I am bent forwards, unable to stand up straight, clinging to the open passenger door of the car pulled up outside the medical centre.
I grit my teeth and shift my weight over to my left side, gaining enough leverage to drag my right foot forward a few inches. I gasp involuntarily with the shock of the pain.
Our seven-day-old baby is screaming in the car as my husband keeps the engine running on double yellows. I have no choice but to cross the three metres of ground to the reception desk on my own.
It’s a cold winter morning but I sweat with the effort it takes to move forward, lurching and dragging from side to side. I dig my nails into my palms to combat the waves of pain and hot, pricking tears.
An elderly couple leaving the medical centre raise their eyebrows as they pass. I feel humiliated, knowing I look absurd.
As I reach the desk, I strain forwards like an athlete crossing the finish line, desperate not to take another step. I beg the receptionist for a wheelchair to take me to the X-ray department.
There, it takes seconds to get the answer I have been waiting a week for: “Oh!”, the radiologist exclaims immediately. “There’s a big gap here where there shouldn’t be a gap.”
From the moment I gave birth, I was in agonising pain. Unable to stand straight, sit up, lie flat or take a step without unbearable stabbing pains throughout the centre of my body, I was permanently in a hunched-over position.
I also lost the ability to move my muscles between my waist and knees. I could wiggle my toes but had to get other people to lift my legs in and out of bed.
Again and again, I told the midwives, doctors, healthcare assistants and paramedics who saw me that I felt sure the terrible pain was coming from my pelvic bone.
But I was repeatedly dismissed with the line: “It’s normal to be a bit sore after you’ve had a baby.”
Around 40 hours after giving birth and still unable to even take myself to the toilet, I was handed half a packet of strong painkillers and discharged home to look after my newborn son.
Even then, no one would help us leave, so another woman’s visiting mother had to push me out of the hospital in a borrowed wheelchair while my husband carried our baby.
And then we were on our own.
It was only after I finally convinced a GP to send me for the X-ray a week later that I discovered my pelvis had snapped when I gave birth.
A pelvic dislocation – pubis symphysis diastasis – occurs when cartilage ruptures at the pubis, the joint (under the pubic hair) which joins the two halves of the pelvis firmly together.
It is a rare injury, occurring in somewhere around one in 30,000 births, and tends to happen in very quick, powerful deliveries, those where forceps have been involved or twin births – although none of these were true for me. I was later diagnosed with congenital joint problem, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which could have predisposed me to injury.
While pelvic dislocation is rare, unfortunately it’s all too common that new mothers like me are dismissed when they raise health concerns after having a baby.
A report published by the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on birth trauma on May 13 said poor postnatal care was an “almost universal theme” among the 1,300 personal submissions the inquiry received from women.
We have a problem with taking women seriously both during and after birth. The report described women “not being listened to when they felt something was wrong, being mocked or shouted at and being denied basic needs such as pain relief”.
Pelvic dislocation is more commonly seen in car crash victims – and I don’t doubt for a moment that if I had turned up at A&E with exactly the same symptoms following a car crash, I would have been urgently diagnosed and treated.
But I’d had a baby, so I was told to stop making a fuss.
As a health journalist, I’ve spent years writing about how the NHS works. So, when I became pregnant via IVF in 2019, aged 32, I felt confident I could advocate for myself.
I was lucky that both my pregnancy and labour went smoothly. My contractions started at 4am one morning in late January 2020 and by around 7pm I was in a birth pool at home, supported by two midwives.
There was no need to transfer me to hospital five minutes away as everything was going well, but by around 10pm I was in continuous pain – it hurt just as much between contractions as during them.
As my son was born at around 11pm I felt something pop. I had no idea that this was unusual and assumed it must be what tearing felt like.
The intense pain carried on, like a continuous contraction, and my muscles no longer seemed to work. When a midwife told me to push to deliver the placenta, I couldn’t.
I was helped onto the sofa as my husband cuddled our baby. For me, there was no rush of happy hormones that I’d been promised would come. My body was in shock: I was shaking uncontrollably, in agony and unable to move.
From that point on, all I remember is pain. Getting into the ambulance to go to hospital for routine checks was excruciating. I needed the strong painkiller fentanyl to be moved from a trolley onto a postnatal ward bed.
Again and again I said: “It feels like my pelvis has broken” – but every healthcare professional I spoke to brushed this aside.
For a long time, I was angry at individual members of staff. The doctor who said I must be fine as I didn’t have an infection. The healthcare assistant who wrote in my notes “patient mobilises well” because she had seen me wiggle my toes. The midwife who discharged me, knowing full well I couldn’t walk out of the room.
But having since reported extensively on the crisis in maternity care, and as is echoed in this week’s report, I now realise the system is the problem.
Staff on the postnatal ward simply did not have enough time to give me the care I needed or to look into symptoms that didn’t fit a tick box. A recent report revealed short-staffed maternity departments often deprioritise postnatal wards, leaving very junior staff in sole charge of ten postnatal women and their babies.
The Royal College of Midwives has described postnatal care as the “Cinderella” of midwifery. NHS England figures revealed around £2,800 of funding was allocated for the average woman’s antenatal care, labour and delivery in 2016 – but just £250 for their postnatal care.
Yet latest figures show nearly two thirds of maternal deaths in the UK occur postnatally, between birth and six weeks later.
And a 2022 study of eight European countries found the UK had second highest maternal death rate, with 9.6 women dying per 100,000 live births, compared to 2.7 in the best-performing country Norway.
Just a few decades ago, women were encouraged to stay in hospital for several days after birth. Now they typically go home within six to 24 hours of a vaginal birth or within 48 hours of a C-section.
One midwife, speaking anonymously, told me that the modern “conveyor belt” approach meant women were moved on quickly to free up beds with “very little aftercare”.
Once discharged home, community midwives are responsible for caring for mothers for up to 10 days. But increasingly home visits are being phased out and women are expected to travel into a clinic with their new baby.
In the following weeks, health visitors may check on the baby but there is no dedicated care for the mother until they are seen by a GP six to eight weeks after birth. Many women are disappointed by the lack of support they get both up to and during this 15-minute appointment.
Unlike in countries such as France, there is no system of routine checks for pelvic or mental health issues in mothers in the UK, and many have to fight for a referral to a specialist.
Clare Bourne, a private specialist pelvic health physiotherapist and author of pelvic health book Strong Foundations, says the “majority” of women she sees say their concerns were not taken seriously.
“When women do ask for help they are often accused of ‘over-expressing’ their symptoms or told: ‘You had a baby – what did you expect?’,” she says. “There is a strong narrative that if you and your baby are alive then you should be grateful – but when you use ‘not dead’ as a benchmark, you are invalidating everything else a woman might be experiencing.”
In the weeks after my diagnosis, an NHS pelvic physiotherapist showed me exercises, fitted a waist strap to help bring my bones back together and lent me crutches.
For months, I felt guilty and resentful as I was dependent on my husband to help me dress, get into the shower and bring me food. He changed nappies, rocked our baby and ran up and down stairs with bottles and breast pumps, unexpectedly becoming both a parent and my carer.
It took three and half months before I could turn onto my side in bed to attend to my baby. It was five months before I could drive, seven before I could get around without crutches and 10 before I was able to leave the house on my own and go to the shops with my baby in his buggy.
It was only then I finally won my battle to see an NHS orthopaedic consultant, who told me I should have been assessed by him before I left hospital.
After spending thousands on private physiotherapy, I regained full movement of my legs when my son turned three.
Now, more than four years on, I have started tentative attempts at running. For the first time since birth, it feels like I have control over my body again.
The mental scars may take longer to heal.
I was diagnosed and received treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) around a year after birth, due to the trauma caused by the failure to diagnose and treat my birth injury – a theme highlighted in the birth trauma inquiry’s report. I deleted pictures from after the birth as I couldn’t bear to see the pain and distress in my face at a time that was meant to be so happy.
My son is the biggest joy of my life but being gaslit after experiencing such a debilitating injury left me a mental and physical wreck, robbing me of my ability to properly care for my own child for much of the first year of his life.
When I put in a formal complaint to the hospital about my postnatal care, I asked if a tick box could be added to the discharge requirements to check that a woman can walk 10 metres unsupported before she can be sent home to look after a baby. The hospital refused, saying it was unnecessary.
While medical professionals made mistakes in my case, it’s also true the situation was made worse by our ignorance about postnatal bodies. We aren’t taught about and rarely see cultural representations of the physical reality of the hours after birth, so I didn’t know I should have been able to walk. It meant I didn’t trust my own judgement or have the confidence to challenge medical staff.
To anyone due to give birth, I would say make sure you know what normal postnatal recovery looks like. It will help you recognise if something is wrong and give you the confidence to fight to be heard if it does.
Because, unless things radically change, you will have to fight.
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