After 40 weeks, 1 day, and 4 hours of pregnancy, my baby almost died.

If you’ve been following along with my story, you’ll know I had an easy pregnancy. No morning sickness, no pain, no high-risk indicators. I was healthy and prepared, having read all the birth books and watched all the videos. I did everything you’re supposed to do to get ready for a healthy baby and a smooth birth.

It all began at night, though I didn’t really know if it was contractions I was feeling at the time. It felt more like period cramps, which can be a sign that labour is merely coming soon, not that it’s getting started. Still, I stayed up to see if these feelings would develop into anything larger.

At 12:30 am, they were consistent enough that I felt a little break between the cramps so I called my midwife to say I thought I was in labour but wasn’t sure. I even apologized for waking her if it was a false alarm.

She reassured me it was fine and told me to take a shower to see if the cramps went away. If they didn’t, I was to call her back when they were 5 minutes apart for an hour.

For the next 45 minutes I did what any normal person would do (lol). I washed my hair, cleaned my room, did the dishes, finished packing my hospital bag just in case, and timed the contractions on the first app I found in the app store.

The app told me my contractions where 3 minutes apart and to get ready to go to the hospital.

From everything I’d read about birth, I knew that couldn’t be right and figured I was timing it wrong. Still, I woke up my mother to say I was pretty sure I was in labour. She immediately had me contact my midwife at 1:30 am.

My midwife assured me labour wouldn’t happen this quickly but promised to come to me anyways for an exam. She’d be there after 2 am, she said.

In the 40 minutes it took her to arrive, my cramps went from a mild annoyance while I washed dishes to doubling me over when they hit. Still, I knew what to do. Deep breath in, hold, deep breath out. Keep your body relaxed. Don’t clench your jaw.

The midwife arrived and I immediately wanted to be taken to the hospital. I asked if she could call ahead for an epidural and she told me that wasn’t a thing (note, it really should be!). She made some updates in my chart, all the while assuring me everything was fine and it would be hours yet. Then she did her exam.

And realized I was 7 cm dilated with contractions less than 2 minutes apart.

“Time to go to the hospital!“ she said.

Duh.

Hurriedly, she got my mother and I into her car and sped to the hospital while we called my sister to meet us there. Needless to say it was the worst drive of my life with my contractions hitting seemingly in time with every bump or turn.

I arrived at 3:15 am.

Again, I begged for drugs but was told I needed to be on a fetal monitor for 20 minutes before they’d call the epidural man. I told the nurses to get me hooked up now.

Except no one had checked the room before putting a labouring mom in it, despite us calling ahead to say we were coming.

The monitors wouldn’t work as the batteries were dead. I told them to take me to a different room or get a portable monitor. But they ignored me in favour of fiddling with the machines. It took them 20 minutes, my precious 20 minutes, to admit they needed to go to a different room.

Once there, things took a turn for the worst. With the fetal monitor on, they started to hear my baby’s heart rate change. It dropped low and I was immediately rolled onto my side. It came back up and everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

Again, I begged for an epidural and again I was told it would be 20 minutes of monitoring first.

20 minutes neither my baby nor I had.

His heart rate dropped again and they tried to reposition me but it was a losing battle. My baby was officially in distress and we were running out of time.

Dimly I heard someone mention an emergency C and another respond there was no time to get to an OR. I had made it through transition and was enjoying some blessed relief between contractions but even so, I wasn’t tracking what was happening.

The panic in the room was palatable and only climbing as my baby’s heart beat went in and out.

That’s when the real-life version of Grey’s Anatomy’s Addison Montgomery swept in.

The OB had minutes only to look at the heart rate chart and make a plan.

“We’re going to do a lateral episiotomy and forceps delivery,” she said. “We have two minutes to get the baby out alive.”

Terror filled me as I knew what an episiotomy was and it was the one thing I never wanted to hear in my delivery room. I’d once joked with my midwife that her one job was to body check anyone who tried to give me one.

Still, nurses swarmed me, pinning me on my back with my bent knees in the air.

“Do you consent?”

I honestly don’t remember if I did. I don’t think it mattered either way. By this point, my baby’s heart beat was completely gone and this was the only route forward.

Even though I had never received the epidural I begged so ardently for.

They gave me a shot of a local numbing agent but when you’re sliced with a scalpel, I can assure you it makes zero impact.

I kept my eyes closed, as if not seeing the monster under the bed would make it all go away. But there was no stopping or slowing what needed to happen.

“Push!” I was ordered, as if I could function with pain unlike anything I’d ever felt flooding every nerve ending in my body.

I tried my best but I wasn’t into the next phase of contractions yet and only had the lightest of guides to help me. Without the aid of contractions, I felt like I was flailing in the dark trying to figure out what the people around me wanted me to do with a brain that wasn’t functioning properly.

“Don’t make sound,” they told me when I screamed.

I couldn’t understand why they wanted me to push silently and couldn’t have complied even if I had. I suppose it’s a stronger type of push but I couldn’t do it. I’d practiced for months to breathe a certain way, push a certain way. In the moment I couldn’t change. I was trying to loosen my jaw as my baby was being delivered by forceps, even though the time to avoid tearing was long past. A thousand conflicting thoughts were rushing through my brain even as pain swamped any logic I could muster.

So instead I tried my best to do as instructed and get my baby out as fast as we could, pushing with muscles I wasn’t even sure were working.

I had never been in such pain, or such confusion, in my life. It felt like my brain was broken when I needed it most.

That’s when I heard a nurse shout, “Open your eyes!”

I shook my head, not wanting to see whatever horror was happening.

“No, open your eyes right now!”

And when I did, I saw my baby opening his mouth to let out his first cry.

The time was 4:06 am. Barely more than 45 minutes after I’d first arrived in the hospital.

Relief washed through me as they held him aloft before immediately rushing him to the baby warmer in the corner to check him out. My mother went with the baby while my sister stayed with me and held my hand.

I didn’t know what was happening or what was coming next. All I knew was that the pain that had been more than I’d ever experienced in my life was now so much less.

Next thing I saw, my son was being cradled by my mother skin to skin since I was in no shape to do it. The OB was talking through next steps with me such as the repairs that would now need to happen. Again, with no epidural I was going to feel the stitches even with the low pain meds they could now press into my IV.

As blessed numbness flowed into my veins, I felt like my brain was offline. I knew I should be holding my baby, or at least should want to do it. Every mother should, right? But I couldn’t think about him. Even seeing him was too much to process. All I’d wanted for 9 months was to meet my little guy and now I didn’t want to look at him. Couldn’t look at him.

I just wanted to escape that horrid room with the bright light shining directly down at me that had hurt my eyes all through the delivery. It was my only thought with my minutes old son within reaching distance.

Once the OB finished stitching me up, while I felt every single agonizing stitch for nearly half an hour, that should have been the end of my story.

Except it wasn’t.

My baby boo was perfectly healthy and needed no NICU time whatsoever, despite him having lost his heart beat during delivery. At 8 pounds 8 ounces he was anything but sickly.

Together with my mom and sister, we were wheeled into a ward room with space for 4 families to recover. I’d expected a 3 hour recovery originally and this was all my health care covered since I didn’t have extra insurance.

“We’ll probably keep you overnight,” the nurses said. “Though maybe you’ll get out this evening.”

Instead, I was in that room for days.

Bleeding is expected after a birth and after such a traumatic one, I didn’t think too much about the pads of blood I was soaking every hour. The nurses monitored me to make sure I was stable but it soon became clear I couldn’t stand, let alone walk, without passing out or leaving a trail of blood behind me. A sight I’m sure was comforting to the three other new moms in the room.

I couldn’t even shift on the bed or roll over at night without mind numbing pain incapacitating me. I was pinned in place like a bug. Anything more than a slight adjustment sent agony coursing through my bones. It was a new kind of torture, since my baby was in a bassinet next to me that was just fingertips out of reach for my range of motion.

My mom and sister, who had an 8 month old baby herself, decided to trade off 12 hour shifts each so that I’d never be alone. It was becoming apparent that the care I was getting wasn’t quite right and I was in no shape to fight for myself. Without them being there, I don’t know how I would have managed. I couldn’t even reach my baby, let alone pick him up myself. And I couldn’t point out to the nurses that my bleeding was getting worse. Left alone, I’m not sure what might have happened.

By the evening, my hemoglobin was so low they ordered a blood transfusion. Always a reassuring sign of health.

The next day, we learned the transfusion had barely made a dent in my numbers, only increasing it two points from it’s critical level. An iron supplement IV bag was ordered instead. But that day, the nurses were so busy no one remembered to check on me. My assigned nurse met me in the morning at 8 am where she checked my chart and said, “This room is for people who are out in 24 hours. You should be home.”

Bewildered I told her the other nurses had been clear that I wasn’t in any shape to go anywhere.

Shaking her head, she left. Despite the fact I needed to be stood up to check my ability levels, my IV bag needed to be connected, and my bleeding checked regularly. None of that happened. Twice I tried my bed call bell to ask about my bleeding and was ignored.

Instead I was left alone for hours without care. Looking back, I can’t help but wonder if the fact that I was alone as a single mom played a factor. As much as I hate the stereotype, there was no male in my life demanding attention and perhaps because of it, I was an afterthought in a busy day.

By the time the shift changed that night and new nurses got to me, I’d been quietly bleeding all day.

It quickly became clear that something was more wrong than a rough birth. My new nurses called for an OB, trying to keep their voices cheerful when the panic on their faces was clear to see. I was throwing clots the size of small dinner plates because I hadn’t been moved all day and it was way above their pay grade to deal with. The OB arrived to check me and the massive clots I was throwing. She immediately ordered an ultrasound to see what was going on with my uterus.

The results from the ultrasound, however, took another 12 hours despite the urgency.

The next morning when we received them, I was told I needed to go into surgery as a piece of my placenta was still attached to my uterus and the uterus had filled with clots trying to remove it. That’s what was causing me so much pain.

Another blood transfusion was ordered to get me through the procedure.

This time when I was wheeled into the OR that afternoon, I was thankfully given pain management. Knocking me out with general anaesthesia was the best thing that had happened to me for days.

When I came to, my rock star OB from my birth assured me that this time everything had gone right. They’d cleared out all the clots and removed the piece of placenta that could have had dire consequences for me if it hadn’t been discovered, including unchecked bleeding and sepsis.

Finally, I was going to be on the mend.

After a few hours, I was wheeled into a room that was blissfully quiet. My OB had handled the insurance issue to get me out of the ward room that had caused so many problems in the first place. For the first time since my arrival, I was able to sleep more than an hour at a time. My night nurse even stepped up.

“I don’t normally do this,” she said. “But I’ll watch your baby for the night so you can get some rest. You need to sleep.”

Gratefully, I agreed. Anything to get a minute of rest after the hell I’d been going through.

When I woke, the difference was mind blowing. I could stand by myself. I could walk to the bathroom without two nurses holding me up while I struggled to stay conscious. I could pick up my baby on my own. My pain was still high but now it was from the healing of the birth, rather than my body slowly bleeding out for days without anyone noticing.

This time when they told me I’d be able to go home that evening, it was true.

Before I left, however, I was offered a lactation consultation, a social worker visit to tell me about post partum depression and available counselling (4 free visits), a pediatrician for a baby check, and a hospital community care worker who took detailed notes about my experience and gave me an apology on behalf of the hospital along with a promise that the staff would be retrained following my experience. Especially the nurse who had ignored me on the most critical day.

4 days after I entered the hospital, I left with my healthy son, some new scars, and a lot less blood.

I’d like to say there’s some moral to my story. That I lived and learned. But really, what I learned was birth can be extremely scary. In a world that focuses so hard on telling moms that birth is a blessing and drugs are the enemy, it’s important to get a more balanced view of what can actually go down. I was completely unprepared for what happened to me. I had no idea what precipitous labour was. I didn’t realize that “the best hospital for births in the city” could be so woefully unprepared for labouring moms, especially when given forewarning. I didn’t know procedures that amounted to straight up torture in any other context could be preformed without any hint of pain medication. And I didn’t know you could hemorrhage in a room full of medical professionals for days without anyone realizing it.

If there’s anything to learn from this tale it’s that you need your village with you right from the start. Without my family, things could have gone so much worse so very easily. When you can’t fight for yourself, you need to find someone who will. Hospitals don’t always get it right and when they get it wrong, the consequences can be disastrous.

And permanent.

I’m alive. My baby is alive. And we’re safe at home. Those are the things I focus on. Infant and maternal mortality rates are no joke and unfortunately it seems like it’s up to us to make sure we don’t become a statistic.

Just because my birth story turned out completely the opposite of what I planned doesn’t mean yours will. Do your research. Be prepared. And most of all, have your people around you just in case.