It took me a long time to get over what I experienced with my second child. I had a doctor I had never met, who ignored me for the most part after I told him I didn't want the c-section he wanted to give me because I had labored for 14 hours by then. (It was 23 in total.) Then things got scary with my blood pressure. I was really afraid I was going to die.
I wrote my own doctor a letter and told him how I felt, poured my heart out. And no, I didn't send the letter - I never would have - he was NOT the doctor attending my birth. But it made me to feel better to write it.
My son was okay, bruised and swollen, and it took my body longer than usual to get back to normal - my own doctor told me I couldn't go back to work at 6 weeks. I chose a song that was popular at the time that seemed to help me deal with what I had gone through with him - Have I Told You Lately That I Love You. "You fill my heart with gladness, take away all my sadness, ease my troubles, that's what you do." I still sometimes tear up when I hear that song.
Fast forward 16 years. I had put that fear and feeling away until this Mother's Day weekend, Foreveryoung. And I wrote something about it in a thread that someone asked a question in. A midwife here started PM'ing me awful stuff and made fun of me for feeling like I might have died. It is her opinion that women should use midwives and not go to hospitals, and she is so sure of herself that she thinks that she knows what every woman needs, though she has never met us or examined us.
I have to say, that her bullying brought back the feelings I had left behind, and the memories I did NOT want to remember. I'm so glad I never had to go through childbirth again. Two children was what I wanted anyway, and I'm glad. But when I read on these threads people badgering and bullying women, telling them that they should have their births a certain way, etc., it really bothers me, ESPECIALLY when THAT midwife who treated me like she did during Mother's Day weekend bullies other moms.
I had turned my memories into gratefulness for my final nurse, who came to me with the new shift change, not remembering the bad part. I wish I hadn't had to go back to memories that made me feel sad.
Dawn