“I had a complete perineum,” Marilyn tells us of her nightmare birth, “a form of catharsis”

“I’m 32 years old and here I am, a future mother. For years I didn’t know if I would ever see myself as a mother or not. Last of three children, I just thought: “In any case, children prevent you from traveling and sleeping! » Furthermore, since I was little I had in mind the dramatic story of my mother who told me about my birth. “So you see that you weighed almost 5 kilos, the gynecologist was absent, you couldn’t get out from underneath, I went into a coma and the medical staff asked your father: shall we save the mother or the baby?”. In the end she was entitled to an emergency cesarean section, poorly performed, which will leave her with lifelong consequences.

I loved every moment of my pregnancy

So when I finally found out about my pregnancy, miraculously, I was at peace before becoming a mother, I felt it directly when the second blue line appeared on the test but the idea of ​​giving birth was already terrifying me! I loved being pregnant, seeing my body grow like a golden balloon, feeling my baby, caressing my belly day and night.

I appreciated every ultrasound, I scrutinized the slightest movement, I listened to his heartbeat, I was really happy to be expecting my little girl. However, a dark side remained: despite the pregnancy preparation courses, a well-thought-out and written birth plan, the sophrology courses, nothing helped, I created disastrous scenarios for the day of my birth.

One September morning I got up with a few pink drops on my trousers, I called for help, they told me to come directly. I had he broke the bag of water and they would induce labor with pills to be taken at a regular rate..

We go up to the room and I take the first pills that should trigger contractions to speed up labor. The day flies by, nothing to report, my cervix doesn’t jiggle, I have no contractions, they tell me to continue the pills. By the end of the day, I’m starting to feel less sensitive to pain.

I swallow the last pill at 11pm, I’m bent over in pain, the contractions are becoming unmanageable for me. A midwife comes into my room, tells me my cervix has opened a little more, and takes me to the delivery room. She complains about my slow walk to the elevator.

I sit down, I am greeted by another midwife on duty, she reads my birth plan, looks at me and says coldly “A physiological birth, aside? I don’t like fashion effects, mademoiselle.

Then I’m 2.5 cm dilated, they give me an epidural, they make me curl up into a ball despite the barely bearable pain. Unfortunately the effects are starting to be felt only on one side. In fact, the poorly positioned epidural anesthetized only the right side, the pain on the left was always terrible. I am still left to marinate in this pain, as the baby is badly positioned (face towards the sky) they turn him onto my stomach and ask me to rest.

I don’t feel anything anymore

An hour later, since I was still in pain, they gave me the injection, this time the epidural took away the pain, but completely paralyzed my lower body. My legs are manipulated, as if I were an ordinary quilt, which is scolded to boot. “But let’s see, try to get yourself together” . They’re pushing me, here we are! I push my feet in the air, I can’t feel anything anymore, they shout at me to pretend to row with my arms and do sit-ups.

No matter how much I breathe, scream, push with all my might, fight like an animal in agony, nothing happens. My little one’s heart started to show signs of tiredness, so 6 people came to the room: 2 gynecologists then stood in front of my cervix and started playing with me with spatulas, nothing was done. Anouk doesn’t want to go out. The required 30 minutes of pushing have passed, a silence, a long look exchanged with my partner, we have to go for an emergency caesarean section.

I’m there but without being there I don’t understand what’s happening, I no longer control anything. I only hear my partner’s voice shouting at me: “heart there was one last contraction on the monitor push with all your strength, think about it”, faced with my partner’s contagious enthusiasm, the gynecologists took up their spatulas again, a midwife pressed on my belly with all her strength. My baby is finally coming out. We take him straight to the pediatrician to check if everything is okay, my partner shouts at me, he’s fine, he has a lot of hair!!! I would never blame my partner. His words and his look helped me resist during this painful journey.

“You have a full perineum”

As soon as labor is over, I am pushed once so that the placenta comes out. Then the gynecologist who had just given birth to me approaches and whispers softly in my ear. “You have a full perineum”. Faced with my questioning expression, he simply explains to me that everything downstairs was destroyed. I remain stunned. 2 hours of skin to skin with my baby gives me back all the softness I had lost in the last few hours. A midwife offers me a chair to go back to the room, I refuse and want to stay lying down.

I learn that there can be 4 types of tears during childbirth, what I had was the stage 3 “complete and uncomplicated perineum” and stage 4 is “complete complicated perineum,” which means the sphincter is also affected.

The rest is not simple. I lay in bed for 5 days, catheterized, my bladder was paralyzed from the epidural, I caught a bad virus that forced me to take antibiotics for 3 days. I’m all stitched up to the anus. After a few hours, when the epidural was no longer effective, I became aware of my stitches, the pain was excruciating. I have a hard time going to the bathroom. I remain on painkillers for 3 days, with ice packs to relieve the hemorrhoids trapped between the threads of the stitches. The hospital staff are very caring after all this and help me breastfeed my daughter.

Months of rehabilitation

In the following months I felt a sense of heaviness in the perineum. I insist to my doctor who tells me it’s nothing and that it’s in my head. In the end, I had surgery exactly 1 year after giving birth. The surgeon removes a piece of my hymen that has been at the bottom of my vagina since I gave birth. They put Botox in the muscles inside my vagina because I have had muscle contractures since I gave birth. The fat from my thighs was also integrated into my perineum to plump it up, because sexual intercourse had led to a fissure at the level of the vaginal fork.

These tears are not dangerous, but unpleasant during intercourse, and then burn when I pee for 2/3 days. A year later, since I still had strains, the surgeon this time injected hyaluronic acid into my perineum, again with the idea of ​​creating a cushion, to prevent it from breaking again. Since then, unfortunately, I’m still breaking down, but less so, so I’m giving it time and hoping that sooner or later it will completely disappear. The interventions are rather unpleasant and are also expensive, because it is considered aesthetic medicine and not restorative…. A shame!

We never know the cause of this complication

I never really knew why I had these complications, it took my daughter a long time to come down and she had to wait and push obviously it “exploded suddenly”, my perineum couldn’t hold up. In general I don’t heal well, even using spatulas didn’t help, buts I didn’t have a purely medical explanation. I was told: it happens, that’s how it is. Looking back, I tell myself that that day there was space for me to give birth and that instead of letting my body work peacefully, letting me go home (the right we have after a moment of crisis and which I didn’t know at the time), they forced things with pills and my body didn’t follow..

Despite all this, I wanted a second child. Now I’m pregnant with my little brother. Yes, I am afraid of giving birth, but this time I was strongly encouraged to do so choose a cesarean section given my history. I am reassured, because I can no longer imagine giving birth vaginally. And even though the cesarean section stresses me out too, I prefer it to the idea of ​​reliving everything I’ve been through.