"Traumatic"

The hospital was clearly stretched and understaffed. My negative experiences have unfortunately overshadowed the many position moments at the hospital and the hard work of some staff with good intentions.

Having been induced I quickly went into labour. After I moved into the delivery ward a relatively positive experience started to go wrong. The first midwife who had been friendly scolded me because in the pains of labour I had moved and accidentally torn the drip out of my hand, resulting in quite a lot of blood. She told me very abruptly 'I told you not to move!' It was the start of a very hot/cold experience. Other midwives clearly were excellent at their job and helped me feel at ease.

It became clear that something was wrong and I had apparently contracted an infection (it seems I contracted this whilst in the hospital). I was told at 8am that my baby was going to be born at around 10am (having been induced at 4pm the previous day), but was then informed by the new midwife at handover that my dilation had been wrongly assessed. The doctors came to look at me and after much confusion and disagreement amongst the doctors they attempted a forcep delivery. This failed and my baby was born in an emergency c section. The actual c section experience was made as positive as possible by the doctors and nurses in surgery and I am grateful to them.

Unfortunately after birth things went really downhil. The midwives mostly had absolutely no time to give me any real help with breastfeeding. My baby had gone a considerable time without milk and asking several times for help feeding I was advised at 11pm that my husband should get milk from Tesco. I was distraught that after having had no sleep my husband had to run around shopping. I came to the hospital with everything I had been told to and had no intention of bottle feeding. Had I been given proper help breastfeeding or been provided milk at least for the night it would have saved us more trauma. Furthermore, my husband could not get on to the ward to drop off the shopping. I gathered my blood drain and catheter in one hand and baby in other to seek help. I told a midwife that my husband could not get in and she snapped back 'well we are busy!' I clearly understand that but did not expect to be spoken to like that especially after the ordeal I had been through. I sobbed as I said goodnight to my husband and realised that I was in for a rough few days. I would have paid good money to escape from that post natal ward and would not wish it on anybody. It's a real shame because I did meet midwives who truly did care and want to help but could not because of time. The stress of the job had clearly hardened other midwives to the feelings of the new mothers. I did not feel that I mattered at all and I would go as far as saying that the postnatal ward did give me some form of postnatal depression.

Baby and I are now doing great but it took a long time to recover from my experiences at the hospital.