Birth Trauma · Personal

Yoda Was Wrong

Photo by Jayson Hinrichsen

Yoda may be a wise little green dude, but I think it’s time someone contradicted him. I have been sitting here for the last hour, trying to write a post about Sausage and how she came into the world. And I think I have realised, that after two and quarter years, I’m still not ready to do it.

The words are flowing out of me readily, but somehow, it feels as if no words can ever do justice to how awful a situation it was. It’s taken a really long time for Husband and I to feel even vaguely normal, but writing about it has made me realise that I am still so angry. I’m angry with the Doctors who were supposed to be there, and weren’t. I’m angry with the crappy bureaucratic system which dictates the way our medical system works. But mostly I’m still angry with myself for ever walking out of that hospital and leaving Sausage there.

After a couple of days, I was allowed to go home, but Sausage still needed to be cared for in the NICU unit. The doctors told me that home was the best place for me, so I left. Grudgingly.

I can tell you, from the bottom of my heart, that nothing can prepare you for the pain of going home and leaving your newborn baby in the hospital. Antenatal classes prepare you for a lot of things, but they never tell you that there is a possibility that you may go home empty-handed, even if it is just for a while.

Sausage was in the NICU for 8 days and made an incredible recovery. To this day, I am in total awe of her strength, her resilience, her sheer force of will. She inspires me in so many ways. It’s because of her that I am now studying for a degree, hoping that I can educate myself enough that I may pass on the knowledge I have to others, so that they never have to feel the way we did when it all went wrong. I’m studying for a BSc in Psychology, and I aim to use that, and my own experiences, to help other families who’ve been traumatised by a bad birth, and hope beyond everything that I can turn around the trauma we felt and make something positive out of it.

And so I would like, here and now, to call Yoda out on his assertion that anger leads to the Dark Side. Because, if you take that anger and build on it, don’t smother it and expect it to die on its own, it can turn to into something positive, something that brings help and hope to others. For Sausage’s sake, that it what I plan to do with mine.

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