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Post Traumatic Birth Disorder

Gillan Drew1 Comment

All prospective parents are prepared for a number of things: the labour will be hard, the birth will be insane, the mum will be sore and hormonal for a long time to come, and the first few weeks will be a whirlwind of nappies, feeding, screaming and sleeplessness. With a few perks, of course, like being able to say you’re a parent and getting to use a new parking space at the supermarket. Or, if you’re really lucky, that moment the baby pees on your partner and not you.

Nobody prepares you for the psychological aftershocks of the birth itself. Now that we’re starting to get used to parenting – that is, we’ve realised we’ll always have at least one too few hands for every task – we have time to process what happened that day. And I think I preferred it when we were too busy to think.

Every time Lizzie goes to the toilet she has a flashback to the labour. It started 6am when she woke in agony and started vomiting. I ran her a hot bath but it did little to help. We went to hospital, were sent home because they thought she wasn’t in enough pain to really be in labour, and Lizzie sat in another bath and vomited some more. She had a bloody show, started to shiver, and still the hospital told us she wasn’t in labour yet – these were just pre-labour ‘twinges’. Then she started to bleed.

There was no answer from the delivery suite, no answer from antenatal, no answer from the birthing unit, no answer from the community midwives’ office or mobile, no answer from the back-up hospital and no midwife at the local surgery, so I rang for an ambulance.

The single-crewed paramedic panicked the second he saw her, called for backup because birth was ‘imminent’, apparently, and within minutes there were three paramedics, three midwives and two grandmothers crowding around the tub. Lizzie was six centimetres dilated, so they piled her and the midwives into an ambulance and set off with blue lights flashing. This was four hours after being sent home from Maternity, and less than an hour since the hospital had told us they weren’t even contractions.

For Lizzie, this was the worst of the ordeal, and now the bathroom stirs unpleasant associations of pain, blood and fear. She isn’t really bothered about the public nudity, but then pregnancy and prudishness don’t go together. Trouble is, she can’t exactly avoid the bathroom.

For me, I have a single image that haunts me: my beautiful angel Izzie lying alone in an incubator in Neonatal ICU, hooked up to all kinds of monitors, a drip in her arm and a feeding tube up her nose. She got stuck in the birth canal for two hours as she was back-to-back.

Downstairs, Lizzie was recovering from haemorrhaging on the operating table after a failed ventouse and forceps birth. I spent the rest of the night and next day bouncing between the two. At the time I simply did what I needed to do and put one foot in front of the other for forty-three hours. But now, when people ask about the birth, I come to the moment when Izzie went into the incubator and I can’t go any further. I can’t talk about the four days in ICU; the three days in Transitional Care; the day I cried because my girls weren’t coming home; the day Lizzie begged me to stay but they still made me leave at midnight.

So how do we get past these thoughts and feelings? For Lizzie I guess we need to fill the bathroom with happy memories to replace the bad, such as baby bathtimes, or else it’s as good an excuse as any to get a new bathroom suite. And as for me? I just need to hold my daughter as much as I can and assure her she’ll never be alone again.

It’s not a competition

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It should be obvious that parenting isn’t a competition. If it was, there would be medals, awards ceremonies and prize money. But there’s no extra credit for how long you can go without sleep, there are no special mentions for martyrdom, and if you’re the dad, give up now because there’s no way you can […]

To sleep, perchance to dream

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The past nine months I’ve had a recurrent dream. I’m backstage at a play, waiting to go on, and I haven’t learned my lines. It’s okay, though, because I only have two and I’m confident I can blag it. A couple of minutes beforehand, I glance at the script and to my horror I have five pages of complex dialogue and I’m not ready and oh hell there’s my cue.

It’s obvious what that’s about. No matter how much you prepare, how many courses you attend and how many books you read, you never feel ready for the arrival of your baby. I’ve had that dream at least twice a week, often more.

I haven’t had it since Izzie was born. On the third day I dreamt I had boobs, but I couldn’t produce enough milk so the baby was crying. In the twilight before dawn this morning, in the 90 minutes between settling Izzie down to sleep and her waking up screaming, I dreamt I had just given birth to triplets, and again my boobs were empty. I’m noticing a pattern emerging here.

Izzie might only be twelve days old, but she’s already starting to grasp that while daddy might have a great beard, mummy’s the one with the breasts. I just can’t satisfy her on that one, although when she’s hungry she does seem to think I have a nipple somewhere on my left biceps. If I did, it would make things so much easier!

It makes me wonder what Izzie dreams about when she sleeps.

Apparently, babies don’t dream. Despite reaching the REM stage of sleep and spending around eight hours there each day, they have too few experiences upon which to call for creating genuine dreams. Instead, the brain uses this period of sleep to discover the body it inhabits, learning about the nervous system and creating neural links (this is what the jerking movements, distinct from the startle reaction, are all about). But how can they be sure?

Sometimes Izzie cringes in her sleep and whines as though having a nightmare. Sometimes her breathing comes in fits and starts like she’s excited. Her experiences might be limited, but all of our sensations, emotions, thoughts and behaviours are played out in our dreams, even if all we know is milk, and pooping, and cuddles.

I like to think that Izzie dreams of a man with a great beard and a nipple on his arm. As for myself, I have a feeling I’ll be dreaming of my empty boobs for quite some time to come.

Baby Steps

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When I was travelling through the wilderness of New Zealand I developed a simple mantra: step, step, step. Soaked to the skin in never-ending rain, tramping uphill towards a mountain pass that didn’t get any closer, with nothing but a cold cabin & faulty gas burner waiting for me, it was too much to think of the end goal. Or the middle goal. Or even the next hundred yards. I could only focus on lifting my foot, moving it forward, placing it down, step, step, step.

Raising a baby is all about the steps. My partner Lizzie thinks it’s about getting through the day, but to me that’s far too long term. Don’t think of reaching bedtime, don’t think of the next three hours. Live in the moment.

As I write this, Izzie is cuddled in my arms with hiccups, looking at me in a confused, mesmerising fashion. When the hiccups finish, will I need to change a nappy, feed her, burp her, settle her to sleep? It doesn’t matter. Right now I’m holding her as she hiccups and that’s good enough.

When the authorities learned that two people with AS were expecting, they assigned the unborn baby a social worker and set about testing our capability to raise a child. How would we meet its social and emotional needs? What would we do if it was eight years old and being bullied, or twelve and struggling to make friends? What sort of things did we witness as children (a particularly leading question, I thought: I witnessed some truly awful McDonald’s adverts, but I’m not sure that counts)?

My answer was that no prospective parent can possibly know what they’ll do so far in the future. We were learning about breastfeeding, nappies, burping, not studying dating advice for teenagers. Like any parent we’ll sort out the baby thing first, then the toddler thing when it arrives, then each stage in turn. And when the baby is being bullied at eight, we’ll have eight years of parenting experience, and be better capable of answering that question than if I made something up now.

They ultimately discharged us, with a view to checking in every so often to make sure we’re hitting the social and emotional milestones, whatever those are. Sometimes I think we know too much, and put undue pressure on parents and children, Aspie or otherwise, to fit into a model of what is deemed ‘normal’. But right now, I’m just thinking of step, step, step.

(And the next step was a nappy change, in case you were wondering!)

Staying Positive

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So, we’re rapidly approaching day ten and after 48 hours of military-style torture techniques we’ve just about survived the first growth spurt.

But now we’ve hit the wall. The adrenalin that kept us going since Izzie was born has worn off and the ‘I’m-the-best-dad-in-the-world, this-is-so-easy’ smugness wandered off around four o’clock this morning after five hours of trying to settle the little madam, and it hasn’t been seen since.

No, this is not going to be one of those blogs where people moan about how hard it is to be a new parent. I mean, come on: that’s a given. True, we’ve now joined the ranks of the bleary-eyed zombies that shuffle around muttering about how people without kids will never understand how hard it is, but we knew what we were getting ourselves into. Of course, I hadn’t realised how conversant I would become on poo colour or that I’d have to search high and low to find the right brand of nipple shield, but all life is a learning process.

This will be a predominantly positive blog. We have to find humour in even the most hopeless of situations, and this one is far from hopeless. At four am it can feel a little like the end of the world, but then the morning comes and all is well. What kept me going in the night was the realisation that, swaddled, lifting her bald head on a thin neck and chomping her toothless beak at me amidst her screams, my daughter looks uncannily like a tortoise. More accurately, she looks like a Koopa Trooper from a Super Mario game. That was enough to get me through.

Oh, and ear plugs take the edge off too!