"Post-traumatic stress after childbirth in Margate"

Mine is a bit of a long story. I gave birth January this year to my son in Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother Hospital in Margate.

I had an easy pregnancy, and my labour started off naturally, about a week overdue. When I got to hospital after labouring for 10 hours at home, I was shown to my room and left for a few hours. Every now and again someone would pop their head round the door to see I was still there.

About 9pm that evening, my labour just stopped and I was advised the best option was to break my waters in order to get labour going. This didn't work. I was then told that as my waters had been broken, I would be given a drip to make my labour start again. The drip was extremely powerful and within 15 minutes I was in full blown labour and was in a lot of pain as the contractions came a lot faster due to the drip. It ended up that I had to have an epidural because of the awful drip, and to cut a long story short I ended up with an emergency cesarean.

I was 22 at the time, and was traumatised to say the least. I feel that the care wasn't great, and that maybe just maybe they were a little hasty in ordering me into a cesarean section as the baby wasn't in distress. I feel that more efforts could have been made to help me give birth naturally. I lost a lot of blood during surgery, and was very ill. I was left in the recovery room and then many hours later moved to my own room. I recall many times calling the midwives and nobody coming, or if they did come I was told someone would be with me in 5 minutes and then I got left in a state. I couldn't lift my baby or do anything, and I was left to look after him all night, after a traumatic 32 hour labour and c-section.

It has now been 7.5 months since the birth and I am still upset about what happened to me. I have flashbacks of the birth and all. I don't think I have postnatal depression, but I have post-traumatic stress disorder. I have self-diagnosed this myself, and am now registered on online support groups for this. I am now back at work and am quite stressed, I feel that the whole experience has put me off from having a baby again as i know that my chances of having a section next time are higher. I feel that the hospital made that choice for me and I firmly believe that had more care been given I could have had my baby naturally.

I wanted to share my story as I feel that post-traumatic stress disorder is very common and should not be confused with PND which is very different. It's a shame as there were lots of nice midwives, but they were just too overworked.