Story #103 - Lauren, Richmond VA (USA) - Multiple miscarriages, Successful Induction, Doula, COVID, Unmedicated Birth, NICU, Medical Malpractice, Postpartum Anxiety & Depression
My daughter is four. She's a lovely, fiery human being and a great first kid to have as an introduction to motherhood. I love watching the world through her eyes.
When she turned 18 months old, we began to think about a second kid. I became pregnant quickly, but at our 12 weeks ultrasound, we found out the pregnancy wasn't viable. I elected to take medication to have a miscarriage at home.
This experience is difficult to verbalize. The process of miscarrying was harder than I had anticipated. I tried to go to work the next day, but I was absolutely exhausted, as if my brain and body hadn't connected the dots that I had just lost my baby.
After that, it took me a while before wanting to try again. We eventually did, and I got pregnant easily. But I lost this baby too. Then the same thing happened again, one month later.
That's when the brutal reality sank: I was able to conceive, but not remain pregnant.
After that third miscarriage, my husband and I decided to take a break and allow space to recover. My hormones were all over the place, and I wanted to focus on getting regular ovulations. But of course, I got pregnant again in July 2019.
This time, it was my son. And he stuck.
Early March 2020, the world began to percolate with COVID. I work for a company with many offices around the country, and they took traveling out, which was already out of the question for me as I was nine months pregnant.
On March 9, my colleague—next to whom I sit every single day—told me he had a fever. I had such a primal response: I stood, took my laptop, and told my manager I was leaving. I haven't set foot inside my office since.
My job there is in communication, and I became part of the crisis response team. We set everything up to make sure everyone could work from home remotely and worked 10 hours a day to make that happen. It was so stressful.
With my daughter, I had been induced for high blood pressure. It wasn't what I would have hoped, but the Pitocin worked well, and my body took over.
With all the stress this time around, my blood pressure also climbed through the roof. I raised my concerns to my OB, but she had already started switching my in-person appointments to virtual ones. I felt jarred: my maternal care was changing, and it felt like my pregnancy wasn't a priority to anyone anymore. Every time I'd talk to her, I could hear the stress and worry in her voice. Most people don't remember how bad it was back then, but I do. It was so scary.
I had a doula, and I'll forever be grateful for her; she was such a great source of comfort. We talked about my options, but birthing centers weren't available because I was so late in the game: it was either a home birth or a hospital one. Having a home birth was not something I wanted to consider so late in my pregnancy, so I stuck with my OB.
Meanwhile, my husband's employer was not treating COVID seriously, and he could not stay home. I was freaking out. My BP got to 155/90, so we decided to wait one more week to get to 37 weeks and induce me. But then, my husband developed a case of strep. The first round of antibiotics didn't work, and he had a fever, which meant he wouldn't be able to come with me to the hospital if it didn't recede.
We took our daughter out of school, and my OB kept telling me she had no idea what the hospital would look like at my delivery. It was madness: I was a forever-month pregnant woman, handling a sick husband, spunky toddler, and working on a communication crisis team from home while a global pandemic unrolled.
I can't describe the amount of fear and anxiety I underwent. It was terrifying.
On the day I was induced, my husband spiked a fever. We spoke to everyone and their mother, including the epidemiologist at the hospital, but everyone was categorical: he would not be allowed to attend the birth.
It was rough, but I had my doula. I had already given birth to my first with her, so I thought: "I can do this." What other choices did I have anyway?
My daughter went to grandma, and I told my husband to get ready for us to come home. He dropped me at the hospital at 8 AM with my duffle bag. We kissed, and I said, "I'm going to have our baby! Get some rest. Bye!"
I walked into an eerie and quiet hospital. I remember getting my blood pressure checked, and it immediately went down. I was cared for, and my doula was next to me. Everyone at home was safe, and there was no more work to perform. Despite it all, it was a good experience.
We started the induction process with low-grade interventions. I had a balloon which led me to be 3 cm dilated and slightly effaced. Then we began Pitocin. We never got above an 8, which was the same as with my daughter. Things started to pick up late evening. My husband was "with us" on video, checking in and out, watching me deliver in the hospital.
I had an unmedicated birth with my daughter, and the same happened with my son. My water broke around 10 PM, and he was born at 10:55. The transition was rough. I threw up, started shaking— all normal, but it was still very intense.
I don't remember much, but I do remember going to the toilet and feeling this urge to push. I put myself on all four on the tiles of the bathroom. The resident got behind me, and the staff put me on the hospital bed, where I pushed my baby out.
Then, no sound. He was grey, not making any noise.
Someone told me to touch and talk to him. Still nothing.
A team of people came rushing into the room and took him away to the other side. All this time, my husband was on the phone, watching. The resident stayed with me and put me on my back. I was shaking, thinking my baby was going to die. Everyone was trying to figure out how long my son had been without oxygen. They pulled blood from the cord to test it. A nurse came over saying he had started to make little noise, but the NICU doctor intubated him right away, and they eventually whisked him to the NICU.
I can still see myself lying on the bed, thinking, "I'm in the hospital without my husband and our son will die."
The staff took care of me for a while then wheeled me down to see him. He was still intubated but pink. Not making any noise—obviously—but this was such a traumatizing thing to endure. I remember his hair being beautifully red.
The doctor explained that he simply needed oxygen and help to breathe. At this point, I was 100% in shock. Luckily, my doula stayed with me the whole time. They told me to go back to my room and rest, but because I didn't have a baby with me, they put me in the smallest fucking room of the maternity ward. I spent the night listening to all the other moms with their babies.
I managed to rest a little until a nurse came in and said, "They need you down in the NICU." She would not tell me anything and had the coldest demeanor.
There are two people I will never forgive at this hospital: her and the NICU doctor.
When my doula and I get there, my son's room was packed with nurses and doctors. The first thing I thought was, "Oh shit, he died. He's dead."
They had us wait there for twenty minutes. Twenty. Minutes. No one came to talk to us.
Finally, the NICU doctor showed up and said, without any compassion, "Your son had a small event in his brain. Maybe a seizure. So we cooled him to help preseve the brain in case there's any damage." He called it a "small event."
For three days straight, they kept him cool. And for three days straight, that was my life: trying to recover from childbirth, not sure if my NICU baby would be okay, in a hospital festering with a possibly lethal virus.
My husband's fever eventually passed, and he was able to come with me. I didn't get to hold my son for four or five days because of the cooling process. I would watch him shiver in his incubator, intubated with a big cap. He was aware and present, but his feet, purple from the cold.
Every instinct in my body told me, "Pick up this baby and hold him." But no one would let me.
Forever I'll be grateful this was my second postpartum experience and not my first. I don't know if I would have been able to have another child otherwise.
I had a lot of breastfeeding issues with my daughter, and I exclusively pumped, so I knew how to do this. When the NICU nurses told me I needed to pump, I was like, "Yep, I'm on it!" It felt empowering, as if I could finally do something for my son.
Eventually, they took the tube out of his mouth, and we were able to feed him. Overall, he spent 12 days in the NICU. But in the midst of our stay, the hospital changed its visitation policy to one person only for 24 hours, so my husband and I could never be together or tag team during the day to care for him. Nurses were also coming into my room with no PPE because they had run out. No was was systematically using masks yet because no one knew it was the thing we needed to do. We just washed our hands 500 times a day and sanitized everything.
Three days after my birth, they kicked me out of the maternity ward, and I landed in the NICU, where you can't eat or shower except in a shared shower for patients where there's not even a table. I often saw a male doctor go in to pee—such assholes. There's one restroom for moms and parents, and the only people I saw using them repeatedly were male doctors.
I'd go to Panera every morning and grab three meals for the day. I'd then put them in the tiny NICU refrigerator to lower my chance to contract the virus by having to go back and forth between the hospital and my son in the NICU.
I can still see myself sitting next to him, freshly postpartum, not able to heal, and in survival mode.
My son was doing very well. I knew he'd be able to start feeding on his own soon, and I advocated hard for us to free feed. After days of asking, they finally gave me permission to try. Can you imagine? Gave a mother "permission" to feed her baby. So fucking patriarchal. Such bullshit.
To this day, I still think about the first time I put him on my breast. I was so alone, and all the trauma from my first breastfeeding experience came back. The doctor needed to know that he could eat, so I felt so much pressure. I told him, "Please baby, please. You need to do this. You need to nurse so we can go back home."
But I knew, as soon as these words came out of my mouth, that we were done. Breastfeeding is a shared experience, and I could not put that pressure on him.
So I pumped like a madwoman.
I tracked how much he ate on a piece of paper. That was my way to prove to the doctor that he could eat independently and was ready to be discharged.
But the doctor and resident didn't like it.
When my son had a tube, they would feed him, and he'd be immediately full. They were not giving him a chance to learn how to eat or give us hunger cues. But they were in control, and that's what they liked.
With free feeding, you have to be in tune with the baby: it takes time and patience, but I was up for it and made sure to track everything I put in his body. I knew my son was eating the amount they required and some more, and he was perfectly on track. He'd wake up, have the cues, eat and go back to sleep. He was fine.
But they didn't trust me. No matter how many pieces of paper with all the ounces I'd give them, they were not satisfied.
On one particular night, I told the nurse to let me know before they'd put the feeding tube back, but they never came.
I was livid. So I lost it.
I sat there and calculated to the milliliters how much I had given him in 24 hours, and it was way over what he needed to be getting.
That was math. Rational evidence. Proof!
But not a single soul listened to me.
I told my husband: "I need to come home. I'm alone, I'm tired. Someone needs to take care of him and bring him home, and that can't be me because no one here is taking me seriously."
Because of COVID, the hospital wouldn't allow him in to grab me and my stuff. But the nurses weren't responding to me, and no one was willing to help. So he just walked straight into the NICU. I was crying so much, feeling like a failure because I was leaving without my baby. A nurse had the nerve to tell me that I wasn’t handling my milk safely enough. I just wanted to scream, "I AM A MOTHER. I have a three year old. I know what I'm doing!"
But despite my best effort, I had failed to keep my baby safe and bring him home. So my husband scooped up my bag, and we left.
I knew that to get my son home and out of that riddle-infected hospital, my husband was the one who would need to go in. That's how patriarchal systems work. There's only so much yelling and fighting a postpartum woman can do.
For three days, my husband got milk I'd pumped at home, did the feeding, and proved them the exact same point I had made days earlier.
During that time, I tried to rest as much as I could. I made banana bread with my daughter and took naps. I felt guilty that I could not go back to get him, but I knew that the most important thing was to get my family home safe and away from COVID. I knew that my husband was the one strong enough to do that. I needed to be at home to be what I was supposed to be at that very moment: a mother to my first child so I could be one too for my baby.
My husband got our son home on April 2, the day after my daughter's birthday. she got to meet her brother, and it was such a happy moment. Sometimes I think about what she went through, and it hurts.
After that, we were on our own with basically no one to help us. There was no school anymore anyway, and we didn't see anyone else.
Weeks, then months passed, and I had a great maternity leave—four months and a half of paid leave. My husband eventually left the job that had treated him like crap, and we created a little bubble of love. We were together and safe: that's all that mattered.
My postpartum period was hard.
I had dealt with PPA with my daughter, but we didn't catch it because no one really talked about it. This time, I had started the work ahead. I was looking forward to having my maternity leave alone with my newborn at home. I imagined my other baby in school, spending yummy time bonding. My first postpartum period sucked, so this one would make up for it.
It's not quite what happened.
My husband is an arborist and cannot perform his work from home. His job is outdoor, so low-risk, so he kept working while I stayed home with the two. I'm not a stay-at-home mom. I'm not a power-career person either, but I like to have a purpose beyond motherhood. Given the current state of the world, it was (it is) a lonely place to be.
My daughter also had a lot of resentment, anxiety and fear because of the virus. She would not let us go on walks and would throw tantrums. She was mad at the world and would exercise her control that way. It lasted several months. I sometimes joke that being stuck with a threenager in a pandemic is not fair.
I'm in therapy now. To say what happened to me was life-changing is an understatement. I don't see the world the same way I used to, and I'm a very different person. The hospital and NICU experiences triggered trauma and childhood issues that I had accumulated. The ways I had learned to cope with life's pain didn't serve me anymore, and I had to learn new ways.
It will sound stupid, but I finally learned to love myself. At 32. I mean, look at what I've done and overcame! The amount of self-compassion I feel is powerful. There's nothing wrong with me as a woman and mother. I don't have to mold myself to anything.
Therapy was important in the process. I still had the same PPD and PPA issue, but I had someone to talk to, and it gave me the tools to reframe my experience. I'm more open and vulnerable now, and I ask for what I needed. There's no need to make yourself feel smaller in the experience.
I also had to learn to surrender.
I tended to forget that leading up to this traumatic experience, I had three or four miscarriages. To learn how to surrender control is a process and is a powerful lesson, especially for me, who's a type-A person.
How you take care of yourself is the only thing in your power.
When my maternity leave was over, I decided to send the kids to school. There's no way of doing my high-stress job with two children at home alone. No way. So right now, there's a lot of solitude with just me at home during the day, but it's been healing to be shut off from the world. It helped me strip things down to the bare minimum.
My husband is luckily still working, but it's been a big life change for all of us. He used to work at a place where few people had a wife who worked, so drop-off and sick days always had a tense undercurrent. We have to support dads too. He chose to find a job that accommodates his family, not the other way around. He's working with a friend at a more flexible and relaxed pace. It's been helpful for our marriage too.
But COVID has shown that this culture is impossible for mothers. I read all those stories about women having to leave their job, and my heart breaks.
I'm grateful that we have that space available in my marriage to make different choices that align with our values. I know not everyone has that.
Since the birth of my son, I definitely have a louder mouth and am more radical. He started physical therapy at four months old and has had to have checkups in the same building where he was hospitalized in the NICU. It's triggering, but we have to do it. He'll have to follow up there for a year or two.
I'm still in a fight mode every time I go there. Having my voice heard is a challenge.
On his first appointment, they had me wait for an hour. He needed a nap. They did a full-on physical test and looked for cerebral palsy. The doctor told me to stop baby-wearing even though there's no evidence it causes CP. He's not high risk anymore, but that was stressful. I knew deep down he was just exhausted, but he "failed" on some of his fine motor skills. It was hard to hear and devastating.
We still have to monitor things like his verbal and motor development. It could show up at any time. They also told me, "You need to do physical therapy," but then just sent me home with that. I had to do all the research on my own and make the appointments. He had many assessments in neurology and audiology since.
It's difficult because I have to keep track of everything and talk to these doctors "just in case." Most people around me are like, "Look at him! He's fine! He's close to walking!" But if I don't look out for him as his mother, no one will. I'm his only advocate, and I don't have the luxury of not thinking about it. It's always in the back of my mind.
As I said: we are lucky, that's for sure.
But it was a lot. It's still a lot.