Turbulence Part 8: Replay and Rebuild

Post crash  - finding the black box flight recording and replaying it - What went wrong and how had this been allowed to happen? The path to recovery had to be met on every level and it had many potholes.

The replaying

“I think I need to talk to someone.”

Bill looked up from his coffee. He’d heard from my tone that I was saying something big.  

“I think I need some counselling, to talk to someone about everything that’s happened, so that we can make the complaint, I just can’t go there again and write it all.”

My health visitor had suggested that we attend an official birth debrief with a consulting midwife at the hospital. Both Bill and I welcomed this, we had so many unresolved questions. During the debrief, the consulting midwife handling my case became more and more concerned about aspects of my experiences as we relayed them. At the end of our session she strongly urged us to make a formal complaint so that there could be an official investigation into my care. I agreed that this could be a good thing to do, both for myself and future patients and told her that I’d be in touch, but as the months went on I found that I couldn’t easily talk or write about my trauma and I needed to put it all down in detail in order to lodge the complaint.

I stalled for six months.

How could I walk back into that time and relive each and every moment that had been so torturous and brought me to the point at which I’d broken both mentally and physically?  

Then, on Easter Sunday 2013, (full of chocolate) I suddenly found myself online searching for trauma counselling. As I’d put our daughter down for her nap, the niggling inner voice had come at me again saying, “You have to write about what happened, or you’ll never make that complaint.” I realised at that moment the only way I would be able to revisit what had happened, would be if I got professional help. I booked myself 6 sessions with a counsellor who specialised in trauma in order to help create a game plan to deal with all that had happened. Talking to a professional listener is always a good thing to do. I wrote my story for the first time as a part of those sessions.

The complaint went through in detail (along with recognition of great work from some key medical staff) and although many of the issues were never fully dealt with, the ward midwife who had so mishandled my situation was put on a monitoring system as a result of the investigation, it was not the first complaint lodged against her.

The Rebuilding

My physio sessions continued over the next year. 

I started my own baby steps of walking again without crutches. 

First milestone was to make it down to the end of our street.

The next was around the block and then around the bigger block, until finally the day came when I was strong enough to physically walk to the park on my own!

My daughter and I were learning to move and grow in physical strength together at the same pace. She brought (and still brings me) so much joy. I was awed at her being and revelled in her tenacity for life. She gave me new eyes, new insight and a new focus. I watched her determination to master each of her new milestones. She was definitely a major player in my recovery process. As she loved and needed me, she also filled me with new purpose, kept me busy and meant that I had no choice but to throw myself back into engaging with life.

I must admit however, that at the same time as I was awed with my new sense of purpose and the wonder that is my daughter, the trouble and turbulence of loss began to rattle and shake me while I struggled to rebuild myself. This time the loss centred on my identity as I tried to figure out who and where I was in the new version of me as a mum.

I think that on some level, every new mother has to face these questions of how to come to terms with their post baby body and their new baby filled life?

One of the big questions that played over and over was how could I become Rachel, "The Singer Songwriter" again? That person on a stage in a kooky hat and steam-punk dress playing those songs, seemed so alien and far away now. The lady who would walk into an unknown room, in an unknown city, in an unknown country and sing a capella bringing a rowdy crowd into stillness, she was not this unfamiliar person, called mum. This new version of myself couldn’t even fit into any of those gig clothes, let alone stay awake long enough play a set!

I was huge. I tried not to beat myself up about it, (I mean what else is there to do when you’re house bound, recovering from injuries and growing a baby, but to eat cake?!) but after pregnancy and the birth trauma I found that I didn’t recognise myself either physically or internally. My scar was a daily reminder of all I’d been through. It was a physical jagged line reflecting back the lines that my mind and body had crossed. Having such limited mobility for all those months as well as the invasive surgery had meant that my muscles had atrophied. My core muscles weren’t even strong enough for me to hold my notes in tune when I sang, let alone strum my guitar. I was stripped of music and my ability to make it from within.

This was hard.

Music was and is so much a part of me.

Identity can be a devious thing. We all fill our minds with tricks, devices and props to ease ourselves though our days. We are what we do. We kid ourselves that what we can do will build our importance. We torment ourselves over our physical appearance and our self confidence rises and falls in relation to what we tell ourselves and how we perceive ourselves. At that moment I didn’t have the ability (or time) to do much of anything that I’d being used to doing previously. My body didn’t do or look anything like that of my previous self. The rebuilding here took a lot of self compassion to accept who I was right in that moment. Sometimes I succeeded and sometimes I failed. There were days when dredging through everything was too much. The mud and muck of my circumstances clung thick and fast in a smothering blanket of dark thought. Some days I wallowed under the covers of self pity, other days it wasn’t so much wallowing, it was just too much effort to lift the weight of those heavy sheets and the best I could do was simply try to come up for air and catch my breath, but having a baby meant I didn’t have time to stay there long. In those times I think an instinctive primal ‘mum type wiring’ kicked in as I knew I needed to take the focus off myself and get busy keeping my focus on caring for my daughter.

Through it all I realised that it was going to be a long time before I was going to be able to find the singer songwriter again and that when I did, she would be a whole new entity, as the scars of these experiences had and were changing me.