‘I can still feel it!’ I yelled.
‘Where?’ the anaesthetist asked.
‘All the way down my back!’
With a back labour, nothing can get rid of the pain, not even an epidural. An epidural numbs the pain so that it’s maybe half as bad, but nothing gets rid of it completely. With a front labour, it’s completely different. You have a crunching pain at the front and sides that is completely numbed by an epidural, so you can just rest until the contractions get really close to each other.
Now I was on the bed and I couldn’t move. At least my mum and Dean were with me, being supportive. I was only allowed two people in the delivery room, so my dad, sister and brothers had to stay in the waiting room. ‘Don’t leave me alone, will you, Mum?’ I said. The midwives were nice, but I was scared of the nurses. They seemed unfriendly, disapproving, and not at all gentle or kind. I definitely got the impression that some of them were judging me: ‘Here she comes: another pathetic, hopeless teenage mother!’
Thankfully the nurses left us alone after I’d been given the epidural. They’re not interested until you’re ready to push. An anaesthetist popped in every hour or so, to make sure the epidural was OK, but that was it. People come to measure the dilation of the cervix and they’re there when the head is coming out, but that’s it.
After a couple of hours, I was told that I was probably going to be given a Caesarean because everything was taking so long. But first they were going to try to induce me. They put a drip in my arm, which fed me drugs that would trigger the birth, and about an hour later, Zach started coming out. By now I was so exhausted I could hardly move. I’d gone into labour on Friday morning and it was nearly Sunday.
What do I do?’ I asked frantically, although I wasn’t sure I could do anything. I started pushing, but I couldn’t feel a thing. I had no sense of when my contractions were coming. ‘I don’t even know if I’m pushing,’ I said. ‘Am I pushing? Am I not pushing? Should I be doing it now? What the hell! What is this about?’
‘Push,’ said the midwife, and a few seconds later Zach came out. But she must have told me to push at the wrong time, because I tore from front to back, all the way down.
They took Zach away and cleaned him up before bringing him back to me, but before I could even see him, they were sewing me up for what seemed like ages and ages. Oh God, it was so horrendous. I was lying on my back, drenched in sweat and completely zonked out, while someone sewed me from top to bottom.
Apparently, women forget how bad labour is once it’s over. Well, I’m telling you now, I am never going to forget it! Never, ever, ever! I can’t believe that nobody warned me what it would be like. No one said, ‘It’s the most horrendous thing you will ever go through and you will feel like you’re going to die.’
Why didn’t my mum warn me? I suppose she didn’t want to freak me out. She just said, ‘You’ll be all right.’ So I thought, What the heck! I’ll be all right, then. I’ll just squeeze it out and go. But oh my goodness, that’s not what happens. It is so, so harrowing.
Zach was born at 23:32 on 21 March 2008. I had hated every single second of my long, long labour. It was disgusting. When they finally gave him to me, I didn’t even want to hold him. I just thought, Get me some food!
My dad, Karen and Dean came in to see us. My dad had his video camera with him, as usual, but he managed to put it down for a few seconds to hold the baby and coo over him. My dad loves kids. He took a lovely picture of Dean holding Zach, which I still have, along with lots of photos of me looking knackered. At the time, I was barely aware of anyone except my mum. I was completely wrapped up in myself and my unhappiness.
‘Can someone get me some toast?’ I asked. But I wasn’t allowed any food yet, because I was still attached to the drip. Next, I was told that everybody had to leave. It was midnight, way past visiting hours. ‘Oh no!’ I cried out, feeling completely panicked. I was going to be left on my own. ‘Please can my mum stay?’ I begged. ‘Just my mum? Please let her stay.’
‘No visitors allowed,’ the nurse said briskly. ‘Everyone out, now.’
‘OK, Stacey, I’m going to go now,’ my mum said softly, taking my hand. ‘But I’ll be back as soon as they let me, don’t you worry.’
‘Mum,’ I cried. ‘Please don’t leave me.’ But although she wanted to stay, she had to go.
I was devastated. I was completely alone, apart from the baby lying next to me in a box. ‘What am I supposed to do with it?’ I wondered. To my dismay, I was told that I had to spend the next three days in hospital, because the baby had pooed inside me when it got stressed during labour and they had to make sure I was clean before I went home.
They moved me out of the delivery room and put me in a bed on the ward. Every single baby on that ward was crying; there wasn’t one quiet baby. So it’s not like you just have your baby crying; you have ten other babies screaming their heads off, too. My baby wouldn’t stop crying. It just wouldn’t stop! And neither could I. I just hated it. I hated it so much.
I didn’t feel motherly. I didn’t want to breastfeed Zach, but I knew I had to, even though I had no idea how to breastfeed and nobody showed me what to do. I lifted him up to my boob, but he didn’t do anything. Nothing was happening. It was so weird. Why am I doing this? I thought, still crying constantly.
One of the nurses came in. ‘Come on, you can’t cry,’ she said sternly. ‘Grow up. You’re a mother now.’
Her words just made me cry even more. ‘But I can’t do anything,’ I sobbed. ‘I can’t move, I can’t walk, I can’t wee.’ She just tutted and walked away.
A couple of hours later, another nurse came in to see me. ‘Come on,’ she said coldly. ‘Why aren’t you feeding him? Why aren’t you changing him? Why aren’t you bathing him?’
‘Because I don’t know how!’ I said tearfully. It was true. I didn’t know what to do and I didn’t know what he wanted. I needed my mum to teach me. I really needed my mum.
The epidural had numbed me all over, so I couldn’t tell if I needed a wee or not. Do I need the toilet? I wondered. Something – a weird feeling of pressure – told me I did. I tried to move, but my legs wouldn’t respond. Assuming it was still the effect of the epidural, I rang the bell for a nurse. ‘Yes?’ she said when she arrived, her expression completely devoid of care or sympathy.
‘I’m really sorry but I think I need the toilet,’ I said.
She pointed to a door. ‘It’s over there, love,’ she said coolly, before turning and walking off. She didn’t bother to look at the notes at the end of my bed.
I suddenly felt very anxious. If I was supposed to walk to the toilet on my own, did that mean the epidural should have worn off? I thought it was supposed to take twenty-four hours. I tried to move my legs again. Nothing. Oh my God, I’m supposed to walk now and I can’t move, I thought, aware that paralysis was one of the risks of having an epidural. Maybe I’m paralysed? I rang the bell for the nurse again and again.
Eventually she came back. ‘What’s wrong?’ she said stonily.
‘I can’t move. I’ve had an epidural,’ I wailed.
She gave me a hard look. ‘Then why didn’t you say so?’
‘I’m sorry,’ I sobbed, feeling small and stupid. Although, as the nurse, wasn’t she supposed to read my notes at the end of the bed, where it said I’d had an epidural? I was her patient, in her care; wasn’t she supposed to be looking after me? But she didn’t seem to have an ounce of sympathy for me. She just wasn’t interested.
The nurses were so old-fashioned and crazy in their attitude towards me. They didn’t seem to have any compassion and they didn’t recognize that I was going through the biggest change in my life. It was simply a case of, ‘You’re having a baby, deal with it. We’ll get it out for you and make sure it’s healthy, but that’s it.’
Maybe when you’ve been working as a nurse for a long time and you see life and death, day in, day out, you become a bit of a stone. You don’t have much emotion left. That’s w
hy I think young nurses are often the best, because they still have the passion that inspired them to go into nursing in the first place. They want to make people feel better and cheer them up.
These nurses were really hard and I felt they were judging me. Yes, perhaps young women shouldn’t get pregnant outside of marriage, but whatever your morals and values are, your patients are still people, and everyone ought to be treated well in hospital.
I felt so hopeless, like I was nothing. I didn’t want a baby. I really didn’t. I went on crying and crying because I just couldn’t stop. Obviously, a baby doesn’t take to you straightaway, so he wouldn’t feed from me and I didn’t have a clue how to make him feed. I became hysterical, to the extent that I was crying so much I couldn’t breathe.
It must have made Zach so sad, because the more I cried, the more he screamed, and his screaming really distressed me. I’ve never felt that upset, not in my entire life. It made it worse to think that my crying was causing him anguish, but I just couldn’t stop myself. No one came to talk to me or comfort me, nobody came to help, so I sat up with this baby screaming at me, crying my eyes out. It was the craziest, saddest scene.
The next thing I remember was waking up to find my mum there. Thank God! She was holding Zach, who was still crying. The nurses had taken him away from me at some point, because I must have fallen asleep on him or something. I was so exhausted. I couldn’t understand why they didn’t appreciate how exhausted I was. I’d been pushing him out for days. All I needed was to go to sleep, but they wouldn’t help me.
Seeing my mum, I burst into tears. ‘Please can I go home?’ I begged. ‘Please don’t leave me here again!’
‘I’m here now,’ she said, cooing at Zach. She was looking down at him adoringly. ‘Who’s a beautiful baby?’ she asked him, happiness lighting up her face. It had been ages since I’d seen her look so happy. ‘He’s absolutely perfect,’ she said delightedly.
‘Mum, I feel so awful,’ I sobbed. ‘Please take me home. I hate it here.’
But the nurses shooed her away again later and I was left alone for another night. I cried constantly during the three nights I was in hospital. It was so horrendous. I’ve never been as sad as I was then, all on my own, with a curtain around my bed and a screaming baby by my side.
The nurses didn’t get any nicer as time went by either. They took no notice when I said, ‘Please, I want to go home. Please, I need to go home.’ At best, they would just huff impatiently before turning their backs.
A friend of mine from school is a nurse, and she’s lost count of the sick children she’s looked after whose parents don’t even bother to come and visit them. Imagine that. How terrible. There are all these young mums whose babies get ill and they just shove them in hospital and leave them there.
Seeing it from a nurse’s perspective, it might not be easy to feel optimistic about the prospects of a sobbing eighteen-year-old girl and her newborn baby. Maybe they thought, What’s the betting that baby will be back here in a couple of months with no mum? They had hundreds of people in and out of those wards every week. Perhaps they’d seen it all before, or perhaps they were just so tired and overworked that their sympathy was all used up. Whatever the reason, it shouldn’t have been that way. I needed emotional care just as much as physical care, but none of them were prepared – or able – to give it. Their cold, unfriendly attitude made me feel even more miserable and hopeless.
The nurses put me under a huge amount of pressure to breastfeed. ‘He’s not feeding,’ I wailed. ‘I can’t breastfeed.’
‘Of course you can,’ they said, tutting with irritation. They’d probably had enough of new mums crying, but a kind word or two would have made such a difference to me. Looking back, I can see that I was going through more than just the baby blues – I was definitely suffering from post-natal depression, although I was unaware of it at the time. I’m surprised that the nurses didn’t recognize it.
With the best will in the world, let me say that I will never, ever breastfeed again. One of the most depressing things about having a baby for me was that nobody else could wake up in the middle of the night and feed him. It had to be me. I couldn’t leave him with my mum or stepmum for an afternoon and I couldn’t go anywhere without getting my boob out. You can’t take a break when you breastfeed. It’s never-ending.
I felt like a human cow. I was just a thing that Zach ate. It was horrible and I hated it. Changing his nappy wasn’t so bad, but it was the endless cycle of nappy-changing and feeding him again and again that got me down. Babies are never full up on breast milk. They want to be fed and fed and fed. Then it becomes a habit. They find it so comforting being on the breast that they never want to get off it. When you take them off, they scream because they want to be back on – not because they’re hungry, but because it’s comforting – and for the mum that’s so difficult.
It’s all right if you’re the maternal type and want to walk around with your baby attached to your boob all day. My stepmum breastfed my little brother for a year and a half – by the time he was weened, he knew exactly what it was and could ask for it – but I didn’t have the same instinct as her. I didn’t have the drive to bond with my child through breastfeeding, although perhaps that was because I felt so low.
Through all this, there was no respite. I was so exhausted. Oh my God, I never want to feel like that again! ‘It’s so tiring,’ people tell you, before you have a baby. All right. Whatever. Get over it. It’s just a kid, you think to yourself. But, my goodness, I was so drained and depleted after what I’d been through that I didn’t have an ounce of energy left. I couldn’t do any of the normal things I used to do. It really hurt to wee, too, so to ease the pain I took a bottle of water to the toilet with me and poured cool water onto to my stitches while I weed. I didn’t poo for about a week; I didn’t dare. I was terrified of pushing in case my stitches ripped open again. My body was completely stressed out.
On top of all that, I couldn’t sleep because there was a tiny constant presence next to me, demanding my attention twenty-four hours a day. Zach’s needs seemed to be never-ending and I became more and more exhausted. I could sleep when he slept, but then he was awake again within twenty minutes. It got to a point where I just didn’t know where I was, who I was talking to or what I was doing. I was in a daze. My life was a blur, and all the days seemed to merge into one.
‘Help me,’ I begged when Jemma came to see me. I felt utterly desperate and at my wits’ end. I didn’t know what to do; I just didn’t have any energy left. If I had, I would have broken out of hospital and run home.
‘Give him to me,’ she said, reaching out to take Zach. She sat on the bed and cradled him in her arms. Looking down at the bedcover she said, ‘Stacey, these bedclothes are filthy! Hasn’t anyone changed them?’
The bed was really dirty. There was blood and everything on it. I’d been in there for nearly three days and no one had changed the sheets. ‘Has Zach had a bath?’ Jemma asked.
‘No,’ I said softly.
‘That’s terrible! Someone should have helped you. Go and ask them if you can give him a bath now,’ she said.
After we’d bathed Zach, I quietly crept away for a few minutes, in search of something to eat or just some time alone – I was happy just to look out of a window and do nothing.
While I was away, a couple of nurses came over to my bed. They didn’t bother to ask Jemma if she was Zach’s mum; they just checked him over and ticked a list. She went along with it, thinking, Aren’t you even going to ask if I’m the child’s mother? It was crazy, but I suppose it was understandable, because me and my sister look a bit alike and she was holding the baby.
It was all just routine to them as they moved on to the next bed and then the next. As they left, they said, ‘You can go home at four o’clock.’
‘Right, thanks,’ Jemma said, thinking, OK, I’m not his mum, but go on, tell me anyway.
When I came back she gave me a rundown of everything that had
been said. ‘I know all of this because they think I’m his mum now,’ she said with a laugh.
‘Thanks, Jemma,’ I said gratefully.
It was a relief to get home from the hospital, because at least I wasn’t on my own any more. Physically, though, I felt totally disconnected, as if I was outside of my body. My thoughts and feelings didn’t seem to be part of me any more; they were somewhere else in the distance, which I’ve since learned is a symptom of post-natal depression. Everything inside me felt different and I wasn’t healing quickly enough. I was still a bit fat, which meant I couldn’t really bend over, so my mum used to sterilize water and wash my stitches for me – I couldn’t even reach them myself. Imagine your mum doing that for you when you’re eighteen years old! Sometimes she would make me salt baths and I’d sit in them, wincing with pain. I had a lot of help from my mum. She did everything for me. She looked after me like I was dying.
All the while I was so, so sad. I think anybody normal would have been sad in my situation. I felt as if I’d gone from having the best life in the world to everything being in ruins. I was fat, torn and sore. I had stretch marks all over my hips and boobs. I couldn’t do anything or go anywhere. My life was one big nothing. I was helpless and trapped, and I felt like I was a hopeless mother. I used to cry all the time, cool silent tears of despair. I didn’t even wonder if I would ever feel happy again; I was sure I never would be.
I don’t remember a lot about that period of my life, because it seems like every day was the same, so in my mind it all merges into one long, unhappy day. When I look back, I don’t feel like I was actually awake during that time. It’s a really weird feeling, as if I wasn’t really there. I remember not wanting to talk to anyone. I was really quiet and I took hardly any notice of the people who came and went. Dean was good with Zach and my friends, and often came to visit, but I was so miserable that I didn’t want to see anyone. Me and Dean gradually drifted apart. Unfortunately, it just didn’t work out between us, as having a boyfriend was the last thing on my mind. I just spoke to my mum and cried. Apart from that, nothing. I hated every second of my life.
Stacey: My Story So Far Page 10