Lately, I’ve been investigating the possibilities around home educating. I was watching D at school one day and it suddenly hit me that he would never do all those things that most “normal” children do and to be honest, I don’t want him to. That day, a storyteller came to school and he had every Prep child engaged in his flamboyantly presented tale…. Every child, except for D. While all the children sat there attentively and chimed in when expected, D climbed over the fence, under a chair and swung around the poles in the undercover area. Daniel dances to his own tune, his own rhythm.

The boys have this book that my husband reads to them (now off by heart as he’s read it soooo many times) called “Giraffe’s Can’t Dance”. In the book the giraffe decries his lack of dancing ability but in the end, he discovers that he has his own unique style. He declares that “we all can dance… when we find the music that we love.”

So, I came to a cross roads. Do I send the boys to school next year and watch them struggle or do I just dive in and try out home schooling? L has struggled with boredom this year because he’s not being challenged and can’t navigate the whole social thing because he doesn’t understand how to interpret people’s body language and spoken language for that matter. D has had a great year in Prep with a lovely, compassionate teacher but next year, in grade one, I’ve been told he’ll find it difficult coping with the rigours of learning to sit still, moving from one activity to the next in the space of 20 minutes, writing and reading when he’s only just learning to talk in full sentences.

And there’s a whole other set of questions. How do I home school? There are a myriad of styles. I am learning as I go that my style (or ideal style I should say) is to allow learning to happen naturally rather than doing “lessons” or “teaching school at home”. However, that said, I have one child who thrives on routine and structure.

L is extremely self-directed and he does a lot of extra activities at home with no encouragement from me (that is not to say I don’t encourage him, just that he starts these projects of his own volition). When he gets excited about something, writing, reading and learning the history behind something comes naturally. Lately, its “dragons”. He’s being playing a computer game about dragons where he has to read the instructions and dialogue between characters before he can play different aspects of the game. One morning I came into his room to find it littered with cardboard. He’d made a 3D cardboard dragon and was half way through colouring it in red when he ran out of ink. The next day I found a book at the supermarket called “The Dragon Chronicles’ which had all kinds of pictures and curious facts about fictional dragons. In L’s learning life, I take on the role of facilitator rather than teacher. I help him find information and activities related to whatever it is he is interested in at the time and the learning flows from there.

D, on the other hand is not yet at the stage where he will make things or look up information on the internet. He’ll play games and is learning how to conquer Super Mario Galaxy but he lacks confidence in holding a pen and generally doesn’t do craft activities like L and A do. He will however, sit and play in the dirt for an hour at a time, chattering away to himself. He will play physical games such as “king of the mountain”, “hide and seek”, “What’s the time Mr wolf,” etc. He’ll often engage his younger brother in play and will willingly participate in play scenarios set up by L as well. Because of his language deficits, I wonder if I need to do something more structured for D. I’ve been offered support by his lovely special ed teacher, by his speech pathologist and by his Prep teacher but I’m unsure about the path we’ll take to learning as yet. Is it possible to unschool one child and home school another?

There are two ways to look at unglorious moments. One is to appreciate that they are but fleeting glimpses of one’s failures and another is to regard them as moments of magnificence, which only improve with time and the telling. So, which category would you put the following tale?

An interview with Larry King–1994, East Texas.

Dixon’s head was buried in the Tyler Times while the rest of us listlessly shook off the sleepless night of layout and editing. Suddenly, he looked up at us, like a rabbit caught stealing fruit from the compost heap and threw the paper down on the table for all to see. Larry King was coming to town and Dixon wanted the event covered by the college newspaper.

“I bet we could interview him,” I said excitedly.

“Fat chance of that,” said Lori. “There’ll be hundreds of people there and there’s no way we’ll be able to get a one on one with Larry King at an event like that.”

“Well, we might get a question in,” I said optimistically.

It was settled quickly. Lori would come with me to take photos and we would go as part of the audience in the hopes that we would be picked to ask a question.

All week I stewed about what question I was going to ask Larry if given the chance.

“I think you should ask a question about NAFTA” said Dixon.

“What’s NAFTA?” I asked.

“The North American Free Trade Agreement between the US, Canada and Mexico.”

I’d heard about NAFTA but hadn’t the faintest idea what its significance was. Afterall, I was holed up on a college campus day and night, my nose in one literature book or another and American politics just didn’t seem so relevant to me at the time.

Dixon briefed me on the issues and I thought I was prepared. My aim was to be able to ask one intelligent question. If I could accomplish that, I would know what it felt like to be a real journalist. Unfortunately though, the feeling didn’t last long.

The room was packed by gum chewing cowboys but we managed to get a seat towards the front and positioned ourselves smack bang in the middle so we couldn’t be missed. My strategy to get attention: I wore big hair, bright clothes and bright makeup but failed to consider that in East Texas, that was the norm for many women; so really, we just blended in with the crowd.

Larry’s speech was an account of his life’s story and how he got to be famous, which I’m sure was just riveting for the East Texas audience. He had some choice clichés. “The world is my campus and experience my degree,” he declared to the cowboys and big haired women.

At last it was time for questions. I raised my hand high in the air and looked him straight in the eyes and to my shock and surprise, Larry pointed his finger right at me. My heart raced. I heard myself say, “Thank you Mr King, for coming to Tyler.” He nodded in practiced appreciation. Niceties over, I proceeded to ask my zinger. “My question is about NAFTA.” Larry’s face changed ever so slightly. “Do you agree that US working class families would be disadvantaged by NAFTA?” It sounded simple enough. There was a lot of unrest about NAFTA. At the time many people thought that NAFTA would open ‘pandora’s box’ to allow business to export their manufacturing to cheaper Mexico.

The audience before Larry King was a conservative, blue collar, Texan community of hard drinkers with hard luck and Larry knew it. So his response shouldn’t have surprised me when he said: “Well do you agree?” I froze. “Well, do you?” There was irritation in his voice as he glared at me. Silence as the audience awaited my response. All eyes were on me. I had no idea what to say. In that moment I wished for a cowboy hat to crawl into.

Still staring into the car lights I felt my heart in my throat as I heard myself say “I don’t know.” Then laughter as Larry swiftly put me in my place and went on to denounce the US decision to sign the agreement. I sank back into my chair feeling silly and bare. At the same time I felt exhilarated. No, not a real journalist, not even a shadow of one but at least I could say I interviewed Larry King.

Anxiety. Egg shells. Every word spoken needs to be thoroughly thought through. Eye contact must be maintained. I will myself to do it. I can’t do this. Not today. I am tired. We are waiting in the chiropractor’s office for an appointment. He’s never late. We are always on time and yet there are four people in front of me. L will be waiting for me at school but I must get D to this appointment. He needs it and will be a nightmare if he’s not adjusted. I will be a nightmare too. I need my fix.

I ask for a favour and explain my child will think I’ve abandoned him if I don’t show up at school on time. It’s 40 minutes away. The secretary tells me it isn’t fair to move me up in front of the others. Stares. Glares. I don’t care. I scream at her. I sit down shaking and sobbing. Somebody walks in and sits down. She asks me if I’m okay. I yell at her. “No I’m not okay. Does it look like I’m okay?” Uncomfortable silence follows.

My façade of perfect manners abandons me. It is a like a beast inside I cannot control. It yearns for escape in the tiredness, the fog of busyness that is my life and I lose it. Anger Does Have a Downside. It all resurfaces. I apologise a week later. “It’s okay, everyone has a bad day occasionally,” says the secretary. But I know she won’t forget. Nobody ever does, do they?

I grew up in a very insular church that held on to its followers through authoritarian control. They did a lot of things badly and caused a great deal of damage in people’s lives; so after seven years of disbelief, when I was reeled back into a relationship with God, I deliberately avoided any institution that had even a hint of oppression in the way it functioned. Eventually I found one.

I’ve been going along to my church for about five years now and have at times wondered if I really should be there at all. It’s not a church that is heavy on exacting theology, nor one that is caught up in futile ritual. For some that is off-putting but for me it is a haven. It is not a perfect church (there’s no such thing) but it is a learning community and a community that is learning how to care for each other beyond the two hours of church on Sunday. Recently they had the opportunity to practice on me.

If you’ve read my blog you will know that I have been very sick and that I recently lost my fourth, very wanted baby early in pregnancy due to an ectopic pregnancy.

From the moment my friend Jane received a phone call from Deb (a midwife friend who does not go to our church but who, I am proud to say, has supported me, and many of the women in our church in childbirth as a Doula and Childbirth Educator), she was on the phone to round up prayer and practical support.

Some people don’t believe in the power of prayer. Well, if I had never experienced healing or seen the way prayer makes people feel, I might not too. However, I have been healed and have been nourished by others in this way on several occasions. Earlier in the year I had arthritis that was disabling. My hands were in constant pain and it was spreading to my other joints, my knees, my feet. I knew there was no physical thing I could do to change this condition. So, I asked for prayer. It didn’t happen right away because there were things I needed to process in order to open up to the power of healing (in saying that I know that sounds like BS but read on…). Once I addressed issues in my life that needed attention and forgave people of some insults and hurts that I had held onto, I woke up one morning completely pain free and the pain has not returned.

I could feel the power of this prayer when I went in for surgery. I felt a sense of real peace and when the doctor commented on how remarkably stable I had been during the long surgery, I knew I was being sustained by a force outside of myself.

After I arrived home from hospital, people in my church started to mobilise and I was offered cooked meals, more prayer, offers of help with the boys, even money. In fact, we had so many offers of help that we could not possibly take them all up.

It has been humbling to be the object of such eagerness to serve and to support.

Our world can be a very isolating place and without community, people struggle. I admire the self-sufficient but I’m glad I’m the sort of person that believes in inter-dependency. Self-sufficiency can be so lonely. I’d much rather share my journey with a supportive crowd.

I normally shy away from talking about my beliefs in such a public forum. Half my family is anti-Christian and the other half is more in the fundamentalist Christian camp (I’m considered a leftist Christian… whatever that means) but I wanted to share this story because I believe that having a community of support around you is so important and I wanted to thank my church for putting their words into action and showing love in the most practical way they could.

My middle son D doesn’t ever lie.

Me: “Did you hit your brother?”

D: “Yes”

Me: “Did you eat that last cookie?”

D: “Yes”.

For my eldest son, D’s honesty is a revelation. My eldest has been known to tell some whoppers and went through a spell where he’d tell lies all the time, primarily because he was afraid that if he told the truth, he’d be punished. Thing is, mothers always know and little boys always get found out. Writing lines, going to rooms, naming and shaming… they’ve all failed. But when L discovered that D was let off easier for telling the truth, it finally sunk in and he stopped telling lies.

Lying is actually a sign of high intelligence according to some books I’ve read. It’s not that Daniel is not intelligent. He is. He is just incapable of lying because he sees the world differently. He calls a spade a spade. Everything is literal, factual and real. If it isn’t, it doesn’t exist. That’s not to say that D doesn’t know how to play tricks on someone. He does that very well, just for fun offcourse.

L, who has turned lying into an art form, is perplexed by his brother’s honesty. He sees lying as a quick way to get the parents off his back, as a means to an end. Lying is a strategy. What gets me is that he doesn’t seem to feel the least bit of guilt or remorse, unless he’s found out.

Whenever I’ve told a lie, either intentionally or unintentionally, I feel horrible. I obsess about it and decry my lack of moral fortitude. I try not to lie to my kids but sometimes an easy answer just slips out.

L: “Mum, why can’t I have such and such”

Me: “Because we’re broke and I’d have to sell the car in order to pay for it.”

Well, maybe I don’t go that far but as a parent it can be challenging to be that beacon of morality you want to shine onto your little ones.

Perhaps I should just be content if they appear to catch even a glimmer of that light. Perhaps I should stop expecting perfection of them and myself or perhaps I should just look for the entertainment value in a son who lives in a fantasy world and another who is so grounded in what is real.

Poor communication with the woman in labour can cause a woman to experience birth as traumatic and can even lead some women to describe their experiences in terms of “rape”.

Some might baulk at the use of this word in relation to birth but a recent story published in Birth Matters Journal illustrates so clearly just how devastating poor care can be for women and their families.

It is important to note that the term ‘birthrape’ does not apply to every incidence of trauma and every incidence of poor care. It is not for us to define a woman’s perception of her birth for her. That is something she must do for herself in order to begin the journey of healing.

In saying that, the situation Tania describes in her story “My birth rape experience”, where she is denied the opportunity to discuss the intervention, where she is forcibly held down against her will and cut with a knife without consent, is assault and it happens every day in our hospital system.
The outcry about the actions of Dr Graeme Reeves, the so-called ‘Butcher of Bega,’ has caused a debate about the accountability of the medical boards in protecting the rights of patients. However, nobody sees the wholesale assault of women in the hospital system as anything to be alarmed about and that is a travesty.

When I approached Amnesty International regarding the Birth After Caesarean research trial a couple of years ago, their response was typical. They told me they only dealt with domestic and community violence when they talked about violence against women.

It seems our society has created a cone of silence about what happens in the birth room. Is it that people don’t care or is it that they can’t face the fact that deprivation of liberty, assault and degradation are common occurrences in our hospital system?

That people think it is acceptable to be coerced, manipulated, degraded and assaulted is a shameful indictment of our culture  –Is it any wonder that so many women fear childbirth?

The above editorial is a modified version of one published in the Spring, 2008 edition of Birth Matters Journal. To subscribe, visit www.maternitycoalition.org.au.

I have often felt isolated from the world of motherhood, despite my immersion in it. There are rituals, and rites of passage that most mothers take for granted… like the first words your child speaks or the first outing to the community fair or visit with Santa at the local shopping mall. Our lives revolve around three full-on little boys, one of them who has been diagnosed with Autism. So life is different for us.

Being a parent of a child with Autism is not like being a parent of a child with some visible disability. My child looks normal. It’s only when another child enters his space uninvited or he opens his mouth to speak or his obsessive compulsive behaviour plays out that people see a different side to him. In the first instance, other mothers look shocked and react quite defensively when their child is hit or kicked or worse. In most cases, a quick explanation of my child’s disability suffices to diffuse the situation. In some cases it does not. I’ve had people tell me to control my child, teach him manners (like that means anything to an Autistic child) and I’ve even had a police officer threaten to arrest me for being a negligent mother because my child nearly strayed into the path of an oncoming car in a shopping centre car park. He had told me to buckle my child into our hot car while I loaded the groceries in. What he didn’t know was that my child had a compulsion to jump into the boot while I did that task and would have untangled himself from any Houdini-locked device in a flash despite my best efforts. I’ve had old ladies lecture me on the virtues of leaving my children at home while I do the grocery shopping and I’ve had people yell at my child and reduce him to a catatonic state because they misunderstood his disability for misbehaviour.

Isolation comes in many forms. When Daniel was little I had to pull him out of playgroups, activities and limit outings to manageable events. A sad day for me was being told by another mother that I should stop attending the mother’s group I helped to found in my local area because my child was too aggressive. It was tactfully put to me that my child was ‘obviously stressed and not coping’ and that maybe a smaller group would be ‘more appropriate’. She was concerned for the safety of other children–I got it–but it hurt nonetheless. We were forced out of a network of friends when I badly needed support.

Since that time I have found solace in my friendships with other mothers of Autistic children. My friend Jamie* at my sons’ school summed it up when she said: “I don’t talk to the other mothers outside class. They all sit there and compare their children’s performance and I just don’t fit in. They really don’t give a sh*t!” And that about sums up the experience of motherhood for most of us.

Last year I was privileged to get to know a small group of other mums through Autism Queensland’s (AQ) early intervention program. We met at the school gate each morning (ummm, actually it was more like a locked fortress really) and chatted while our children attempted to play with each other… or was that beat each other up?… It was hard to tell sometimes. Nevertheless, we formed a lovely supportive circle and were there to give hugs and pass the tissues when one of us inevitably was having a crap day. I miss them dearly.

Another opportunity I had to connect with other mothers in my world was at AQ’s Mother’s Camp. It was there I met my beautiful sole sister Jennifer*. At that time I was still coming to terms with and grieving over my child’s disability and many of the mothers at camp had been there done that. Jennifer was about the only person who seemed to meet me where I was at. In some ways, I felt like the other mothers tried to out do each other with their tales of woe in a “who has the most stuffed up life?” competition. Jennifer and I had long conversations about spirituality, childbirth (she was pregnant at the time), shed tears over the movie Sense and Sensibility and spent time appreciating all the little gifts that life had on offer for us.

When I was in hospital recently, Jennifer phoned me to give me some encouragement and shared that her new baby was very sick with a rare form of Leukaemia. However, she was so gracious about it and so strong. It made me want to be stronger and humbled me deeply. I can’t wait to see her again!

I am grateful for the mums and children I have come to know through my journey and grateful for the understanding that comes with experience. However, I still feel jealous of mums who can take their children out to see a show or to a fair, who can feed them regular food without worrying about an additive-induced meltdown, who can do school holiday activities without having to worry about whether or not their child will beat up some poor unsuspecting pre-schooler that happens to stray into their path and without having to worry about vigilantly watching their child all the time in case they run off into the distance, run into traffic or drown in the nearest body of water.

Is it too much to ask to want to do all those things that most mothers take for granted?

*Names changed to protect my friends’ privacy.

The following article was first published in the Winter, 2008 edition of Kindred Magazine (www.kindredmedia.com.au).

The saying “we are our own worst enemies” has never been truer than when applied to conversations about birth.

There’s a lot of unnecessary guilt and blame surrounding birth. Every time a new piece of research hits the press a war of words ensues between polarised stakeholders—obstetricians, midwives, researchers, paediatricians, mothers, fathers and even people who don’t desire to “breed” at all.

Women who’ve had elective caesareans feel defensive because a compelling body of evidence has revealed that elective caesareans for no medical reason are more harmful to babies and mothers than vaginal birth. In addition, recent evidence showing the compounded risks for the mother and any future babies she might have has rocked the obstetric world.

Women who have had good outcomes from caesareans get hot under the maternity bra straps because negative reports about the operation translate as “you’ve made a bad choice,” instead of “you were given bad advice and/or poor support.” So, women take on more guilt because they feel like they’ve been labelled as bad mothers for agreeing to an operation they thought was best for them and their babies.

On the other end of the spectrum, the diminishing number of women who manage to come out of birth unscathed by medical interventions feel defensive too. Their beef is with those pesky too-posh-to-push Lexus drivers and their private obstetricians who declare that anyone who has a vaginal birth is either lucky, stupid, selfish or downright dangerous.

And it doesn’t end there. Women who give birth in hospital feel criticised by women who choose to birth at home. Women who thank their lucky stars their emergency caesarean saved their baby feel it their duty to give other women some perspective. Forums are filled with women telling those who come out of a caesarean birth feeling mugged, raped and left for dead they should just be thankful for a live baby and get over it.

What is missing here? In my six years as an advocate for informed choice in birth I have seen very little empathy from people in general—whether they be mothers, fathers, doctors or midwives. They all have different and personal perspectives on birth but there seems to be very little understanding of what makes birth good or bad and why it matters at all.

If a woman is brave enough to admit that she feels like a train wreck after a caesarean birth she is told to suck it up and get on with looking after her new baby. She is lectured about how lucky she is to live in a first world country where medical intervention saves lives. Yet, how can a woman get over it, if she is never allowed to process something she obviously feels is significant to her? Why should she bottle up her grief and live with the incredible guilt that comes when you feel bad about a life event that is supposed to bring such joy? –More guilt and a ticket to poor mental health with all its repercussions.

Conversely, why is it that we accuse women of being cowards because they are fearful of childbirth. These women need to be listened to, acknowledged and helped. Recent research has shown that more than 43 percent of women who choose elective caesarean have a clinically significant fear of childbirth. The sad truth is that surgery won’t heal the emotional wounds that underly childbirth fear. It can’t be cut away. It needs to be explored. But how often does this happen when the expert listening is a surgeon and not a counsellor or psychologist let alone one who understands the impact of birth?

Perhaps we need to redirect our angst, not at each other but at a health care system that has put birth into hospitals with sick people and turned it into a disease that needs to be contained with machines that go “ping,” time limits, drugs, and surgery.

As someone who was born by caesarean, I know that birth matters. My mother was deeply affected by her experience and I was never allowed to forget it. I’ve also been the train wreck after a nasty caesarean experience, had a good elective caesarean experience and felt the amazing power of normal natural birth. Subsequently, when discussing birth I often feel like the teenager stuck in the middle of arguing parents. It is true I probably wouldn’t be here if my mother hadn’t had her emergency caesarean but I nearly didn’t make it after my eldest son’s avoidable caesarean-gone-wrong left me traumatised and unable to cope. Should I now feel guilty because I’m not grateful for that?

When I did finally give birth normally with my last child I realised how important birth was to me as a woman and a mother. Whether it was that surge of hormones as I drank in my little one’s eyes or the high from finishing the marathon-like labour I don’t know. But I do know it made me stronger to face the challenges mothering has brought and I refuse to feel guilty for wanting every birthing woman to feel like that.

Only a system-wide rethink about how birth is funded and managed can bring about a change in women’s and practitioners’ thinking about birth. When women (and their babies) are at the centre of care rather than passive recipients, when they are clients rather than patients, our predominant conversations about birth might just change from being about how dangerous birth is to how great it should be. And maybe we’ll stop taking the blame for a system that has set us up to feel like it is all our fault. It is time to remove the guilt from birth.

Reference:

Wiklund, I., G. Edman, et al. (2008). Expectation and experiences of childbirth in primiparae with caesarean section. BJOG. 115: 324-331.

Tuesday, 16 September

I could feel myself slipping away. Dizziness took hold of me as I struggled to walk to the toilet, my husband on one side, a ward nurse I don’t even remember now on the other. I could feel the whiteness of my skin, the shallowness of my breath. It was a futile endeavour. I lay back down on the bed, exhausted, unable to move, in pain.

The nurse came in to take my blood pressure. “That’s quite low!” he said. “I think we’d better get you in for that scan.” I had come in that morning at about 10.30am and had been waiting all day for a scan that would tell me whether or not my baby was stuck in a fallopian tube. Why was it taking so long?

He rushed out to see if he could hurry things along. My husband and my three year old Adam left to pick up our other children and try and find a babysitter. I waited there alone.

At about 5pm, a friendly face came to my side. I recognised her—Rebecca*. We’d done a course together at Community Health. We both had sons with Autism.

Rebecca was about to wheel me into the scan room herself when a wardy finally showed up. With the help of a nurse, Rebecca tried to roll me onto my back. My body seized. I couldn’t breathe and started to panic. She quickly called for help. The nurse gave me some oxygen and put a pillow under my right side so that I wasn’t flat on my back. It was better but I still felt pain with every breath.

It was easy to see that something was wrong straight away. There was no obvious baby blob in the uterus but there was something elsewhere. She then did a scan of my upper right side and found two large gall stones and a lot of excess fluid in my peritoneum. She didn’t say what that was at the time but told me the gall stones were benign. Thank goodness for small mercies, I thought to myself.

The ER doctor was called in and shown the damage. I kept asking, “Are you sure?” Rebecca was certain. The pregnancy was ectopic and my right fallopian tube had ruptured. I was bleeding out and didn’t even know it. That’s why I felt so much pain. That’s why I couldn’t breathe. The fluid was accumulated blood.

The registrar was called in and the nurse phoned my husband to come straight back. I began to cry for the baby I would never meet but didn’t understand that the hurrying around was more about saving my life than getting my baby out of me.

Within a short while, my husband and children had gathered around me. My boys looked perplexed, a bit scared. I reassured them that the doctor was going to make me all better. I found out later how scared my eldest was of losing his mum. I have wept many tears thinking about the unthinkable, what would have happened to them if I had died.

A midwife I knew came in and told my husband, Wayne, she’d take the boys home with her for the night so he could stay and wait for me to come out of surgery. Because I was a consumer representative at the hospital, I knew a lot of staff members in Maternity. They all came to see me at one point or another during my stay in hospital. They all offered support and help. It was humbling and deeply felt.

I had no fear of the anaesthetic. I just wanted it to be over. They rolled me on to the table gently and we waited for what seemed like an eternity for the surgeon to walk through the door. I could hear the anaesthetist say that he didn’t want to put me under until he saw the surgeon. I felt like a beached whale, unable to breathe. The surgeon came in and a mask went onto my face. I heard conversation and felt a funny sensation. The talking didn’t stop and I thought, ‘Why is it taking so long? It’s not working” but quickly realised that I had simply slipped into a dreamless sleep and had just been awoken in recovery. It was over, for now.

The registrar came to my bedside in recovery and said, “You are a very lucky young woman. The surgery took a long time, about 1.5 hours. We tried to do the keyhole surgery but there was too much blood so we had to do a cut through your caesarean scar to remove the tube and the products. The foetus was quite well developed and had a placenta….” I felt a pang of deep pain in my heart.

He went on to tell me that I had lost a lot of blood and that he was shocked at how stable I had been during the surgery. I had been given two units of blood and would probably need more…. All I could think about was my baby and I wondered what they had done with him/her. I wished I’d asked for the “products” to be kept for me but I hadn’t thought about it at the time. And now I had yet another scar on my belly.

The next morning, the registrar came in to see me, check my wounds and go over the surgery with me once more. He said that given the amount of blood I’d lost, he suspected that I’d sprung a slow leak up to a week prior to the surgery… My mind raced back to the week before.

Rewind to the Week Before…

Driving to school one morning I had felt a sudden sharp pain in my right side but it went away, so I didn’t bother to get it checked out. I flew to Melbourne on the Friday, feeling a bit unwell and bloated. The Sunday night I left Melbourne is when things started to go really wrong. I thought I had a gastro bug. My husband had been unwell the week before and I thought that I’d caught his bug. An hour before I had to catch my plane home, I rushed to the toilet and stayed there for half an hour with cramps and diarrhoea. Something was seriously wrong with me. Somehow I made it onto the flight and somehow made it home. When I got home I vomited everywhere and collapsed in bed.

The Monday evening I phoned the midwife we had planned to hire on and I talked over my symptoms with her. She thought I had gastro and said to get plenty of rest. I had pretty much done the bare minimum that day. That night I woke up with massive cramps in my abdomen and couldn’t stop vomiting. I begged Wayne to take me to hospital. I kept saying, “This is not normal, something’s wrong.”

Wayne thought I was just sick and talked me out of going to the hospital. The next morning he arranged for the boys to go to after school care and left me in bed, with Adam in front of the TV, while he went into work for a few hours.

I phoned my friend Deb (who’s also a midwife) and she listened while I recounted the events of the last two nights. Then she asked me if I thought it could be an ectopic pregnancy. I said I thought it was gastro or maybe kidney stones at worst. In hindsight I didn’t want to entertain the notion that I would lose my baby. Nevertheless, she said I should check in with my midwife and get her opinion. I did that and my midwife said that I should get things checked out. By the time I phoned Deb back, I was in agony again and told her I was calling an ambulance. She dropped everything and raced over to my house to collect Adam and got there just as the ambos were getting me into the van. Another friend, Kathy (who runs our local BaBs group), who had phoned me just after I’d phoned the ambulance, also raced over as she lived five minutes away. Adam retreated to his bedroom when the Ambulance officers took me outside so I was grateful that he had some support arrive at that moment.

After the Ambos took me away, Deb went to check on Adam and asked, “What’s wrong Adam?” “I’ve lost mummy,” he said. “Well, let’s go and find her then,” said Deb. She packed up his things with Kathy’s help and then drove to the hospital to look for me.

Deb arrived just as an A&E doctor came in to assess me. I told the Doctor I was eight weeks pregnant. She asked me if I had confirmed that with a blood test. I felt exasperated. No, I had taken a home pregnancy test. She drew my blood to “make sure I was really pregnant.” Deb asked about the scan but the Dr insisted she needed the blood HCG levels first. A&E was busy and the blood test took a long time to come back. They had given me some morphine and nausea medication for the pain and nausea but the pain never subsided. My mouth was dry and I asked for some water. I hadn’t really had any all morning. They refused, saying that my chart said Nil By Mouth. I asked for some ice chips instead and Deb went looking for some, giving me little bits at a time.

The Dr then came in and said she wanted to do a speculum exam to check for bleeding in my vagina. There was none and I wondered why they weren’t just doing a scan. It seemed like a massive waste of time. At about 2pm, Deb had to go but Wayne showed up just as she left. Throughout, Adam just sat there eating and playing. He was fantastic! I told him the Dr House would make me all better. It was after that, that things really started to go downhill.

The Aftermath…

Nights were the worst. The Nursing Unit Manager for birth suites had arranged for me to have a private room in the Maternity Ward, where all the gynaecological patients also go but there was a lot of noise which made sleep difficult. That first night, listening to babies crying, and some mothers crying was awful. Every night, I pretended that they weren’t actually babies but wild animals in the jungle. Mentally, it was the only way I could cope. I felt like that guy in I Am Legend, surrounded by a mutant mass of humanity gone wild.

I was in hospital for a week and it was the longest week of my life. I needed two more blood transfusions because I was still losing a lot of excess blood. That delayed my recovery somewhat. Then a cough developed into spiking fevers on the Friday night and I was sent off for an Xray the next day which showed my lungs had partially collapsed, probably from the surgery I was told.

On the Sunday I was referred to a medical registrar who ordered a preventative heparin injection and sent me off for a CT scan to assess whether or not I had a blood clot in my lungs (pulmonary embolism). This involved injecting a dye into my veins as I went through the large cylindrical CT machine. In the few days I had been in hospital I had been stabbed and jabbed no less than 27 times with about five recannulations. My veins weren’t coping too well with the massive amounts of antibiotics being pumped into them and the blood drawn each day to assess my haemoglobin levels. I was black and blue and looked like a junkie with needle holes all over my arms and hands. The worst was when they took blood out of my radial artery to check my blood gasses. The pain was excruciating. By the end of that Sunday, I just wanted to go home but they said I needed to stay another day for intravenous antibiotics because I had pneumonia…. Well at least it wasn’t a pulmonary embolism.

That last night on the ward I felt defeated. I thought they’d never let me out. I thought about my children who I had barely seen that past week. I missed them terribly. At that moment, one of the midwives I knew through our BaBs group walked in the door to see if I was okay. That happened a lot during my whole experience. At each moment where I felt alone or scared, someone familiar—a friend, my partner, a midwife I knew—walked through the door. I had a room full of flowers to remind me that people were thinking about me and not a day went by without several text messages and phone calls, sometimes more than I had the energy to handle.

I went home on the Tuesday, exactly one week after I had gone into A&E. Going home was definitely the best medicine. I couldn’t wait to hold and kiss my beautiful boys.

How this Has Changed Me…

As I sit here now pondering the events of the past few weeks, I feel a renewed sense of what is important and what I can just let slide. In many ways my near-death experience has overshadowed the loss of our baby (who we have named Angel Riley). I feel very blessed to be alive and make a point of taking quiet time in my day to appreciate just breathing. When my children need me I no longer tell them, “in a minute,” and when they come to me for a hug, a kiss or a cuddle I savour it all. Every day I have with them is so much more precious to me now.

Coming to terms with the fact that a pregnancy made me so sick was humbling and enlightening. In the back of my mind I knew that my previous caesareans put me at greater risk of an ectopic pregnancy but I never dreamed that one of my greatest fears would play out in the way it did. Now I not only carry an increased risk of another ectopic pregnancy but also have decreased fertility. I have accepted that I’ll need to get a scan when I get pregnant again to rule out another ectopic pregnancy. For me it is a cross I will reluctantly have to bear, but somehow it doesn’t seem so important to me now. What is important to me is avoiding another life-threatening disaster and losing my only fallopian tube. What is important is having a viable pregnancy next time around, hopefully with a happy outcome. What is important is to live every day like there is no tomorrow, to love my kids and my partner and be there for my loved ones and friends like they have been there for me these past few weeks. What is important is to be grateful for every day I have on this earth.

*not her real name.