Staying in hospital or a birthing centre after having a baby

People often ask me why I chose to give birth in a private hospital because it's not like they have a better medical care. But the fact we were able to stay there longer, those first few days are so crucial to how much you can take away with you home.

And so that, to me, was again, a choice I did not regret. Even though I am not absolutely certain whether I would have to go to give birth in a private hospital again but the first baby I felt really looked after and it a source of strength for me. Because I can look back and really draw on how much encouragement people gave me. And maybe it is something that others receive from their family who are closer than mine. But it was really the midwives there and our doula that just, for us, was that, source of encouragement.

I can see that women who are in the care of midwives only still develop a better connection. Although I am not 100 per cent sure that they would always see the same midwife. And the midwives in the hospital I chose were all very lovely and friendly but there was just a lot of them and so we would see every day somebody else. Somebody new and we would almost repeat the same story to a different person every day. I thought the level of care probably was worthwhile in a way that my husband could stay overnight. That we didn't have to go home the next day, that we actually stayed six nights. Which is unusual in a public system. Those extra days would only be given to women with complications or caesarean delivery. So I think that was nice, that we were able to experience those first days as a family and that the partner could stay there overnight. But I think clearly midwives ... would be experienced everywhere and midwives would be friendly because that depends on the personality not which hospital they work in. I'm glad we chose that private care because the extended stay and perhaps you know, the fact that our obstetrician was able to then develop the relationship with us.

So it is hypothetical ... what would have happened but we had a better piece of mind and had no regrets over going private and paying the extra cost because we felt looked after.

And you mentioned ... that you weren't sure that you'd have - make that choice a second time. Is that correct? If you had - how come?

I think because the first time around everything is new and it's unknown. And maybe that is when fear happens when we don't know what to expect. Now having gone through that I feel that maybe I could handle a birth without an obstetrician because clearly if complications do arise public hospitals still have obstetricians on call. But generally we just, needed those extra days in the hospital to ... learn how to handle a baby. How to swaddle baby, how to bath them, how to change a nappy. It was all new to us, we never had to baby sit anybody's baby. And maybe the extra parenting craft was the bonus the hospital gave us. So the second time around, the value perhaps wouldn't be there.

When my babies are 40 weeks [gestation] then the doctor say, "You come in and must give birth to them". Then I went to hospital and I'm crying all the while because I [starts crying] - sorry ... I had an epidural and they put in my back, so I did not have any pain when my babies were born - but then I'm very bad and struggle because my head is very painful. Because my blood is going - the doctor doesn't know about this, and then [for] about 10 days I am very bad - headache. Still in hospital, I was there but [for] 10 days I don't eat, don't drink [crying]. Sorry. When I eat anything, then I vomit and they give me a drip all the time ... The problem, when the specialist come, they say, "Your blood is not enough for your body ... [you lost] too much blood when the baby's born," but the doctors know about this one and my head is very bad pain and always when I take something [to eat] then I vomit. I can't eat or drink something for 10 days. And after 10 days I'm good.

I don't see my babies properly because they take my milk and the bottle and then they give them [to my babies]. After then when I'm good - feeling good - because they give me blood, then I'm good [laughs]. I feel very good because before I say I'm crazy because my head is all the time very bad pain. Then I cry, cry, cry. But then at the hospital the nurse and the doctors are very good, they look after me all the time. They give me the medicine at the right time.

Yeah I like the people there, very good, very kind. I'm very happy. I feel very good first because in my country the doctor is not good with the patient, not very kind. Here when I cried and they said, "Come on," and they hugged me and kissed me, "Don't cry, you miss your family, I know", and they talked to me and then I am very happy, I feel very good.

In my country no... who cares? "You cry - so cry, I don't care about you." Here it's very good. When this son was born, the little one, [laughs] my tummy was not - my iron is low Vitamin D, Vitamin C, everything. I feel not good. Tired and very pale. My head is also bad. My body is - all my body is painful. Then when they check my blood they say, "You take one week in the hospital".

We were in a private hospital for both the births. I had a five-night stay with both because I had the Caesar. I found that extremely helpful. I know in public hospitals you get sent home after two days I think it is normally, which is fine for a lot of women but I really needed I think that bit of extra support having the midwives there to help me, because I just really felt like I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't know how to calm a crying baby, I didn't have the feeding down pat. I was struggling with the feeding so I really benefited from having that longer time in the hospital.

You sometimes received conflicting advice from the midwives, which was difficult and that's something that I have heard from friends and other women that some midwives will say, "Feed this way" and others will say - and everyone has their own preference or own way, but some say, "Feed with pillows" and then the next ones comes in on the next shift and says, "Why do you have those pillows there, don't feed with pillows". And as a new mum when you don't know what you're doing it's very difficult to - "Oh, okay, just tell me what the right thing is and I'll do it", but it's difficult when you're having conflicting advice and different advice.

I found during the night particularly difficult because the staff obviously did dwindle right down. You'd have a couple of people on, on night staff but being by yourself with this crying baby thinking, 'I just want to go to sleep and I don't know what to do with this baby. I don't know if he's hungry or - or if he - I just don't know'. So the evenings were difficult. But I received excellent care in the hospital, but struggled with the different advice that I would get about how to do things.

And then I luckily enough had my own room at the hospital once he was born. But I didn't really get a lot of sleep. And I think that even though I had a lot of distress in my pregnancy and I think that's probably when I started to go downhill because I had no sleep the night before the birth and then after the birth the hospital like to have the baby with you straightaway and that's nice and everything but I was just so exhausted and I didn't have any rest at all and being a new mum as well, and I suppose being a bit of a worrywart as well, just - I was just so exhausted and, newborn babies - I think all of them or some of them - they vomit up, just fluid and things like that. But it was quite forceful vomiting and I didn't know what was happening. And I thought that he was choking or something like that and it looked quite distressing for him.

So I got very, very distressed with all of that and at one point I hit the emergency button. All the midwives came rushing in and at that point they knew that I wasn't really doing as well as I probably could have been. So they took him into the nurses' station for a little bit so I could get some rest. But wanting to do everything the right way. I was breastfeeding and trying to get that all right. And we actually did quite well with that but you have to wake up every ... three hours, or four hours, whatever it is, and feed. And so just no chance to recover. So we came home and it was - after the normal hospital two days or whatever it is. And then he had jaundice so we had to - he had to be readmitted to the hospital and his readings were quite high. So he had to go under the lights for a couple of days.

And then when we went back into the hospital we were in a shared room this time and we were in there with a lady who had a little baby who was tongue tied and he couldn't feed properly. And this baby did not stop screaming, he ended up losing his voice because he was screaming so much. Obviously hunger and a few other different things. And so I got no sleep in - I may have got 20 minutes here and there for the three days that I was in there but that was it. And again, I think that really contributed to me just really starting to kind of go downhill.

And there was one point where the nurses offered to take that baby away just to give this lady and me some rest and then about an hour later she said, "Oh I really miss him", so she went and got him and brought him back in. I could have throttled her. I just thought, "My God, we need some sleep in here". So I just felt myself slowly - I remember one night my partner came in to see me and I just fell apart. And I remember there was this huge thunder storm going on outside and I started hallucinating because I hadn't slept and there was this paper towel dispenser on the wall that I could see from my bed and I started seeing a face in it, like the paper towel hanging up was like this tongue.

And I started to get really - I just hallucinated from lack of sleep and everything I looked at I could see a scary picture or a face or a ghost or just scary things. And so that was quite scary and I was just quite distressed.

I spent about six nights or six days in hospital. My hospital experience wasn't that great. I found the nurses were fairly - some of them, not all of them - but some of them were fairly aggressive and they were very pushy in regards to breastfeeding. I had a lot of trouble with breastfeeding my son. The colostrum came in, like my milk came in but it I think it was probably a little bit on the late side and he wasn't actually getting enough so I wasn't - my supply was fairly low and I couldn't get the supply up.

And what else happened in hospital? I think there was one nurse that actually made me feel like the worst parent in the world because I didn't change his nappy. So he was really hard to settle one night and I sort of panicked and my husband was with me because he stayed with me throughout the whole hospital stay which was good.

But I was having a lot of trouble with him one night and I was just at my wits' end and I didn't know what to do and he just kept crying. I'd fed him and I think changed him actually and you know I did all of that and nothing seemed to help so I called one of the nurses in and this nurse just had the worst attitude and just said, "What is it with your son?" and I said, "Oh" just you know - my husband said "Oh you know, we can't settle him, we don't know what's wrong with him". And she sort of grabbed my son, put him on the bed and checked his nappy. She goes, "Well look at this he's got a poohey nappy. Would you like to be in pooh? Would you like to be sitting in pooh?" and all of this sort of stuff and just made us feel absolutely shocking.

And I had a really bad breakdown after that. I just felt really bad. I felt like I wasn't cut out for this. Who was I kidding? She just made me feel really bad. So that was my hospital stay.

And I had him in my room the first night. I was in my own room 'cause I had a Caesar. And the next morning, 'cause I couldn't move, I was trying to - I was too sick. Right after surgery I had to go into recovery for a bit. And then the next morning they came and got him, because he had a haematoma, which is blood under the scalp, from the suction cap. So he was then in ICU, and I couldn't move, and I had to go down - in the beginning I had colostrum, which is what you get before your milk, and it's just as good as your milk. So the nurses were really lovely and they helped me gather that up for him, 'cause he was sick and needed it.

And as I started getting better they used to push me down in the wheelchair to go see him. And some of the nurses were a bit rude and said - 'cause I was so sick, and they're like, "We rang you, your baby needs you, why aren't you here?" And I'm thinking, 'I didn't get a phone call, no nurses came in and told me', which was kind of upsetting.

Then I ended up having him in my room, and I couldn't pick him up, and - 'cause I couldn't move. And the nurse is like - and I asked her to help me, and she said, "No". I'm like, "Well, I don't want to drop my baby". And things like, I used to push my button 'cause I was in a lot of pain, and it'd be hours before they'd come in. They used to keep record of it, write it down. And I used to ring up my partner in tears saying, "Can you call the ward, because they won't come see me". I can understand that they're busy, but it was like an hour and a half before they actually came and saw me. And it was pretty full-on.

We shouldn't have gone home. We were home within 24 hours and we were so broken ... emotionally and physically I was just shattered. We hadn't slept, we didn't sleep the first night, who does? We probably didn't sleep for about two weeks in more than one or two hour blocks and we had a reflux baby, we had a jaundice baby, she was refusing to feed, she wouldn't attach, we were syringe feeding her.

It was horrendous, it was absolutely horrendous and I had no idea, no preparation, about what to do with a baby when you get home and this is one thing that I'm really very angry about.

When - a really good example - my partner and I went to go home from hospital. She picked up my bag and she put it on the bed and I realised at that point I did not bring any clothes to go home in, not on the list, didn't occur to me. Everything about childhood preparation, childbirth preparation, is about getting to the hospital. Massage balls and essential oils for the labour and a play list for your iPod. I mean we packed all that and none of it got used. Nothing about going home. Had no idea ...

And I'm so angry still about the pre-baby preparation. At no point did they run through with us, 'Okay, so when you get, when you walk through that door with that baby' - I remember literally walking in the door. I was holding the baby, and I turned and said to my partner, "Where do we put her?" And she looked at me and we just started laughing because we literally did not know where to put her and said, "Do we put her on the couch? What do we do?" That first night, "What do we do? Do we put her in bed? What does a newborn baby do?" No idea, and no-one has any idea but surely if we're having all this education we could focus on that just a little bit.

Yeah, real murky situation, it's really massive tensions around feeling violated, feeling really violated and invaded and like all your self-agency and control is taken away from you by these anonymous medical figures who then afterwards don't even come back to debrief with you or tell you why they made the choice that they did or even acknowledge how there was that discrepancy between how you might have been feeling and what they chose to do in the end and just, I guess, sitting - taking 10 minutes to sit down with you and sympathise with you and acknowledge your feelings and emotions.

That wouldn't take much, but that would have made a massive difference, I think, because there's just that sense of this anonymous person has come in and this person has all the control and all the power in this dynamic. All your power is taken off you. They make the choices of what happens to you and your body and your child. You're not allowed to say anything against it, and you kind of don't because they're saying that your child's life is at risk so you shut your mouth, but emotionally you're feeling like you're being violated, you know?

So even if that situation can't necessarily be avoided because medically they deemed that that's what had to have happened, then there needs to be some serious mopping up afterwards, you know? They need to seriously get in there and sit with the Mother and talk to you and, even though - it must have been on my records that I was booked into the family birth centre and have been consulting with a team of midwives for the past nine months.

So that would lead one to the logical conclusion that she's obviously - the mother, is therefore obviously probably of a, you know, persuasion that she potentially wanted quite a natural birth - they could make some conclusions about what I was hoping for versus what I experienced and therefore there's some emotions that need to be addressed and acknowledged there. I think that is a bit of a no-brainer and I was just so angry that that never happened.

I think that that really magnified the trauma, because you just feel completely unacknowledged, there's no space to talk about what you experienced, no one really listens. I do remember voicing it to a few people, but not really because the key thing - you can sort of start saying that and it's, "Oh well, but you have a healthy little baby girl" and now you move on to talking about the baby.

So the medical thing, so I guess just to follow up with that, so I then tried to pursue getting some debriefing and I found the family birth centre very supportive, so although I never gave birth there and it wasn't those midwives in the end that attended to my birth, they were really accessible with me, coming - available for me to come back and debrief with them on two occasions.

And there was only one dodgy experience at the birth centre which was in that they wanted me to wake my baby to feed her. And I knew that babies often sleep for 12 hours or so after they have been born. Like they have the colostrum or whatever, and then they pass out, because they're dealing with their own experiences. And I said, "No, I'm not going to wake her". And they brought the head nurse in and they said, "You have to wake that baby, or you need to sign a stat dec to say that we asked you to, and you wouldn't. It's very dangerous. She might even be in a coma, and you don't know". And I just was really out of my depth so I just woke her, and I wish I hadn't. I wish I had just signed the stat dec for that stupid woman, but anyway. That was really weird.

That was the other thing I forgot to say about my first baby was that she had the vitamin K injection, which I really regretted, because it was awful. She didn't have the Hep B or C or whatever it was, because I thought it was just silly, but she had the vitamin K. And I was really determined that my second daughter was not going to have that, because it was an intramuscular injection, which I'd had for my placenta and I knew how it awful it was. And I just - I still feel really terrible about my baby, who had just had this beautiful water birth, then got jabbed with a needle. Ugh. Horrible.

And then I had the doctor come in and tell me that they had to give me a hysterectomy and they had to take out some organs and that my placenta had infiltrated some of my internal organs and I'd never be the same again. It was not what I'd banked on at all. And I think once I got out of ICU and back to the maternity ward, where I think I had every person who was in the theatre that night come and say, "Hello" or touch me, just to say, "We can't believe you're still here," and, "You really shouldn't be here," because the survival rate is - it was really humbling. It really, well, gave me a sense of my own mortality, that's for sure, and how lucky I was to still be here.

When the anaesthetist came in to speak to me, he was like - oh, he couldn't even - he just sat there and cried. You could see that what he'd done was - he couldn't believe I was still here. I couldn't believe I was still there. The amount of pain I was in was phenomenal too. It was just - I felt like I'd been hit by a Mack truck. It was horrendous pain. Horrendous. And I knew that I was not good in myself while I was in the hospital, because I started having nightmares and flashbacks.

And I've never dealt with PTSD before, but I knew that there was something not quite right with how I was feeling. I'd be listening to things in the hospital and all of a sudden I could feel a panic attack coming on, because I could hear machines, buzzers, and it was just an awful feeling ... It was awful. I felt really, I know it's whacked, isn't it, but I felt really like I'd taken it upon myself, like it was my fault that this had happened. So when I came out of hospital I really was quite messed up. It wasn't good. And my poor husband, thank God, you know. The first week, I think, that's when we knew I was really in trouble, because I wasn't sleeping. I would go to bed and all I could do was cry. And it was awful.

I'm really surprised actually. They should have picked it up in the hospital. I was in there for 21 days. They should have seen it. Because I told them that I wasn't sleeping, that I was having nightmares, and I didn't see a counsellor once. And you'd think after that birth, I should have really.