Sometimes you have these movie-like visions of your life.
I am about to go into labor with my first child. I am terrified. I feel so damn vulnerable. Unfortunately, the only way out of labor is through labor. YIKES!
In my mind, I will go into labor and have a baby. Someone will yell push. I will wince while pushing. It will be hard. But not TOO hard. Right?…Right?
Well, my water broke in the middle of the night Saturday/Sunday morning. Without going into all of the details, I will fast forward to tell you: my daughter was born after 5pm on Monday. It was a very long, unexpected labor with lots of twists, turns, and mistakes.
There are moments in life you expect to define you in one way, and they end up defining you in a completely different one.
I had my daughter at the end of March. The labor did not go as expected. But I was on the other side with my new beautiful baby girl. That was the hard part, right?
Unfortunately, I spent those first months managing symptoms nobody would acknowledge, navigating a medical system that continued to fail me, and trying to hold myself together while everything felt like it was falling apart.
This is that story. Or, at least some of it.
The doctor I hoped never to see again
During my pregnancy, I cycled through the doctors in my OB practice the way you do when you’re preparing for whoever shows up on delivery day. One of those appointments stands out with painful clarity. Right after our ultrasound where we learned we were going to have a girl, a doctor I had yet to meet walked in like a wrecking ball — no hello, no introduction, zero bedside manner — and asked me if I liked to open Christmas gifts early. My husband and I looked at each other, confused. I said no with absolutely no idea where this was going.
“Well,” she said, “you just found out the sex of your baby before labor. You just couldn’t wait to open your gift, huh?”
She clearly disapproved of our decision to find out we were having a girl. And she wanted us to know it. Point taken.
I filed that interaction away and hoped I’d never see her again. My regular OB was someone I trusted, and I took for granted that she would be the one in the delivery room with us.
No such luck.
My OB was on vacation when I went into labor. Because I was in labor for so long, I cycled through several MDs at the practice. At the very last minute — literally 30 seconds before I delivered my daughter — the Christmas gift doctor walked in to catch her. This was the one who would “deliver” my daughter and go on to be the worst physician to ever “care” for my health.
She performed what she documented as a second degree tear repair. What I actually had was a fourth degree tear — the most severe classification — repaired as a first degree. Meaning she never sutured me internally. The most significant damage was left completely unaddressed, and my records were falsified to reflect an injury far less serious than what had actually happened.
I didn’t know any of this yet. I just knew something was wrong.
Nine months of being told I was fine
The months that followed were supposed to be about bonding with my daughter and figuring out our new life. Those moments were there, of course, but I was also constantly managing symptoms. Symptoms I won’t detail fully here, but that affected my body in deeply personal ways that touched everything: daily functioning, intimacy, my sense of myself.
When I raised my concerns at my six week checkup, I was told I had to meet with the MD who had been at the delivery. CRAP! Her. Again.
When I finally saw her, she told me to stop breastfeeding. Breastfeeding, she explained, can put the body in a low-estrogen state that affects muscle tone. She also told me I was being vain. That it would reverse. That I was fine.
I was not fine. I knew I was not fine. And there is a particular kind of lonely terror that comes from knowing something is deeply wrong with your body while the person responsible looks you in the eye and tells you it isn’t.
I called my doula. She told me to see someone immediately.
The institution that was supposed to help
Because I was living in Minneapolis and Mayo Clinic had a reputation as one of the best medical institutions in the world, I made an appointment. I went through a battery of invasive, painful tests. And then I sat across from a urogynecologist who told me that I required a highly difficult and often unsuccessful surgery. He said if he performed it, I would face serious risks, probable lasting abnormalities, and lifelong pain. That my life as I knew it was over. He literally said I should forget about controlling my symptoms — there were good diapers out there. He went on to say that I should just have more babies, because that was a woman’s role. That’s a clinical diagnosis, right?
I walked out of that appointment into Mayo’s lobby sobbing uncontrollably. I called my husband. I was gutted. Finally, I got in my car to drive back to the Twin Cities and called my doula — still crying.
Here is what I learned from that experience that will be forever true to me: a great institution is not great at everything. Mayo Clinic may be extraordinary at certain specialties and disease states. That does not mean every specialist in every department will serve you well. Guess what? I found a dud department at Mayo.
The surgeon who almost didn’t operate on me
My doula came back with a recommendation from another client: a colorectal surgeon ranked among the top surgeons performing this specific procedure. I made an appointment.
The consult was hard. I was already exhausted from months of being dismissed, and I walked in emotionally raw. When I started crying, she told me I wasn’t emotionally prepared for surgery. (Is that a thing? Pretty sure crying has never been named as a contraindication for surgery.) She also suggested my symptoms probably weren’t as severe as some of my test results indicated. Some of the imaging was so clouded by scar tissue it was difficult to read. She said if I truly was as bad off internally as implied, I’d appear worse off than I did.
I wasn’t a whiner. I never had been. I was using clinical results to have a clinical conversation, and I was crying because I had been let down so many times that I didn’t have anything left. But I couldn’t explain that in the moment. I just cried.
I decided to have the surgery anyway.
On the day of the procedure, she was running late. I was already terrified, and the waiting made it worse. When she finally came into the room, I started crying again. She threatened to cancel the surgery. Please tell me — what is wrong with crying before a major surgery?
I don’t know how to explain what it feels like to be told, in that moment, that your tears are a reason to deny you care. I had held everything together in every other area of my life. I just could not stop crying in that room.
We rolled into the OR. I asked the anesthesiologist if he had eaten a meal today and had his coffee. I wanted him on his game. She performed the surgery.
When she came to speak to my family afterward, she apologized. She said she couldn’t believe how severe my injuries actually were. That I had been under-reporting my symptoms significantly. That my test results had in fact been accurate — and had actually under-reported my injury all along. She just hadn’t believed I was symptomatic enough.
She told my family she had learned something from my case about how to treat her patients.
I cried again. Different tears.
The question nobody prepared me for
The surgery went well. But while I was recovering, another weight was sitting alongside everything else — one I hadn’t anticipated and didn’t know how to carry.
My husband and I had unofficially planned on having more than one child. or at least, hadn’t talked about stopping with one. And now, that plan was no longer simple. Pregnancy puts enormous pressure on the pelvis in the final weeks — it’s one of the primary reasons sphincteroplasty repairs fail. Having another baby could undo everything I had just been through. Everything I had fought so hard for.
The cruel irony wasn’t lost on me: the Mayo doctor had told me to just have more babies, as if that were the obvious solution. But the reality was that more babies could destroy the very repair that had given me my life back. There was no clean answer. Just an impossible choice sitting quietly in the middle of what was supposed to be a recovery.
This tension — between what your body needs and what your heart wants, between the future you planned and the one you’re handed — is something I’ve thought about a lot since. It isn’t unique to birth injury. Women navigating infertility, IVF decisions, and other reproductive crossroads know a version of this weight too. The specifics are different, but the impossible calculus is the same: how much do I put my body through, and what am I willing to grieve?
I’m not going to wrap that up neatly, because it wasn’t neat. And, it is still hard in some ways. It took time, therapy, and eventually a peace I had to build myself.
The research, the recovery, and the nineteen years since
The surgery — a sphincteroplasty, performed about nine months after my daughter was born — came with a rough recovery. The data at the time suggested these repairs had roughly a five year window before failure. I was not willing to accept that as inevitable.
So I did what I always do when I want a different outcome: I researched. I dug into community groups of women who had been through similar injuries. I looked at how other countries handle postoperative care for birth trauma — and found that in many places, women receive comprehensive follow-up consultations after labor as standard practice. In the United States, that is largely not the case. That made me angry in a way that will never fully resolve.
My surgeon had a biofeedback nurse in her practice, which was meaningful and rare. She gave me guidance on eating habits, body timing, and exercises I could do at home to continue strengthening the surgical site. About nine months later, I moved away, and that follow-up relationship ended. From that point on, I was largely on my own.
I kept going anyway. Pelvic PT. Fiber. Eating habits. Timing. The homework she gave me, continued and expanded over years.
It has been nineteen years. The repair has mostly held.
I want to be honest about what that means and what it doesn’t. This injury has had lasting implications on my health and my daily life. There are things I manage, prepare for, and work around. There are things that are simply different now than they were before. I am not going to pretend otherwise, and I am not going to offer you a tidy resolution that isn’t real.
What I can tell you is that the anger, and there was so much of it, building for years, has largely lifted. Not because what happened to me was acceptable or because the system that failed me has been fixed. But because I found a way to live fully inside a body that went through something it shouldn’t have had to. That took time, work, and a lot of grace toward myself that didn’t come easily.
Devastating doesn’t have to mean permanent. Even if it feels that way at the time.
What I want you to take from this
If you are in the middle of something like this, I want you to know that your instincts are worth trusting. I knew something was wrong. I kept going until someone believed me. It sucks when you are made to feel like you are wrong about something you know undoubtedly to be true.
Find your doula. Find your person who will dig until they find the right recommendation. And know that a great hospital name is not the same as the right specialist for your specific problem.
More on what I’ve learned practically, medically, and emotionally in the posts to come.