No One Believed Me About My Postpartum Hemorrhage
Image from Suhyeon Choi on Unsplash
CW: if you scroll to the very end of this article, you will see a graphic image of a postpartum hemorrhage.
A year ago, in December, my baby died at the end of my second trimester. It was a devastating loss, and I left the hospital in a state of utter shock. I returned home, sat on the couch with my toddler and mother-in-law, and wondered how I would get up the next day and function.
And then I started bleeding.
I could feel blood gushing out of me so fast I was afraid that, if I stood up, my uterus would fall out. I ran to the bathroom, which quickly grew to resemble a bloody murder scene. I knew that I was bleeding a lot, but I also knew that a certain amount of bleeding was normal, so I started calling experts. And that’s when I learned that no one listens to or believes a woman having a postpartum hemorrhage.
I called the OB whose clinic I had just left. The receptionist wouldn’t put me through to the doctor. She assured me, without asking how much blood I had lost, that however much blood I had lost was normal. She told me a nurse would call me back. The call never came.
I asked my husband—a good feminist, who knows to listen to women, who knows that doctors often don’t listen. He was confident that, if the clinic said it was ok, it was.
I called three different nurse friends. None of them asked me how much I was bleeding. They all simply insisted that I was panicking because of the emotional weight of losing my daughter—not because I was bleeding to death. By this point, I had soaked through multiple pads in a mere 15 minutes. I was passing blood clots larger than my hand. I was shaking and my heart was racing.
So I asked my mother-in-law, a retired nurse. She told me to go to the emergency room.
But that’s not all she said. Her words will forever haunt me. “Don’t change your pants. Put all your pads in a bag. Take a picture of the bathroom floor. No one believes us when we say we are hemorrhaging.”
My husband and I packed up and headed to our local emergency room, at Emory Decatur Hospital. I followed my mother-in-law’s instructions. I approached the intake counter, told them I was hemorrhaging and dizzy, itemized how much blood I had lost, and attempted to show the male nurse my bloody pads. He took the bag, threw it away, and told me to sit down.
We sat and waited. And waited. I began to feel faint. I asked again for help.
“This is the emergency room. It’s for emergencies,” the male nurse emphasized, apparently unaware that postpartum hemorrhage is a life-threatening emergency, the leading cause of maternal mortality, and something which doctors often ignore until it is too late.
Somehow, through lobbying by my husband and doula, we finally convinced the nurse to take me back into the hospital. By this time I was in a wheelchair, unable to walk without falling from dizziness. The nurse deposited me in a waiting room, alone, and told me my husband could not come back with me.
I sat. I waited. I was alone, bleeding heavily, and dizzy.
I watched the treatment team tend to a man whose finger hurt before me.
No one examined or checked on me.
Finally, my doula and then my husband somehow snuck back. My doula gave me water, reassured me, and left me in my husband’s care at my request. I began to see spots. My husband alerted the nurse, who yelled at us for disturbing him. My husband asked where he should put me when I hit my head on the floor. The nurse finally agreed to put me in a room, even as another male nurse cautioned him, “No, no, that room is for emergencies. She’s not an emergency.”
No one examined me, and I did not see a doctor, until two hours after I arrived. Several nurses came into the room. I attempted to report my bleeding to them, or get them to examine me. They all refused. Even as I soaked through my pants and the towels my husband had positioned under me, no one would bring me a pad.
When the doctor finally got around to examining me, things changed. It became clear how much blood I had lost, clear that I needed urgent treatment. There was a team of people working together to figure out what to do. But even then, the reluctance to believe a hemorrhaging woman persisted. The primarily male team of nurses who treated me were rude, mocking even, and incorrectly administered my medication—a medication it took two hours for the pharmacy to get into my IV after my doctor ordered it, a medication that is supposed to be delivered instantaneously to hemorrhaging women so that they don’t die.
I survived that night, thanks in large part to basically good health, and a willingness to continually demand treatment. The next day, when I saw my regular OB, she remarked that my being alive was basically luck.
Luck. That’s what kept me alive.
Hundreds of other women each year aren’t so lucky.
I’ve told this story many times. I’ve publicly attacked Emory Decatur Hospital for its medical malpractice and abuse. I’ve written several articles about this. And what always sticks out is this: people assume my story is an outlier. They think the problem is with the hospital, or that I didn’t know how to correctly advocate for myself. They tell me what they would have done to get a different outcome. Surely, the thinking goes, a more competent person wouldn’t have suffered this fate. Some are skeptical that my hemorrhage was that bad. After all, I didn’t die.
The hospital told me that they couldn’t be expected to implement standard hemorrhage management protocols, and that even after I almost died in their waiting room, they still hadn’t adopted such protocols. “Sorry if you felt your experience wasn’t good.” Yes, because the problem here is clearly my crazy woman emotions.
This is what it’s come to with healthcare in our country. The U.S. has the worst maternal mortality rate in the wealthy world. My home state of Georgia has the worst maternal mortality rate in the U.S. And in addition to the skyrocketing death toll, an additional 50,000 women nearly die or are left permanently disabled by childbirth. The data is clear: these deaths and injuries are preventable, and they mostly happen because of medical neglect. The U.S. is the only place in the world where maternal mortality has risen. In Europe, the rate has dropped to almost zero. Spend five minutes googling the topic and you’ll find hundreds of stories like mine—women who couldn’t get anyone to believe them about their hemorrhages. Some of them survived. Many did not.
In any decent healthcare system, a person wouldn’t need an advocate to not bleed to death in the hospital. They shouldn’t need to be articulate, or have an attorney, or even know how to speak. Because everyone deserves not to die.
But we’d rather believe that the problem is crazy women who don’t know how to speak for themselves.
We’ve decided that there are good hospitals and bad hospitals, and that if a woman only has the good sense to choose the right hospital, she’ll be safe. We’d rather believe that, surely, this couldn’t happen to us. Victim blaming is all about feeling safe in an unjust world.
My mother-in-law was right. No one believed me about my hemorrhage. Not the nurses or doctors supposed to care for me, not anyone on the frontlines of healthcare. And the hospital where I nearly died has still not implemented a group of protocols called AIM Bundles that are proven to reduce hemorrhage-related death. It’s going to happen again and again. Women are going to keep dying. The media is going to keep wringing its hands about the maternal mortality epidemic, while continuing to fail to name and shame the primary perpetrators: negligent hospitals.
Much of our culture is premised on the idea that women are hysterical and unreliable. We don’t believe women about anything—about rape, about sexual harassment, about abusive marriages, or chronic pain, or how difficult pregnancy is, or how challenging the postpartum period can be. We don’t believe them when they’re dying. And we would rather continue letting them die than build a world that is safer and more just for them.
I’m going to conclude this post with a picture of the blood I lost in about three minutes of sitting on a bed pan. I’m sharing this because it shows how much effort the hospital had to go to to ignore my hemorrhage, and how much danger I was truly in. This image is graphic, but it’s also important. We, as a culture, must stop looking away from women’s suffering—whether it’s the postpartum hemorrhage no one thought was real or the rape everyone said was the woman’s fault.
Trigger warning: if you don’t want to see a picture of blood loss, don’t scroll past these dots.
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