Why People Go Mad: Part Four

Part 4.1: The birth story

Content note: This post contains a graphic description of medical procedures, near maternal death, a lot of blood, mentions of baby loss, mentions of birth injury and trauma, and medical mistreatment and mismanagement. Please feel free to give it a miss if you need to. 

Just before the baby arrived, at the start of June, a damning report was published about birth trauma and injury in the UK. It was all over the news for several days – every time I thought I had avoided it, it popped up somewhere unexpectedly. As well as being on the news, Instagram in its infinite wisdom thought I might want to see a young woman tapping her fingernails together and reading out the report’s key findings, and a surprising number of people imagined that I might want to talk about it. I couldn’t stop myself reading several opinion pieces about it, in the same way I couldn’t stop myself reading the plot summary of Hereditary on Wikipedia, and then, again in much the same way, spent several days trying to expunge the contents from my brain. It turned out that while this report was the absolute last thing I should have read given the circumstances, its contents were frightening but abstract. The excellence of the maternity unit where I had my antenatal care turned out to have shielded me from the crisis of maternal health care, which is a cultural crisis as well as a practical one. I am able, over four months later, to think and write clearly about what happened. Thinking positively, I am still alive, and for the most part I’m fine. The baby is enormous, cheerful and healthy. He makes wonderful faces. Another positive: for many moons now, I haven’t given one single thought to the plot of Hereditary, because I have now efficiently replaced it with something else to lie awake and think about.