I have been putting this blog post off because the words are just not coming to me. I want to give my story and experience justice, but at the same time feel like I am over exaggerating and that it wasn’t “that bad”. I think I, and maybe you and women in general, have a habit of belittling our experiences. Brushing off things that either hurt us, difficult experiences and even huge successes. We brush it all off like it was no problem, no big deal. It is a big deal. It is important and it shouldn’t be brushed off ever. That is my hope and what I have struggled with the most while writing this. I don’t want to diminish or minimize what I felt or experienced in anyway because it is valid and I had a right to feel the way I did.
Trying to recall those days now almost feels painful. I joke about my experience quite a bit with my friends and family, laughing it off in a “can you believe that even happened to me?!” type of way. But, I want to confront this experience vulnerably and honestly without jokes. I’ve never done that and it has been 2 years since I’ve had my daughter. I boxed up all the memories and emotions in a box labeled “Do Not Touch” and left it in the recesses of my mind for 2 years, and now that time has come to finally unpack that box, process the emotions, accept them, and let them go. So without further adieu, this is my postpartum experience.
I was relieved when I finally regained use of my legs. Trying to control my body and clearly seeing that there was a huge disconnect between my brain and my body was unsettling. I was wheeled into a long rectangular room with blue curtains on each side, only leaving a tiny strip of walkway big enough to wheel a hospital bed through.The maternity ward apparently. Each side of the room had more blue curtains dividing the room into eight sections. 8 curtained off sections, 8 women, 8 newborns, and one nurse. I got the section by the window, I felt bad for the other women who only ever saw blue curtains during their stay. I at least was able to look out and see the sky.
It was getting late by the time we made it to the maternity ward. Husbands and partners were not allowed to stay over night. They had their own visiting hours. About 3 hours after I was wheeled into the room Lorenzo was escorted out when visiting hours were over. I wasn’t unprepared, I knew this was going to happen. I had been told ahead of time and I am proud of myself for how prepared I was mentally for me to have to do everything on my own while in the hospital. I thought that I was capable of it and I wasn’t worried. I soon found out how wrong I was.
My first night went routinely with Giorgia waking up every 2 hours to feed. I don’t remember feeling too tired or overwhelmed. I’m sure it was from all the hormones and how happy I was to just have here there with me. I only struggled with picking her up from her bassinet. I didn’t want to tear my stitches open and I couldn’t move or bend or even use my abdominal muscles to help me pick her up. I pushed the call button for the nurse every time she needed to be fed, thinking that they would be more than happy to help me since I had a c-section and couldn’t move very well. I don’t remember any of the other newborns being loud. They rarely cried, or it just didn’t wake me up as I slept in between feedings.
Around the third time that I pressed the call button for help the nurse came in extremely upset. Tearing the curtain across the curtain rod and huffing her way into my curtained room. Whenever someone would press the call button, a huge alarm in the hallway would start to go off. It sounded was extremely loud and even had the red flashing lights. I felt bad pushing the button because it was waking up the other women, even though it was in the hall and not in our room. I needed help though. I couldn’t lift Giorgia from the bassinet and either the alarm or her crying would wake the other women and their babies.
The nurse came into my room, grabbed the call button and put it behind my bed where I couldn’t reach it anymore. She told me not to call for help anymore because the alarm was too loud and it would wake the other patients. I was told that if I saw her walking through the rooms then I would be able to ask her for help but that I could not use the call button anymore. Quote, “she had too many patients to take care of and I wasn’t more special than the rest”. Then she spun on her heel, yanked the curtain shut and left.
I wanted to cry. I didn’t think I was more special than any of the other women. I just expected help. I was in the most vulnerable state I had ever been in, had just had surgery, was a new mother trying to figure out what I was supposed to do, and I just wanted help. Which was now unavailable to me since the call button was no longer within reach.
I felt inadequate as a mother. I felt isolated. They kicked my husband out and then took away the only help I was supposed to have. The nurse made it seem as if I should be able to do this on my own. That I shouldn’t have needed the help I was asking for. I thought it was my problem, that I was the problem. After a couple deep breaths and the realization that I was well and truly alone I pulled all the strength I had into getting my shit together. I didn’t ask for help the rest of the night. Anytime Giorgia cried I would click the button to elevate the bed so I was in a sitting position, shimmy as close to the edge of the bed as I could and twist to reach her inside the bassinet. Then I would grit my teeth use my elbows as a fulcrum on the edge of the bassinet and as carefully as I could lift her and quickly put her in my lap.
I was terrified of dropping her and popping my stitches. Every time I would twist to her bassinet I would feel them stretch taut, and every time I would use my stomach muscles to lift her up they would pull. I had enough pain meds it never hurt, it was just uncomfortable and it was more the anxiety of what would happen if my stitches did burst open that scared me.
After the nurse told me she would no longer be helping me I was hardly able to sleep. I needed to be ready to get Giorgia as soon as she started crying so she wouldn’t wake the other mothers and babies and with this no help it took me a while to be able to get her out of the bassinet. Just getting the bed to an upright position took a good 30-45 seconds! I finally got her back in bed as the sun was coming up. I placed her in her bassinet, and laid down hoping to catch some sleep before breakfast, and before Lorenzo got there for visiting hours. Just as I was about to doze off the nurse flung the curtain aside and told me it was time to shower. I didn’t have a choice apparently, it was shower time.
She held my catheter bag as I slowly got out of the bed. This was the first time I actually felt pain. I couldn’t stand up straight. My stomach burned and every time I tried to straighten my body my stitches would pull tight. She handed me the catheter bag, turned on her foot and told me to follow her. I have never walked so slow in my life, but I couldn’t have walked faster if my life depended on it. My body was tired and sore. My head hurt and I just wanted to sleep.
I got lost on the way to the showers. I could no longer see the nurse since I walked so slow. I had to ask a different nurse from the next room over where the showers were. The showers were on the opposite side of the floor. I shuffled and hobbled my way there and finally spotted my nurse who was waiting for me inside. Why they would put the showers so far away from the maternity room, I have no idea. I think it was just my luck of the draw that I got the maternity ward farthest from the showers.
She asked for my catheter bag and hung it up on the hanger in the bathroom, I started to get undressed as she began to fiddle with the catheter line, and before I knew what was happening she yanked it out and told me to get in the shower. Nurses, please tell your patients when you’re going to rip their catheter out BEFORE you do it, and maybe don’t rip it out.
My eyes stung, not only from the pain, but the complete and utter lack of delicacy and care. I was just a body to them. A bullet point on someones list that they just wanted to hurry and check off. They didn’t care about me, just completion of the task they were sent to do.
After my shower I got back to the maternity ward and heard a baby screaming. I tried to walk as fast as I could because I just knew it was Giorgia, and I was right. While I was in the shower no one was watching her. I don’t know if they even do that here in the United States, but I would assume at least someone is with the baby if the mother is away. Maybe I am wrong. I really don’t know. She was all alone in our curtained off corner crying for I don’t know how long. I felt stressed and awful like I already made a mark as a “bad mother” because I left her unattended to take a shower that I didn’t even want to take in the first place. I quickly climbed onto the bed, shuffled to her side and heaved her out of the bassinet onto my lap ready to breastfeed again.
Lorenzo arrived shortly after and saved me. He held Giorgia all day long, changed all her nappies, and accompanied her to all her tests. The day nurse was an angel sent from heaven, and I am not exaggerating. I wanted to hug and kiss her and let her know how much I appreciated her help and her love. She was always willing to help, never made me feel ashamed for asking questions or for help and gave me so many tips, suggestions, and information that helped me feel more adequate as a mother.
I slept most of the day to help prepare me for the second night in the hospital and before I knew it they were escorting the husbands back out. Lorenzo had tried to hide in the curtains when they came to get the husbands so he could stay with me the second night but they found him and told him he wasn’t allowed to stay.
I dreaded my second night in the hospital. I didn’t know how I was ever going to get any sleep. I felt desperate and hopeless and wanted to be home so badly. If everything went well this second night, I was told I would be able to go home the following afternoon. I prayed with my entire being that I would be able to be released early and hoped that the night went smoothly.
I was hoping to go to bed fairly quickly after Lorenzo so I could get a couple hours of sleep before I needed to feed Giorgia again. I kept imagining building a brick wall, and shoving every emotion of despair, anxiety, sadness, and helplessness behind it. Trying not to feel anything because I knew if I let one tear fall, I would be a mess and I did not want the night nurse to see me like that. She already made me feel like I was a hopelessly inadequate mother, I didn’t need to feel her judgement in the middle of a breakdown.
The nurse came in to give me my pain medicine and handed me 6 pills. I thought that this was strange because I normally only got 2 pills and this was triple my normal amount. I asked her if I was supposed to take all of them and she didn’t even turn from the monitor she was looking at as she sighed, clearly annoyed with me, and told me that of course I was supposed to take all of the pills.
I took 4 pills before she slapped them out of my hand. The pills fell to the floor, and I looked up at her in surprise because she literally just slapped my hand. She was upset and told me I wasn’t suppose to take those pills. She gave me too many pills. I wasn’t suppose to take the extra 4 pills that were in my hand. She asked me why I didn’t say anything and I reminded her that I did in fact ask if I was supposed to take all of the pills. She said I should have been more specific about how many pills there were because she thought I was just asking about the normal amount of pills that I usually take.
She did a horrible job of taking accountability for her mistake and an even worse job of informing me what would happen next. I asked her if it was okay that she gave me too much pain medicine, she said she didn’t know. I asked her if I would still be able to breastfeed with so much pain medicine in my system, she said “I don’t know. It should be fine. I think. I’m not really sure. I don’t know”.
I tried as best as I could to hold my tears in but I couldn’t. I started to cry and her entire demeanor changed. She knew she messed up. She knew that I could get her in trouble and she knew that she needed to fix it. She told me she would speak with a doctor and that the doctor would be in to speak with me and we would figure out what to do from there. I was sobbing uncontrollably at this point. I had enough. I wanted to go home, I never wanted to see that nurse again.
I am incredibly disappointed in myself for not advocating for myself more. The nurse asked if she could hug me because she could tell that I was “struggling”. That was the last thing I ever wanted from that nurse. I didn’t want any false sympathy or love. She was only wanting to hug me to assuage her own guilt. I didn’t have it in me to tell her no. I didn’t want to make her feel bad. I understand that mistakes happen. I now realize that I can be kind, while still advocating for myself. If I could redo that moment over, I would think about my feelings and how I was feeling in that moment more than how she was feeling.
I would have denied her hug. In that moment in time I didn’t want to be touched by anybody. I only wanted my husband. I would have told her to get her superior, then I would have explained how from the first night she hid my call button and told me I wasn’t allowed to ask for help anymore, ripped my catheter our with zero warning, and overdosed me on medication after I had asked her if she was sure I was supposed to take this much. I would then tell them to put a new nurse in our room, or to put me in a new room because I needed a nurse that I could trust and one that treated me with basic human decency.
None of that happened, though I wish it did. I stayed in the same room, with the same nurse, except she had a “change of heart” and attitude and suddenly wanted to be very helpful and kind. Immediately after the nurse left to talk with the doctor, I texted Lorenzo telling him what happened. He wanted to come back and make a scene, requesting that I be changed rooms and that he was to stay with me overnight from now on. Making a scene was the last thing that I wanted so I convinced him I was fine and that there wasn’t anything we could do and that I would see him in the morning.
That was the longest night of my life. All of the babies were crying. I would finally get Giorgia back to sleep just to have one of the babies cry and wake her up. I didn’t sleep at all. I cried the entire night and Giorgia woke up from midnight to 4:30 am to eat. I was exhausted, miserable, and desperate. I wanted out. My milk was changing from colostrum to milk and thats why she was cluster feeding. I had no help and I was exhausted. I was falling asleep holding her and then jolting awake because I was terrified of dropping her or suffocating her while she ate.
When I was finally able to get Giorgia to unlatch from breastfeeding the nurse came in and asked how I was doing and if she could help me. Up until this point she never had come in to ask if I needed help with anything or to see how I was doing. Not even on the first night. I was annoyed because I should have been treated this way from the beginning.
I told her that I hadn’t slept all night because all Giorgia wanted to do was breastfeed or cry. She told me she could watch Giorgia for a little bit since she wasn’t too busy at the moment. They don’t have a nursery that you could send your babies to in the hospital. The babies stay with the mother the entire time. I got 45 minutes of uninterrupted sleep before the nurse came back in and said she had things to do and that she couldn’t watch her anymore.
By that time it was already morning and they were handing out the breakfast trays. When we were eating breakfast we would have a nurse come question us to see if we were ready to be discharged early. This is what I had been waiting for, and I hoped that she would discharge me because of the awful night I had. In my brain it made sense. I had an awful night, the nurse was awful, and I would receive more help and be more relaxed at home. Therefore I should be sent home. Instead it had the opposite effect. I was told that since it was a rough night I needed to stay another day and we would reevaluate in the morning. I hadn’t stopped crying the entire night or when I talked to the discharge nurse. By the time Lorenzo came up I had calmed down just to see him and burst into tears again.
Again, Lorenzo took control during the day. He changed every diaper, held her when she was fussy, got me snacks and food, and waited on my every need. I slept the day away, waking only when I needed to feed her. The day nurse was an absolute angel. She was so helpful and took such good care of me and Lorenzo. I even asked her if she could stay at night to help me, but unfortunately she didn’t work night shifts.
The next night I don’t remember. I really don’t. I think I was so exhausted I just did everything half asleep. I don’t remember anything other than when I talked to the discharge nurse the next morning I put on my happiest, brightest, smiliest face and convinced her that I was ready to go home. I was discharged a couple hours later.
I was on cloud 9. I have never ever been so happy to return home. I left the hospital looking like Miss Trunchbull, wearing a green striped dress, white compressions socks and black crocs, and I didn’t even care. We didn’t have a car so we had to take a taxi and on the way to the taxi people stared at me like I was insane. I was dressed insane. I know. I literally did not care though. I was finally getting out! I was finally free!
We got in the taxi and I immediately wanted to call for a different one. The entire car smelled of cigarette smoke and my baby’s first breath of fresh air was cigarette smoke. I didn’t want the driver to feel bad though, so we got in anyway and just prayed that it would be a very, very, very fast ride. I sat in the back with Giorgia, full of anxiety. I kept my hand on her chest to make sure she was breathing. Her head was incredibly malformed, from her position in my belly. She looked like the crystal skull on Indiana Jones. When she was in her carseat it would push her chin to her chest and I worried that it would make it difficult for her to breathe. We got home without any incidents and this is where, I believe, my true postpartum experience happened.
After the hospital postpartum was magical. I loved every moment of it. During my pregnancy I had pre-natal depression. I was completely apathetic, not happy, but not sad, just numb. I felt like I couldn’t feel any emotions and I was experiencing the world through a glass box. I could see everything happening around me, but I couldn’t feel or hear it. Nothing could touch me. After delivering Giorgia and finally getting back home it was as if I had taken a hammer to that glass box and everything came rushing back in. I could feel and hear it all again.
The day after I got home, I was already going on walks. We would walk by the beach and watch the waves at the lookout point. We never went far, I still walked a bit bent over and was extremely slow, but I honestly think that is why I was able to heal so well and so fast. Getting out of the house to walk 5 minutes to the lookout point did wonders for me.
I would wake up every morning with the sun, lay Giorgia on the couch cushion and make sausage, bacon, eggs, and pancakes. We would listen to music and sing, and I would drink my tea while soaking in the sun. We napped all day, the midwives would visit us at our house and do all of their checks on my living room floor. It was magical. I honestly loved every moment of it.
My parents came to visit 2 weeks after I had Giorgia. I made them take a trip to the Cliffs of Moher because I felt guilty that they came all the way to Ireland and would just be staying with us at our house and wouldn’t be able to see anything else. I also took them on a tour of Dublin. We walked down all of the streets showing them all of the important sights to see. My mom was shocked that I was able to be up and moving about and that I even wanted to take them to Dublin. It took a lot of convincing on my part because they didn’t think I should have been up and moving around so much. I felt so good I didn’t even care.
I know that many women who have had c-sections have not had experiences like mine. I remember seeing an influencer talk about how after her c-section she had to put a garbage bin by her bed so she could pee in it because it was too painful to even walk to the bathroom. Every woman’s postpartum experience is different. Please do not take my experience and think that is how it is supposed to be, cause I promise you my experience is an outlier.
I honestly believe that I was just so happy to finally feel like myself again I didn’t even notice anything else. I honestly never felt pain. My incision never hurt me, ever. The rude nurse even told me that the strong pain meds they gave me were only for emergencies. I was only supposed to take them if I was in extreme pain. I never was in pain so I never took them. Instead when the midwives came and asked if I was taking all my medicine I told them that I was only taking ibuprofen like the doctor said to, but that I didn’t need the pain medicine they prescribed me since I wasn’t in extreme pain.
They looked at me like I had suddenly sprouted a second head. I was actually supposed to take the prescribed medicine the entire time along with ibuprofen. They told me that women normally can’t even function if they don’t take that pill and that they didn’t understand how I could be going on walks and feeling no pain if I wasn’t taking the pain medicine. They told me that they didn’t care if I felt fine and that my incision never hurt, I still had to take the pain medicine that was prescribed.
My postpartum experience was pure bliss for me. Though I did feel like it took an extremely long time for my body to feel normal again. My knees always ached, and I would get a stinging pain in my spine where they gave me my spinal block when I would work out, even 4 months after I had given birth. It took me a long time to build my strength back up, and I will be honest, I didn’t feel “back to normal” until about 18 months postpartum. That is a long time. Some women feel “normal” after 6 weeks. I didn’t. Mentally yes, physically, not at all. It is a huge reason why I enrolled in a yoga teacher training course. I felt so disconnected from my new, postpartum body and its capabilities and I didn’t know how to connect with it again.
I still wonder if my body will ever feel like it did pre-baby. As of now, it’s still very different and I still have many goals I want to accomplish. I am happy where I am though. I go on 5km runs, I lift weights, do yoga, and run after my daughter. I may never be able to do a back hand spring again, but I’m not dancer anymore, so let’s be honest… it doesn’t really matter.
I get curious what my future pregnancies will look like. Will I get prenatal depression again? Will I get postpartum depression? Will my recovery be just as easy? Will I need a c-section again? I honestly don’t know, but I do know that I will definitely do things differently for my future pregnancies. I will advocate more for myself, and not care so much about hurting others feelings. I will give myself grace and know that however my next pregnancy and postpartum is I am strong enough to go through it.
I hope that you can learn from my experience. That if you have a rude nurse you will think of me and what I didn’t do, and you will do the opposite. I hope you will advocate for yourself. Whether you are pregnant, giving birth, or even just going to the doctor for a sore throat. I hope that you don’t take my postpartum experience and think that yours will be the exact same, or that it should be the same. I hope you give yourself grace and space and all the time that you need to heal physically, and if needed, mentally.
Thank you for taking the time to read my story. For reaching out, connecting with me, and sharing your stories with me. I treasure it so much. I love hearing women’s stories, and you’re stories are meant to be heard and shared. I love connecting with you and building a kinship and a sisterhood with you. I think you are extraordinary and so much stronger than you think. With every fiber of my being, thank you, thank you, thank you.
