My Birth Cost Me

Emotionally

The four minutes between my baby’s heart rate dropping and him being born changed something in me permanently.

Being asked to consent to surgery while not fully grasping what was happening, hearing “we will try to save you and baby”, and not knowing if my son would survive took away any sense of safety I had going into motherhood.

I still carry the memory of that theatre room, the urgency on the staff’s faces, and the loneliness of going under anaesthetic without my partner there.

That fear and helplessness didn’t end when my son was born. It became part of how I experience risk, hospitals and even ordinary worry as a parent.

I spent eighteen months in therapy afterwards, working through what had happened, and I still live with anxiety that I can trace directly back to that morning.


Physically

Recovering from an emergency caesarean is different to a planned one.

There was no time to prepare my body or mind for major surgery, and I came round from a general anaesthetic disoriented and panicked, asking if my baby was alive before I’d even properly woken up.

That recovery happened alongside the shock of what had just occurred, which made healing harder.


Relationships

My partner missed the birth by two minutes.

He arrived to find our son already in NICU. That gap is something we’ve had to make sense of together, and it shaped how we each remember the birth quite differently.

I went through the most frightening moment of my life without him there, and he arrived to a baby already separated from us both. That’s a strange thing to carry as a couple.


Parenting

Our son’s first hours were spent in NICU, needing resuscitation, before either of us could hold him.

That early separation, and the fear that came before it, has stayed with me in how I parent.

The anxiety that began that day hasn’t fully left.

I notice I’m more anxious about his health and safety than I might otherwise have been, and I sometimes wonder how different early bonding might have felt without that trauma sitting underneath it.


Other Costs

Eighteen months of therapy carried its own cost, in time, money and emotional energy, on top of everything else involved in caring for a newborn.