Clinging to the edge of the bed on the postnatal ward, I deployed a syringe of morphine into my mouth as I braced myself to move. The ward bathroom was only about 10ft from where I was stood, but it felt like an impossible distance.
I could move forward only by pulling my body along the hospital bedframe with my arms, dragging my legs behind me. Even with morphine, the pain was agonising. It took me nearly ten minutes to get to the bathroom, as other new mothers on the ward looked on, horrified. When I finally got there, I was shaking with the pain, effort and humiliation.
‘It is normal to be a bit sore after you’ve had a baby,’ midwives, doctors and healthcare assistants told me dismissively when I repeatedly raised concerns about my agony and inability to move my legs.
In fact, my pelvis had snapped during childbirth – but on the desperately short-staffed postnatal ward, everyone was too busy to notice.
Less than two days after giving birth and still unable stand straight, sit up or take a step without crying out in pain, nobody had diagnosed anything wrong with me. I was handed half a packet of strong painkillers and discharged to look after my newborn son.
Chairman of the Independent Investigation into Maternity and Neonatal Services in England, Baroness Amos, last week released an interim update where she revealed her horror at the extent of crisis in maternity care – stating it was ‘much worse than anticipated’.
‘I expected to hear experiences from families about where they had been let down by the care they had received… but nothing prepared me for the scale of unacceptable care that women and families have received, and continue to receive, the tragic consequences for their babies, and the impact on their mental, physical and emotional well-being,’ she wrote.
She expressed shock that so little has been done to improve maternity care, despite NHS England having received 748 recommendations for change in the last decade.
Rosie Taylor takes a stroll with her baby – a task which required crutches for the first year after birth due to her crippling pelvis break
Rosie’s injury was a rare one, striking in fewer than one in every 30,000 births
But as a health journalist who has spent five years reporting on this crisis, I am sadly not surprised at all. I regularly hear from women who are suffering today because of the same systemic problems that left my debilitating injury undiagnosed in 2020.
As Baroness Amos recognises, women’s pain, concerns and knowledge of their own bodies are frequently dismissed; there is a lack of empathy and basic care on labour and postnatal wards; and healthcare staff fail to communicate properly with each other and important information gets missed.
Maternity staff do not want to provide poor care, but become burnt-out by repeatedly working in understaffed and dangerous environments, where no one has enough time to stop and listen. One former midwife told me she was expected to treat women in labour as if they were ‘on a conveyor belt’ and to discharge them as quickly as possible to free up beds.
Sadly, being well-informed is not enough to protect you from poor NHS maternity care, as I know only too well.
I’d spent years reporting on the NHS and felt confident I knew how to advocate for myself before I became pregnant via IVF in 2019, aged 31.
Luckily, both my pregnancy and labour went smoothly. But after 18 hours of labour, I was in continuous pain. One midwife told me off for using the gas and air between contractions and I mumbled that it hurt just as much as during them.
As the baby was born, I felt something pop. The intense pain continued and my pelvic and leg muscles suddenly stopped working.
I lay down as my husband cuddled our baby. For me, there was no rush of happy hormones that I’d read would come after birth. My body was in shock, shaking uncontrollably, and I was in agony and unable to move.
From then, all I remember is pain. I needed the strong painkiller fentanyl to be moved on to a postnatal ward bed. I kept telling anyone who would listen: ‘It feels like my pelvis has broken.’ But my concerns and my pain were brushed aside.
Injuries like mine are rare, affecting women in fewer than one in 30,000 births – and are more commonly seen in car crashes. Yet, if I had turned up in A&E with the same symptoms after a crash or fall, I have no doubt I would have been X-rayed, diagnosed, given pain relief and not allowed to leave without a wheelchair or crutches.
Because it happened after I’d had a baby, I was told to stop making a fuss.
The first week of my son’s life was supposed to be full of joy. Instead, I spent it in extreme pain and distress.
Gaslit by the dismissive responses from medical professionals into thinking I must be overreacting, I tried my best to look after my baby with a broken body.
I sobbed in frustration that I could not pick him up, change his nappy or even turn over in bed to check on him, while my husband was unexpectedly launched into being my carer as well as a new parent.
When my son was seven days old, I finally convinced a GP to send me for an X-ray. It immediately showed my pelvis was in two pieces – and I felt validated I had been right to feel like I was trying to walk on two broken legs.
Baroness Amos, chairman of the Independent Investigation into Maternity and Neonatal Services in England, said: ‘Nothing prepared me for the scale of unacceptable care that women and families have received, and continue to receive, in maternity care’
Pelvic dislocation (medically called pubis symphysis diastasis) occurs when the strong cartilage holding the two sides of the pelvis firmly together ruptures at the pubis (the joint under the pubic hair). It can happen in very quick, powerful deliveries, those where forceps have been involved or twin births. While none of these were true for me, I was later diagnosed with the congenital joint condition Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which may have predisposed me to the injury.
While pelvic dislocation is rare, it is all too common that new mothers like me are dismissed when they raise health concerns after having a baby – as Baroness Amos is discovering.
About a year after the birth, I was diagnosed and treated for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), triggered by the intense distress and fear I’d felt when I was unable to move to attend my baby and nobody believed me. I’ve met many other mothers since who had different birth complications, but who felt exactly the same distress and fear when they were dismissed.
The NHS has a problem with taking women seriously both during and after birth. Last year’s Birth Trauma Inquiry report found multiple cases of women ‘not being listened to when they felt something was wrong, being mocked or shouted at and being denied basic needs such as pain relief’. Poor postnatal care was ‘an almost universal theme’ of the 1,300 personal submissions the inquiry received.
In the weeks after my diagnosis, an NHS pelvic physiotherapist fitted a waist strap to help bring my bones back together and gave me crutches and rehabilitation exercises – but it took three years and thousands of pounds of private physiotherapy before I regained full movement of my legs.
I was on crutches and continuous painkillers for most of the first year of my son’s life. I felt tearful when I saw other mums effortlessly pushing their babies in prams or carrying them in slings. I felt robbed of the normal experiences of new motherhood and ashamed I couldn’t care for my son as I wanted to.
More than five years later, while largely recovered, I still experience occasional pain and distressing flashbacks.
As I continue to hear from women all over the country with heart–breaking birth stories, I am relieved to see Baroness Amos is determined to get to the bottom of why the NHS is still struggling to provide ‘safe, reliable care’ for mothers, babies and their partners.
‘I do not understand why change has been so slow. It is clear from what I have already seen that change is not only possible, but also necessary and urgent.’
She couldn’t have said it better.
