Jack’s Birth Story

I found out that I was pregnant with Jack two weeks after my mom died. I remember going to meet my brother at my mom’s apartment to sort through her things and feeling very nauseous. This was not the kind of nauseated you feel when something terrible happens, to be honest I think I was still too numb to feel that, but the first trimester kind of nausea. I took a pregnancy test later that day and to my surprise it was negative. A week later I still felt off, so I decided to take another test and it confirmed my suspicions…it was positive.

It’s a strange feeling to experience joy during a time of sadness. We had been trying for several months so I was by no means shocked that I was pregnant, but the timing of it was a little shocking. It was so much to process at once, and the nausea, oh the nausea! I was SO sick. Eleanor was a little over two years old and I had her full time, plus I was still working part time, oh and my mom had just died. It was a lot, to say the least.

My pregnancy was otherwise normal, and once the nausea finally ended, I could open my fridge again. Life was starting to get a little easier. At 20 weeks we went for my ultrasound to check on baby and find out the gender. A boy! One of each, a boy and a girl, I felt so lucky. My ultrasound also revealed that my placenta was covering my cervix. Nothing to be too concerned about for now, but I would need to have another ultrasound in my third trimester. No big deal.

I should mention that I had an emergency c-section with Eleanor. She was posterior facing and just would not come out despite me pushing for almost five hours. So with Jack I was debating between a scheduled c-section or trying for a v-back. I was almost a little relieved to hear that if my placenta stayed over my cervix I would have to have a c-section, the decision was sort of made for me.

At 32 weeks I went for another ultrasound. My cervix had not moved and I was diagnosed with placenta privea, a condition where your placenta implants itself low in your uterus covering your cervix. I was a little worried when I heard this, but from what I understood it just meant I would need to be careful for the rest of my pregnancy. I would need to watch for bleeding and I would require a c-section, but then the ultrasound tech brought in a radiologist and this is when things got scary. She explained to me that it looked like I may have a condition called placenta accreta as well as placenta privea. I had never heard of placenta accreta before, my head was spinning and I just kept hearing the words “catastrophic”, “massive blood loss” and “life threatening” repeated to me. I remember leaving the appointment in tears wondering if I was going to die during childbirth.

So for those of you, like myself, who don’t know what placenta accreta is, it is a serious pregnancy condition where the placenta attaches itself too deeply to the uterine wall. Normally your placenta will detach from your uterus very easily during delivery, but with placenta accreta trying to remove the placenta from the uterine wall can cause dangerous hemorrhaging during delivery. This meant that I would not only need to have a c-section, but that it would have to be soon, no later than 37 weeks pregnant, I would now be delivering at a different hospital, one that could handle high risk surgeries (with lots of extra blood on hand,) and I would have to have a vertical incision from my bellybutton down to my pubic bone, and, the scariest part, I would likely need to have a hysterectomy after the birth.

This is when I started googling vertical c-section scars. I cried. I don’t mean to be vain but knowing I was going to have such a large scar on my stomach was heartbreaking. I liked my stomach, I remember my husband once telling me it was his favourite part of my body, now I was going to have a massive scar in the middle of it. My mom would have been horrified. And what about the recovery? A *normal* transverse c-section recovery is not easy, this was going to be much worse, and so was the surgery.

A routine c-section is typically quite simple and pretty quick. Baby is usually out within the first 15 minutes of the surgery and then you have that wonderful baby to snuggle while they close you up and you’re on your way. I remember nursing Eleanor while they stitched me back together. But this surgery would not be like that. It would not be quick, it would not be simple. It was complicated and dangerous and pretty uncommon.

We scheduled the surgery at 36.5 weeks, I met with the doctors, the anesthesiologist, and a nurse. They walked me through how it would all go and the plan was made. Then at just under 36 weeks I started bleeding. Baby had to come out. I had been instructed to call the hospital immediately if this happened, to call my midwife and even told at one point to call 911 if I was out of the house. I had been given paperwork about my condition that I had to carry around with me everywhere I went. So we went to the hospital, it was a Friday evening and the OB that does these types of surgeries had gone home. The OB that was on call didn’t want to touch me with a ten foot pole and sent me home. I wasn’t bleeding very heavily and she told me to monitor it. This seemed strange.

My dad (who is a retired family doctor and has delivered hundreds of babies) was supposed to fly in from Ontario the day before my scheduled surgery, but being the wonderful man that he is he dropped everything and got on a plane the minute I called to tell him I had been bleeding.

Saturday morning when I woke up I was still bleeding. I called the hospital again and they rushed me in. This time there was another doctor on call who seemed much more comfortable with performing the complicated surgery. Since it was the weekend, they had to call in a new team of people. Things were not going according to plan. The anesthesiologist that I ended up with was terrible. The plan had been that I would be awake during the surgery. I would need to have spinal epidural freezing because a spinal block would not last long enough during such a long surgery. Then, once baby was born, if my placenta would not detach and if they would need to perform a hysterectomy, they would put me to sleep. I wanted to be awake for the birth of my child. I couldn’t imagine being asleep and missing this experience, despite being terrified. This was something myself and the entire surgical team that I had met with had agreed on, but this anesthesiologist disagreed. He wanted to put me to sleep and be done with it. He didn’t (I assume) want the hassle of having to monitor my anesthesia for hours on end. Thankfully my dad was there for this conversation and he also insisted I be awake during the delivery and convinced him that this is how it would be done.

Walking into surgery is scary. Getting an epidural needle when you’re not in active labor and dying for that pain relief is really scary. Doing it all alone, is terrifying. Andrew was not allowed to be in the room with me, he could come in when they were ready to take the baby out and he would have to leave immediately after. It took four hours. I had to have stents (tubes) inserted into my groin with balloons attached to the end of them to prevent hemorrhaging. I was strapped to the table with my arms stretched out on either side of me and several tubes in each. The room was filled with a lot of people and a lot of blood. It was the longest four hours of my life, I had a reaction to the epidural and my entire body shook and shivered the entire surgery, I was SO thirsty, I can’t even begin to explain how thirsty I was, at one point I remember begging for water but they aren’t allowed to give you any, and I was extremely nauseous. Finally Andrew came in, I was so grateful to see his face, but that relief was pretty brief. They started cutting me open, a sharp horrific pain shot through my body. I could feel it…I COULD FEEL THEM CUTTING ME OPEN.

As I mentioned I have had a c-section before. I know what the pressure feels like, I know what the tugging feels like, I even have a high pain threshold. This was not pressure, this was pain. I was screaming in pain, I wanted to be put to sleep, but by this point there was a new anesthesiologist in the surgery and thankfully he was wonderful. He kept repeating “your baby is coming your baby is coming.” I closed my eyes and tried to remind myself that labor is painful, I survived that once and I will survive it again. 

Then we met Jack. He was so beautiful, an absolutely perfect little boy. The pediatrician held him close to me for a moment to say hello, my sweet boy, but he was struggling to breathe and needed to be taken to the NICU. Once they took him away I became overwhelmed with nausea and started to dry heave, and we still needed to deal with the placenta.

Turns out, the placenta didn’t need to be dealt with. I had a feeling that I didn’t have accreta I just knew it. I had had an MRI after my possible diagnosis and it showed that the chance of accreta was pretty unlikely, but they insisted I have this surgery, to be safe. Part of me wishes I had pushed more for a normal c-section, I could have avoided the trauma of this surgery, because in the end my placenta detached easily. In the moment I felt so relieved, the surgery was over and I didn’t have to have a hysterectomy, but now I’m left with a large scar down my stomach and a very traumatic birth. 

Jack spent eleven days in the NICU after he was born, I was able to stay in the hospital with him for five of those days. The rest of the time I spent commuting back and forth to the hospital to feed and spend time with Jack.

Now this part is a little TMI so please feel free to skip it…
On the day that I was discharged from the hospital I went back to my mother in law’s house where Eleanor and Andrew had been staying. We had dinner and then I went to use the washroom. While going to the bathroom I felt something coming out of my vagina. I obviously did not have a vaginal birth so you can imagine the confusion and horror I felt as something came out of my body. It was a sponge. There was a sponge left in my body for FIVE DAYS. To this day I’m still not sure why there was a sponge inserted into my vagina for the surgery, but for whatever reason that particular sponge was not part of the surgical count that they did to ensure nothing had been left inside of me. I was horrified. I called the hospital and explained what happened. Since I was no longer a patient I had to go through emerge and be readmitted to the hospital. I brought the sponge with me. Once I was admitted I had to be examined and x-rayed to check for any other objects that may have been left in my body. Thankfully there were none. Once I was done I made my way up to the NICU to feed my baby.

The next day I passed an enormous blood clot, the size of my fist. Up until this point, I didn’t experience much postpartum bleeding. Now I knew why. The sponge was blocking it.

In the end, I am fine. I have a healthy, happy sixteen month old boy. He was able to breastfeed and I have recovered from surgery. I am still traumatized by the experience. I still hate the scar on my stomach. I dress differently now because clothing irritates my scar. I look at my body differently and the confidence I once had has shifted. I wish I had stood up for myself more knowing that it was so unlikely that I had placenta accreta, but I also understand the mentality of being safe. Had I had it and they were not prepared for it, I could have died. But I didn’t die. I’m healthy and I have a healthy baby boy and for that, I am grateful.