To mark International Day of Action on Women’s Health, our Menopause Champion Stacey Bamford has courageously shared her personal journey through endometriosis, IVF, and support after a difficult birth. Resources and support for dads and birth partners are shared at the end of the blog.
Content warning: traumatic birth, surgery, neonatal care, post-natal depression.
I'm not ashamed to say that I was unable to conceive naturally due to an endometriosis and adenomyosis diagnosis and had to use the wonderful world of science to get our little miracle.
Our baby girl Isla was born two weeks past her due date on 29 January 2020. Due to having adenomyosis and endometriosis, I was always worried about the pain of giving birth naturally.
I was booked in for an induction at 40 weeks and 12 days. It was so painful. After about 12 hours, they broke my waters manually. I was given an epidural and once the electric shocks in my spine had passed, I was happy as Larry. I finally felt I might be able to give birth naturally. After five or six hours though, I started to shake and my temperature increased.
As my temperature had increased, I had a blood test which showed I had Strep B in my blood. I was in danger of passing it onto my baby if born naturally, so it was decided that an emergency caesarean section was the way forward. I was devastated, but I knew it was for the best deep down.
I went down to theatre, and they tested my skin to see if I could feel anything with the epidural. I couldn't but, once on the table I could feel them cutting and pulling at my stomach and it was knocking me sick.
Our daughter was born at 2.17am and as my husband showed her to me, I started to cry but as I did, I couldn't get my breath and started to have a panic attack. They decided to give me a general anaesthetic.
I came round about six hours later (convinced I was dead) to find that our daughter had been taken to the neonatal intensive care unit, as she needed two lots of antibiotics. One for the Strep B and one for a slight problem found with her kidneys.
I was on the recovery ward for six days and during that time I had severe stomach pain. An ultrasound found my digestive tract had slowed right down and was blocked.
I was given all sorts to try and get things moving but they didn't really have any success. Two days and two enemas later, I was finally able to go home. I still felt sore; the surgeon told me that my scar would take longer to heal due to them having to work around the endometriosis scarring.
After the midwife and health visitor visited me at home, they both agreed I had postnatal depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from the labour as I was getting very low and upset and kept replaying the experience in my head.
I got the help I needed and I’m still on tablets now over three years later. On the plus side, I had my gorgeous baby girl; and although I was petrified I’d be a bad mum or do something wrong, I was so pleased she was finally here.
I wanted to share my story so anyone else who goes through a similar situation knows they aren't on their own.
Stacey Bamford, Approvals AdministratorThere are so many people who struggle to conceive naturally and sometimes IVF works and sometimes it doesn't. I'm so thankful that it worked first time for us. I feel so lucky and blessed to have my baby girl after nearly 11 years of trying to conceive. I never thought the day would come. It has given us this beautiful, funny, intelligent, patience-testing, loveable little girl who means the absolute world to us.
We will forever be grateful to the scientists, researchers and everyone else who was involved in pioneering this medical breakthrough and to all the consultants, doctors, nurses, anaesthetists, embryologists and administrators at our local hospital who helped us with our dream of becoming parents.