Turbulence Part 7: Debris

As far as a landing goes it was more like a series of crash landings with bits of the plane falling off at every impact. It was full of confusion. Were we airbourne? Were we on the ground? Where is the plane? There I sat unable to move with the remains of the fuselage scattered around me unrecognisable as a plane, just as my life was unrecognisable from 9 months previous… 
Would we be able to find and gather all the pieces to put back together to build something that was once again recognizable, or did we need to start again from scratch?

As I’m writing my story, I am aware of so many other stories of huge suffering around me.

There are people in my life who have been through horrific chemo and radiotherapy that has savaged them to the point of a living death existence while they endure it. There are dear friends of mine who have lost their partners and/or their children. There are those living with chronic physical pain or tormenting psychological illness on a daily basis. There are a few whose bodies and minds have been violated by the criminal actions of others. I hear my own words in the context of everything else and know that all I went through, is just life. None of us makes it out unscathed. We all have to find ways of getting up and beginning again when that rug is pulled out from beneath us and we crash and burn. This is hard. 

It was heart breaking and defeating to be back in hospital.  Although my objective self knew I needed to be there, my subjective self felt like I was in prison. In retrospect I find myself thinking about torture techniques and how repeated physical and emotional pain are used to break a person.  Of course I don’t compare what happened to me as equal to what survivors of torture have experienced, but I do feel a small amount of heightened insight as to the breaking of a soul in that way.
Add to the mix: The trauma of my fall, Bill’s near death experience, months of physical pain from my injuries, months of sleep deprivation, the epic and traumatic events of birthing and haemorrhaging, necessary but excruciating physical pain inflicted by staff with no warning or worse a false statement of “this procedure will just feel a little bit uncomfortable” constant noise and bright neon lights of a hospital environment, building work outside my room and drills sounding non stop through the daytime, a continuing cocktail of drugs, claustrophobic spaces of an MRI scan, the underlying undiagnosed medical conditions that had been ignored and dismissed as nothing important and finally listening to the sound of a few gossiping staff members making negative uninformed and disparaging comments outside my door.  All this, compounded by my own sense of grief that I was unable to properly care for my newborn child, had added up to bring me to breaking point.

Nobody knew why I had lost my memory in those moments. It might have been any number of medical symptoms from anaemia to TIA, or it might have been a psychological disassociating PTSD type of response to my trauma or just sheer fatigue so great that my mind couldn’t function, but for me experiencing those episodes of confusion and memory loss was the moment that I realised I was really very broken. Something inside had snapped both physically and psychologically. There was talk of brain scans, but in the end the consultants decided against it.

My bladder was stretched and distended and retaining disturbing amounts of fluid so the catheter went back in and then a few days later a system of monitoring began. The problem was, the hospital was so understaffed that there was nobody available who was qualified to operate a bladder scanner once the scanner finally had been located. I won’t go into the gory details of how we had to measure in the end except to say it was what they described as the old fashioned way… It is likely that I’d experienced bladder trauma from the impact of my falling and that this was part of my on going back pain but that in between my hospital admission in Italy and my re admission in the UK, there was a lot that didn’t get checked out. 

My haemoglobin levels had dropped significantly below 7 and I was finally given a blood transfusion. As I felt the cold new blood travelling through my body I wondered who this blood had previously been travelling in. I contemplated the fact that my story had intersected with complete strangers who would never know how much I valued their choice to offer something so vital in donating their blood. During the second unit I suddenly found that I began to feel more human, but then sadly almost as soon as I’d received the blood transfusion, my blood pressure soared and I developed postpartum preeclampsia. The Drs wondered if the blood loss from my haemorrhage had been masking that condition all along. Again I experienced the NHS stretched beyond what it could handle, as during the night, the staff were busy with an emergency situation and were unable to administer my medication.

We decided that one of the best things for me to do would be to try and get some sleep. This meant that Bill took our daughter back home with him for the nights I was re-admitted and she spent the days with me. The majority of staff were supportive of this decision but there were a few who felt differently and made it known to me, voicing their opinion both to my face and discussing me outside my room. New mums need support, not disapproving judgement. I knew they were afraid that I wouldn’t bond with our daughter. I already felt a terrible amount of personal emotional guilt about this, not being well enough to properly care for my own daughter, but knew that it really was the most helpful scenario to choose.  I also knew in myself that I already was as bonded as I possibly could be and that if I was going to have a fighting chance of getting well enough to function, then I needed to sleep. I believed that our daughter would feel more secure being cared for in the evening by her dad who she already knew and trusted as well as my mum who had who was on hand at that time, than by a member of staff who was a stranger.

I finally retuned home with beta-blockers and a truckload of extra iron tablets and visits from breastfeeding consultants. 

In the days that followed there was suddenly a lot of concern from visiting support team about our daughter not gaining enough weight as it transpired my milk wasn’t producing the fats/ nutrients needed. It had taken two full weeks for my milk to come in at all. At the time I could still barely walk (or do anything much physically, even changing a nappy was sending my muscles into spasm) but I found breastfeeding was something I could at least try to do. It was toe curlingly painful for many weeks, but I think I’d got so used to everything being so painful that I didn’t really question it. I don’t think I really knew how ill I’d been, or was, while I was going through everything. I had to top up every feed with formula for a few weeks but eventually we settled on continuing with a mixed feeding pattern 75 % me 25 % formula. It worked well and thankfully our baby was healthy and thriving.

I wasn’t depressed, but I was utterly and totally broken. I was starting from ground zero in every sense. I felt my life was a post apocalyptic wasteland of the person that I’d known. Anxiety and panic attacks visited me daily for many months and were often triggered by lack of natural light or lack of windows, anything that reminded me of the hospital lighting. Neon supermarkets were particularly awful.

I wandered through the debris of my broken self and very slowly began to rebuild.