When Birth Doesn’t Go as Planned: Navigating Trauma and Healing After the Unexpected

In this episode we talked with guest speaker Rachel about her traumatic birth experience due to preeclampsia. We talk about what it is like to navigate a traumatic birth and provide recommendations on how to cope and heal afterwards. If you are struggling to process an unexpected or traumatic birth, this episode is for you.

Blog post: https://www.functionalfourthtrimester.com/blog

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

Welcome to Functional Fourth Trimester, a podcast created to support new parents as they return to daily life after having a baby.

SPEAKER_02 0:12

Each episode will talk through common postpartum challenges, share practical education and strategies, and hear from real parents and healthcare professionals along the way.

SPEAKER_01 0:22

Whether you're listening during a feeding, a walk, or a quiet moment, this space is for you. I'm Lauren.

SPEAKER_02 0:28

And I'm Melissa, and we're excited to jump right into today's topic.

SPEAKER_01 0:39

You can plan and prepare for every detail of birth, but what happens when it doesn't go as planned? When the unexpected takes over and fear replaces excitement. Today we're talking all about the realities of traumatic and unexpected birth experiences and what comes after.

SPEAKER_02 0:56

I'm happy to introduce our guest today, Rachel. She's a mom to one beautiful daughter and a pediatric occupational therapist from Richmond, Kentucky. We are so glad to have you join us today, Rachel. So welcome, Rachel.

SPEAKER_01 1:10

Thank you. I'm excited to be here. Yeah, welcome. We are so happy that you're here joining us today. I would love to start off talking a little bit about your birth experience and kind of what made it either traumatic or unexpected for you.

SPEAKER_00 1:24

Yeah, so I had my daughter at 36 weeks. Uh, she got evicted, basically. I went pre-ecleptic. And so it was kind of crazy. So I birthed on a Thursday. It was on New Year's Day. And so on that was a Thursday. So on that Monday, I had an OP appointment. My blood pressure was perfectly fine. And then by Tuesday night, I was being admitted, and my blood pressure was 160 over, I want to say the bottom was in the 90s. It was really fast. So that was um very unexpected. It just kind of went from zero to 100 really fast. And then we just went from there. But uh it was a little bit wild. So we were slacking a little bit and hadn't even packed our hospital bag and everything. We did have our car seat installed, thank goodness. But I just made my husband pack us a bag really fast. You only pack like one shirt, two shirts for himself a time. So we got to our hospital and I started getting admitted at 11 p.m. on that Tuesday, labored that whole time induction through to Thursday, and then Thursday on New Year's Day. Uh it was 4 43 a.m. I birthed my daughter. I noticed at home that my blood pressure was high. And just having a medical background, I was like, no, we're I'm gonna get triage. That's not right. The uh phone triage lady just said, you know, you're probably stressed, just sit down for a little bit. I was like, no, I'm my my top number is 160. It was going into the 170. So I booked it up to the hospital with my husband and got triaged. And um, I just got admitted, and that was that. So then they started me on magnesium, and that was the time. Magnesium was not fun, it burns really badly, and it makes you feel um not right, basically mentally. It makes you kind of out of it, spacey, and so I didn't have any idea what was going on the whole time, and then it also makes you really warm semi-room. I probably had it set on like 55 degrees, like it was very cold in there, and I was just burning up.

SPEAKER_02 3:48

But I have a question, Rachel, for a mom who is maybe listening to this who has is pregnant and hasn't had her baby. Can you or do you understand why they put you on magnesium? Just yeah, like okay.

SPEAKER_00 4:02

Yeah, so uh magnesium is a neuroprotective, it protects your brain from stroke seizure risk. And so when you have that high blood pressure, it is preventative basically to help that protect your brain from that high pressure. And so magnesium is just it's a helper in that, but the side effects are can be kind of crazy, just hot flashes and feeling a little silly, but yeah, so I was in labor Tuesday, Thursday, um, I birthed, and so that Wednesday I was just totally in labor the whole time. I have a lot of memory loss from just how exhausted I was in labor. Just I had this lovely birth plan where I was gonna go unmedicated and I was gonna do all the things and I was wanting to push squatting, all these fun things. No, I I tapped to that, I tapped out of that really fast, which is okay as long as baby is safe and mom is safe. I always knew that parts of my birth plan might not, you know, come to fruition, and that's okay. But your your birth plan is just hopes and wishes for your birth. Um, you can't fully, you know, plan birth. Baby has its own. Your body and your baby have their own plans and you may or may not be aware of them.

SPEAKER_01 5:26

So yeah. Amazing. Thank you so much for sharing all that information with us. Yeah. I think uh it's it's wild that on Monday at your appointment, blood pressure was all good, and then the next day it just so much changes changed so fast.

SPEAKER_00 5:42

It was it was insane how fast it changed. And I had noticed my blood pressure normally runs insanely low, and my heart rate too. I normally run in the 110s, 100s, maybe on my top number. My bottom low, my bottom number can be in the 60s, 70s. I really I run really low. And then my heart rate resting is usually in the 40s or 50s. Well, not really 40s, that's more sleep, but my heart rate in resting is normally in the 50s.

SPEAKER_01 6:14

So I'm glad that you like knew your body so well to know that it wasn't normal for you. And so, like when you're on the phone with the triage nurse, you're like, no, this is actually concerning. This is yeah way above my normal. And I think just having your background and that knowledge is really helpful to be able to understand and like advocate for, no, something might be up.

SPEAKER_00 6:36

I think that saved me a little bit because I mean the phone triage lady isn't with you in person, they don't know anything about your history other than what you tell them, and that's just a diagnosis name. And so they they try their their best without being able to physically see you, but at the same time, I I knew something was wrong. I felt bad, and so I'm uh you know yourself best, and um sometimes it's fine, and I hope I that's a good thing if everything's fine, but if it's not triage is always there in person, you know, you can if if nothing's wrong, then nothing's wrong and you just go home. But I'm very glad I went in because I had a baby.

SPEAKER_02 7:16

Yeah, it's great how you said you know your body best because that's very true. And you mentioned earlier how you're you know that you ran low with your blood pressure. So maybe what was within the like normal safe range was not actually normal or safe for you. So you being aware of that and going in, I think is amazing. Um that's definitely a New Year's Eve and New Year's Day that you're not gonna forget for many reasons. Your experience, but also you brought a new life into the world. I am curious to hear more about the memory loss portion that you just talked about. Like, what did that look like? Was it like longer lasting, or you know, kind of how did you overcome that?

SPEAKER_00 8:00

It's it's very interesting. So for this podcast, I had to sit there and go on my notes app and my phone and recount my birth and really try to remember everything. And I remember the big parts. I remember, you know, labor earlier. It's mostly the middle part that's fuzzier and then right after birth is really fuzzy too. So I got just so exhausted from labor. It was just really hard on my body, and I just it was very exhausted. And so I think that might have something to do with it, but I birth trauma is funny because people can do trauma Olympics all day. Like I there's people out there that my birth would have been the ideal for them. Like there's people that might not even consider this like super traumatic compared to what they went through. There's definitely way worse scenarios, but your story is your story, also. And so mine was, I think the trauma side of it was the loss of the control for me, and then just having basically everything turn the opposite of thought how I thought it might go, but also just how bad my body was. I was just throwing up bile every time I moved or anything, every time I looked at a light or anything, I would throw up. I threw up, I counted because out of spite, I guess. And I threw up, I stopped counting at 35 times and I had a 29-hour labor. So it was rough. And then um just some my my public floor was very, very high tenicity, very tight. And so the muscles didn't want to give, and I had trouble relaxing them, and so that was another thing that I think had me tear pretty bad. I tore internally as well as externally on the inside and outside, and then there's things I still don't even remember where I know it was scary, and I can't even recount it. And I think that's part of the memory loss, and so I think the memory loss is partly due to how scary it was health-wise for me, and how high my blood pressure got might have influenced it at one point around my birth. It was either right before or right after I they didn't tell me what my blood pressure number was, but I looked over at the monitor and uh my my vision was blurry because of the magnesium, but I saw a two on the top, so I know I was in the 200s, and so I don't know what it was, but it wasn't good. And so that might have also contributed to it just not being your best at all physically. It's very interesting.

SPEAKER_02 10:44

There's yeah, you said something that I I want to repeat. You said your story is your story. I think it's really important because sometimes as a mom, you might try to discount your traumatic experience. And I think any experience can be traumatic if it's not even just what you're envisioning or planning. It turned into something that you didn't imagine. So, even the smallest thing, I believe that we should not discount those things that to us felt traumatic, that we weren't prepared for, that we didn't expect, and be able to process those, not push them down inside and be like, well, somebody else had a much more traumatic experience than me, and I'll like I should not even consider this traumatic because it wasn't that bad compared to other people. It is so true that your story is your story, and you need to process it in the way that you need to process it. And trauma doesn't have a specific box, it fits inside. You don't have to fit a mold for your story to feel traumatic to you.

SPEAKER_00 11:48

Yeah, that's such a good point. And that that helped me in the early postpartum because in the first week or so I was like thinking to myself, I think I'm kind of shocked from this and kind of scarred, but I don't know if this fits the mold of birth trauma. Everybody is so different and everyone processes things so differently, and your birth is your own. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:12

You kind of started touching on my next question about like in the days and weeks that followed your birth, like, were there ways that you noticed it was impacting you, whether that was physically, emotionally, kind of just like how did you see it kind of carrying over into postpartum?

SPEAKER_00 12:27

Yeah, so I didn't realize kind of how scarred I was until I got home. And I was pre-eclimptic for a while after birth, the pre-eclimpsia foundation. I also want to shout out to them because they gave me a lot of resources and information that just helps my my journey. But uh pre-e doesn't necessarily end whenever you birth, it ends when your blood pressure goes back down. And even being in healthcare, I I work with pediatrics, but I work once they're here, not in the birth space. And so I I actually didn't really know that. And so that was one thing that helped me advocate for myself and get on the appropriate medications, everything. I was really weak whenever I came home. I I felt like I could barely even sit up, and family would want to visit and everything, and I wanted them to, but I could I realized I had an hour limit and then I would have to lay down and make myself sleep because I just I would physically be so exhausted. But things kind of started trickling in and realizing things in the days right when I got home and I was trying to go around the house or just remember my birth and talking to family and them just asking, How did your birth go? I would realize I couldn't remember an hour-long, two-hour-long segment and just I don't know, ask my husband. I don't, I don't remember it. But that's where I kind of realized, I think, that it was harder than I realized. And birth is inherently to your body, even if it's not mentally a traumatic process, uh minimum to your pelvic floor, even if you don't tear, it's just that's hard on your body, and it's hard to go through mentally, even if everything goes to plan, it's still a hard thing to do. It's very labor-intensive, no pun intended on your body. And so it just um at first I thought it was just birth being normal but hard, and then I I realized it was a little bit more than that, I think.

SPEAKER_01 14:41

Yeah, definitely. And I think you bring up a good point about like having to reconcile with not having certain things happen like you wanted them to, especially like as you're postpartum and you're trying to think back and like remember all these things that happened, and then being like, Oh, but I didn't get to, you know, do this or this, like you said, like with the different positions you were hoping to do. So I think that's part of it too, is it can be hard to kind of reconcile and like almost like grieve the birth experience that you wanted and didn't get.

SPEAKER_00 15:10

Yeah, yeah. There's one more I wanted to add to that. I just remembered that was something else I forgot and I just remembered. But after my birth, uh my baby was so small at birth and she was only four pounds 13 ounces, but she was just so little bitty that her weight dropped, and they all do a little bit. It's okay. No one well, I was gonna say no one told me. They probably didn't. I was so fatigued that I didn't receive it, but I wasn't aware that they drop so much at birth, and they can drop up to 10% of their body weight and be completely fine. My baby dropped a little bit more than that, and my milk hadn't came in yet because she was so early. I had I had prepared all these things mentally. If I was going to labor on time at 40, 39, whenever weeks that if I had gone into spontaneous labor, I wanted to collect colostrum beforehand, do all the things, be prepared. No, didn't get that, but that's okay. And so I didn't have any colostrum. And I in my post-labor haze, I had the biggest panic attack of my life just because I was so tired and I thought that I was causing my baby's weight drop, even though the nurses were like, it's okay, it's okay. We have donor milk, it's all right, she's she's gonna be fine. And I thought I was hurting her for not being able to give her only my milk. And I just, you know, when you've been enduring physical work for then 29 hours and not really resting and everything, I was just out of it mentally. I was so tired, and I just, you know, you're not fully reasoning in that space, and that's okay too. You gotta give yourself grace. And that's what I learned in birth that I had probably the biggest panic attack ever because my I just couldn't make her milk and I thought I was hurting her. Uh, and after that I realized that man, maybe maybe I was impacted a little bit um from just everything going on too, where I was like, maybe okay, maybe this was really scary, and I have to let myself admit that. But that was part of it too, just letting myself realize and be okay with the fact that it was a scary birth.

SPEAKER_02 17:32

But yeah. It's so important that you realize that. I'm I'm sure there's a lot of little moments where you continue to realize it, you know, and going home after having this and having to stay in the hospital as well, and that fear of like not being able to nourish your baby appropriately, all those things that come with both part, and you know, are different stories. And then earlier you were talking about when you got home that you were feeling weak and not really knowing how to support, you know, do all the things that you needed to do. You could take care of your baby. What things did you do moving forward to balance, you know, understanding as you slowly understood what you could, what you couldn't do, were there resources that you felt were helpful, people that were helpful, things that you made yourself kind of set aside that way you could balance letting your body heal, because I think that's many times something that we forget after we have a baby. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 18:27

Definitely. There was a point where I had to physically make myself nap. And I want to say it was the second or third day postpartum. It my husband just did the entire night and like put me to bed. He's like, you have to rest or your blood pressure is going to go high again, even more than it is. And it's it's funny because I have my OT brain. I know about all the things, I know about fatigue, I know about grading your work, I know about all the things, but when you're in it, it just kind of goes out the window, and that's okay too. But I wanted to do do do, which is, I think, also funnily an OT thing a little bit. But I I had to make myself rest, basically. I had to let myself use my support system and let my baby be with my family, be with my husband or our parents, his or mine, whoever's, or just whoever was over in that moment. I had to let myself just sleep. And then uh I also just had to allow myself to slow down essentially.

SPEAKER_02 19:38

I didn't that's so awesome that you got to the point where you're giving yourself grace and um that you accepted that you did have a traumatic birth experience no matter what anybody else's might look like. So I know as we're coming to a close on this episode today, what is something like a piece of advice that you would give to a mom that has maybe gone through something similar? So like in that moment right now, what would be one of your biggest suggestions?

SPEAKER_00 20:09

I would say it's okay if it's hard, even if you have the most supporting family like I do. I have parents on both of our sides, I have an amazing supportive husband and all the things. And so uh I and I never felt unsupported. I just felt the effects of man, this is hard, and that's okay. Even if you have all the things, and my family is the best I could ever ask for, and it was still hard, and that's okay. And you have to give yourself grace, you have to give slower than you think. And one thing that helped me is just literally staring at my baby that just to be proud of yourself a little bit that you got through all that, no matter what your birth is, even if it's not even anything going off plan, even if you have the most stellar birth, even if you have a way scarier birth than mine, there's you know a lot of medical things. People could have a serious thing that endangers their life, that they could have something that endangers their baby's life. I came home with me and my baby, and I was very grateful for that. And otherwise, I mean, relatively healthy, we were stable enough to go home and she had no issues. So I've considered myself very lucky in that, but I also realized that it's okay that my birth was scary. It's it's okay if what you went through was scary, and it's okay to realize that and ask for outside help too.

SPEAKER_01 21:41

Yeah, I love that you're like saying that it's something that you should be so proud of because I think that's so true. It's like getting to the other side of things and realizing and reflecting back on like, oh, but look what I did. Like, look, look what the outcome was. And I love that that's something that you found was really helpful for you. I want to thank our guest speaker, Rachel, for today. For joining us and sharing about her unexpected traumatic birth experience and some things that she found that was helpful in terms of processing that. I hope you all remember that everybody's birth experience is different, and even if it was the smallest little unexpected thing that happened, it still can be a very traumatic experience, and it you're allowed to grieve a birth experience that you didn't get. In the description to this episode, I will attach the blog post link with more information, resources, and our guest speakers' contact information. We thank you all so much for joining us today, and we were glad you're here listening. And we can't wait to talk with you guys next time.

SPEAKER_02 22:49

I hope today's conversation gave you something practical to take into your day or simply remind you that what you're experiencing is normal. Returning to daily life after birth is a process, and support matters.

SPEAKER_01 23:01

However, your day continues from here, be gentle with yourself. You're doing important work. Thanks for listening. We'll meet you back here next time.