable to get a GP appointment I went through private health care to get an appointment with a gynaecologist. They examined me and told me that although my episiotomy has healed externally, it hadn’t internally and this was causing me pain, and limiting my ability to heal. Furthermore, being in active labour for 5 hours had caused significant muscular damage. It made me feel relieved that I had genuine cause to be struggling to physically recover from the birth.

Overall I am disgusted with the care I received with the NHS. I have no trust in Greater Glasgow & Clyde’s training, procedures and policies. The staff I had encountered were carrying out their jobs in the way they had been trained and with the policies imposed upon them, rather than looking at the patient in front of them and dealing with their needs.