How Far I've come

As you can see, I'm not posting as much. Things have been much better lately. I was talking about the journey that the PTSD has taken me on the other day. I don't often take the time to reflect on how far I've come in this journey. I get so caught up in what's happening each day, that I just don't take the time to think back to where I was. There are some days that I almost feel like the old me. I've resigned myself to the fact that I'll never be who I was, and I'm beginning to make peace with what I think I'm capable of becoming now. I really think that I'll end up being more than I ever would have been if I hadn't experienced this.

I had a uterine inversion in addition to several other post-partum complications. At first, I coped by running away from what happened. I believed that if I ignored it, it would go away. I took my daughter out of the house every day. I believed that if I acted like a "normal" mom that no one would know that I spent hours at home crying when my husband was gone. Also, when I was out of the house it was easier to pretend that I was "normal".

It wasn't until my six week post-partum appointment that I really started to notice that my head wasn't quite on straight. It wasn't until the doctor touched me again that I had the first flashback. The feeling of his gloved hands touching me down there sent me back to the hospital room with his hand / arm elbow deep in my hoo-ha. The exam, just a typical exam, nearly brought me to tears. When I was in the hospital, I didn't get a good explanation of what had happened to me, and given the extreme trauma my body and mind had gone through, I didn't push for answers. I was told my uterus turned inside out, the placenta came out in 20 pieces, and I lost a lot of blood. None of those things are helpful at explaining /understanding what had happened. At my six week appointment, I finally had the wherewithal to start asking questions about what had happened. It was the first time I was told I had a uterine inversion, placenta accreta, and post-partum hemorrhage. That information sent me on a spiral of obsessively researching the complications. Every chance I had, I'd be reading about it, researching it, looking for the rates of recurrence, etc. It became my life for the two weeks I had left of my maternity leave.

My husband couldn't take it. He hated the obsession, so he started pressuring me to see the doctor. I went back to my old family practice doctor, not my OB, because I thought I had PPD. Actually,he's the one who suggested the PTSD diagnosis. We tried medicine, but I was still too obsessive. My husband kept hounding me to get help. He believed I needed more than just the drugs, counseling would be more effective, and he was right. I went back to the doctor, and asked for a referral to a counselor. At that time, I was having nightmares every night. I was having flashbacks a couple of times a week. I was obsessed with what had happened. I did the bare minimum when it came to work, to taking care of my daughter, to being a wife, but every other moment was spent thinking about, re-living, or reading about the complications. The counseling helped. It took months of seeing someone.

The first thing I had to work on was my anger with my husband. I hated him for allowing the doctor to do that to me. He was supposed to rescue me, protect me, save me, and instead he allowed the doctor to violate me. It took quite a while before I got past that. The next thing was learning to like sex again. I never told my husband, but, for the first six or seven months, I had flashbacks during sex. (I found the procedures they had performed on me to get the placenta out and reinstallation of my uterus extremely violating since they didn't tell me what they were doing before they started the procedure.) The feeling of having his penis inside me reminded me of the doctor's hand being inside me. I hated it. I couldn't get into it, and it hurt as a result. The pain fed the flashbacks, so it took a while to get to the point where I could look at it as just being close to him and not as something I "had" to do to keep him happy. After that, I still struggled with flashbacks whenever I gave my daughter a bath. I struggle with going to doctor appointments at the clinic, and it took me 14 months before I could walk back into the hospital where she was born. I'm just now starting to feel like the "old" Me.

I'm just starting to regain my sense of purpose, my ability to focus at work, and my ability to work through problems at home. There are still triggers, things like a friend being induced or talking about what happened with medical personnel, can still have me struggling. I know how to monitor myself for problems now, and I go back to counseling for a tune-up when I need one. It took me a long time to realize / accept that the complications and the procedure didn't cause my trauma. Yes, it was painful. Yes, the procedures they performed are vile. However, it was the lack of communication when I was still capable of understanding what was happening that caused the trauma.

So, now I found a new doctor, one who really listens to me. This doctor is a family practice doctor, so both my daughter and I are treated by her. That way, I see her more often than once a year, and she knows how to handle my needs. I've been really up front about needing a lot of communication. She knows that I need her to tell me what she's doing when I have a pap smear. She knows that I need to be highly involved in medical decisions. It helps me to deal with the fall out of the poor care I received during my daughter's birth.

As for having more children, if the only complication I'd had was the inversion, I'd be pregnant again right now. All of my reading /searching has led me to believe that the odds are in my favor of that not happening again in a future pregnancy. There's a support group for uterine inversion survivors on Yahoo that has so many positive stories of having second children that I could get past it. The problem for my husband and me is the accreta. The only study I've found that talks about the recurrence rate puts it at40%. I just can't get past those odds. I've met with several doctors. All of them have told me that I can have another pregnancy. I've even been told that they'd prefer that I deliver vaginally. They tell me that they can make it safer in the future. They would make sure the surgical team is accessible immediately.They would make sure to talk to me. They'd make sure I was treated with kid gloves. But I keep coming back to the 40% odds of having it happen again. I just can't risk the daughter I have growing up with out a mother because I chose to give her a sibling. She needs a mom. She can have a great life with or without a sibling.

I've come a long way, baby!