How I Learned to Stand Up for Myself and to Say No, Too.
January 23, 2009
The following post contains some details that may disturb some readers. Death, trauma, and pregnancy complications are discussed in some detail. If you are pregnant – stop reading this. Now. You can always read it later – but you don’t need this in your mind right now. Trust me. If you are sensitive to situations that involve medical complications or blood – stop reading this. Just figure that whatever happened from here? It taught me to stand up for myself.
Six years ago today, I was waiting around to check into Rose Medical Center in Denver for my inducement to have my baby girl. GeekDaddy and I kept calling the hospital to find out when I could come in, because seriously – 1/23… what a cool date for a birthday!
But apparently, there was some sort of “post-9-eleven” baby boom going on, so the Labor & Delivery floors of pretty much every hospital in town were overly full and there were women laboring in gurneys lining the hallway at the time. Something that just makes the whole experience joyous, I’m sure.
I was happy I had an induction scheduled, because otherwise they would’ve sent me home to “wait it out” despite the fact that I had been in non-productive labor for 72+ hours by the point I actually got checked into the hospital.
What’s “non-productive labor”? Oh, it means I was in full-on contraction mode… but my timing betweeen contractions was erratic. They tell you “come in when your contractions are 5 minutes apart.” Mine were along the mode of “5 mins, 5 mins, 20 mins, 5 mins, 5 mins, 16 mins, 5 mins, 4 mins, 18 mins…” For nearly 3 days.
This wasn’t exactly unexpected by me. My mother never went into labor “naturally” with either my brother or I either. I had told my OBs this and been reassured that they would “deal with that if it came to it.”
Their lax attitude should’ve been a huge red flag to me, but for some reason, wasn’t. I blame it on pregnancy hormones and an aversion to actual confrontation. You see, I should’ve been scheduled for a c-section, not an inducement. My due date had been pushed back from 1/6 to 1/11 and finally to 1/14. They finally scheduled me for the 23rd to be induced strictly because I had gotten so whiny. You know, given that I had such severe Hyperemesis Gravidarum that I had been on two different anti-emetics the whole way through my pregnancy and had been so sick for months that my students thought I must have cancer and be going through chemo… until I started showing.
Here’s the thing… my OB practice, which consisted of 5 doctors at the time, dropped the ball bigtime. Over the course of 8 months, I cycled through all 5 doctors – so I got to see everyone at least once. Since they rotated their on-call so they wanted to make sure you’d seen the person doing your delivery at least once. Every single one of them I went over my “history” with. I’m not going to burden you with details – let’s just suffice to say that at 36/37 I was extremely high risk for the complication that happened. I retold my concerns to every single one of those doctors and wasn’t listened to. I know, because they wrote it down several times in my chart – and it would’ve been a devestating blow if I had filed a malpractice suit.* (Reasons I didn’t are below.)
What complication? A condition called placenta accreta – which is the medical term for saying that the placenta attaches ‘abnormally’ or too firmly to the uterine wall. In my case, I had the rarest form of it, placenta percreta. Which means that my daughter’s placenta had actually grown through the uterine wall.
When I checked into the Emergency Room at 2 a.m. on the 24th (when they finally called us to come in) the guy doing the check in watched as I was rocked by a strong contraction more than once and said “I don’t understand, you are checking in for an induction, but you look like you’re already in labor…” Breathing shallowly, I said “I am.”
“Then why are you checking in for an induction?” he asked. “Because my contractions are not consistent and haven’t been for 3 days and you’d just send me home otherwise.” I replied trying not to bite my lip until it bled. “Oh… well, that makes sense – let’s get you up there then, how about we get you a wheelchair?” Fabulous!
I had to retell my story to the L&D folks upstairs, who gave me a room (with a pullout sofa for my husband) and said “well, your induction won’t start until the morning… your doctor should see you in about 5 hours… but you look like you’re in pain. When was the last time you slept? Would you like us to give you some Morphine so you can sleep for a bit?”
“Yes, please?” I said and then threw up on the floor… an action that I repeated but with “liter jars” repeatedly for the next 17 hours. Of course, past a certain point, they wouldn’t let me have water, so I just repeatedly vomited stomach acid. Because there’s some bizarre logic that says it’s better not to aspirate water into a breathing tube if you need surgery than it is stomach acid. Personally, I found the diluted stomach acid less painful.
So I slept for 5 hours and my poor husband didn’t – because some woman down the hall sounded as if they were torturing her repeatedly. In my morphine sleep, I kept thinking they should put that woman out of her misery and “put her down” gently. I guess I thought she was a wounded animal?
At 7:30 a.m. we wanted to know where the doc was. The nurse said she was just down the hall finishing another delivery, she’d go get her for us. The doctor who came in – whose name I will not reveal – had seen me only 1 time. Her first question was “who scheduled you for an induction?!” Um, the office?
It seems no one had told her. So instead of prepping by reading my file the night before, she just had to wing it. She wasn’t pleased. She had them ’start’ the induction with promises to be back “later that afternoon” after sleeping a bit. If you don’t know what an induction entails, you can Google it. I’ll spare you the details and the controversy. In fact, I’ll spare you most of the details until after the birth of my beautiful daughter at 6:50pm on January 24th… Six years ago tomorrow! The only thing I’ll say is “remember the liter jars I was using for the repetitive stomach acid upheavals – they will come in to play again.”
GeekDaddy accompanied Buttercup down to the nursery for the usual procedures while I stayed in the room with my epidural and my semi-delirium and my doula and the OB who had just delivered my daughter. We were chatting and I kept thinking “when will they bring the baby back? Why are these women looking so serious?“ What I didn’t know was that it had been 20 minutes and no placenta. I didn’t even know enough to know what they were waiting for. Finally, the doc said “I’m just going to reach in and get that placenta out manually…” and then all Hell broke loose.
Somewhere in the midst of the realization that the placenta was coming out in pieces and that I was now bleeding uncontrollably, the doc managed to get me to blurt out a simplified version of my medical history. She was rapidly being covered in blood and right after telling my doula to ‘push the button, scream if you have to, we need help!’ she started swearing. I can look up in my head right now and remember her saying “F**k! Why weren’t you scheduled for a c-section!?!” and then going on to describe in graphic terms the conditions of the placenta, my uterus, and the now gaping hole that was in the side of it. Trust me when I say you never want to hear an OB tell you that your uterine wall is “all ratty in there!” – but there’s some humor to it this many years later. I wonder if there’s a technical medical term for a ‘ratty uterine wall’?
Anyhow, I think I’ll kind of slide over the next bit. Because it’s getting more detailed than I usually feel comfortable with when I recount it to folks. Over the next several hours, I received super-human efforts and amazing care in the effort to save my life. 9 pints of blood transfusions – they based the amount needed by the volume of blood that nurses had “sponged and scooped up off of the floor” into the 2 different liter jars that I previously mentioned. They came to the conclusion that I was going to die without surgery.
My husband briefly held up my daughter once, so I could see her, just in case it was the only time I did. 16 nurses, doctors, and other hospital personnel were with me at one point… I had 6 IVs in, 3 in each arm. Then the OB, whom I blame for none of this, did something astounding for a doctor in my experience. She asked if “anyone in the room” had any ideas on how to save me other than getting me into an OR for an emergency 
hysterectomy? The Deck Doc (a young woman going through her OB rotation) piped up that she had seen a (then) experimental surgery a couple of weeks before that was a radiological procedure called Uterine Artery Embolization – usually used for Fibroid treatment, it entails threading a tube up the femoral artery and injecting polyvinyl microbeads into the artery that supplies the blood to the uterus, blocking off the blood flow. In this case, I was the 5th person ever at Rose to undergo the surgery rather than emergency hysterectomy. I know because I was awake throughout the procedure… and half of the hospital apparently came in & out of the observation room to see. There were so many who wanted to, they took turns. I was really well known for the next 5 days that I was there.
I keep vacillating on sharing more details here. This is already long enough to be a short-story and yet too short to even begin to encompass what I and my family went through over the course of my time in that hospital following my daughter’s birth… But there’s a title above that says “how I learned to stand up for myself and to say no, too” and so far, all you’ve heard are horrific details about my daughter’s birth and my near-death.
So let me skip the minute gory details and get to the end of the story.
Those doctors and physicians assistants and personnel at my OB’s office? They didn’t listen to me. As a result, I almost died and I suffered irreparable damage to my reproductive system that required a tubal ligation. Since getting pregnant again would be a death sentence for both me and the baby.
Death is always a risk in childbirth – even in 1st world countries. But if even ONE person at my OB’s office had listened to my concerns? I would’ve been scheduled for a c-section, given late-term ultrasounds to see if the placenta was an issue, and treated as the high-risk patient I was.
Why didn’t they listen?
Because I didn’t demand it. I should’ve walked out of that practice the first time someone dismissed my concerns and found doctors who would listen. I should’ve stood up for myself repeatedly and didn’t. I should’ve been my own best advocate and if not listened to refused to put up with it until heard. Instead, I nearly lost my life because I entrusted it to people who weren’t paying attention.
I didn’t file a malpractice suit because I talked to the top malpractice attorney in the state and he said “Look, let’s be frank here… you could file a suit. There were so many instances of malpractice here that it’s amazing. Clear cut. Undeniable. Even in writing. But… you’ll waste your time and you’ll lose. Because you are alive, you have a beautiful, healthy baby girl, and you are 37 years old. I’m not going to smoke-screen you… no jury will award you damages because the defensive attorneys will argue that they saved your life, you have a child already, and your eggs are old.”
It was an awful thing to hear. Your eggs are old. Your uterine lining is ratty. They messed up, nearly killed you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
But it was the truth and I knew it when I heard it. He could’ve filed a suit, charged me tons of money, and had the same result – but he was far more helpful… he was truthful.
So here’s another truth: that OB did save my life. I’m here. Every day I get to spend with my daughter is a blessing. A gift that I almost didn’t get. Six years tomorrow of days I almost didn’t have with her or my husband.
And the hardest truth? If I had believed in myself enough, had believed in my right to say “No, stop. Now listen… I have valid concerns and you are dismissing them without even thinking about it. Stop and listen or I’ll go find someone who will” she wouldn’t have had to save my life. I wouldn’t have had to see her covered from the neck down in my own blood. I wouldn’t have had to see my husband holding up my daughter ‘just in case it was the only time I ever saw her.’
Because as much as those doctors failed me – I failed me.
So for 6 years now, I’ve said what I need to say, done what I need to do, and had absolutely no fear of saying “no” because I never want to go through anything like that again.
Sometimes, I have to remind myself. Because old habits die hard. But that’s why I wrote this post. Because maybe it will help me remember. And maybe it will help you too.
Tomorrow I’m celebrating my daughter’s sixth birthday… But I’m also celebrating the beginning of the point where I became the best advocate for me that I can be. How about you? What’s it going to take for you? I hope it’s not as extreme as what it took for me.
