I felt guilt for years after Patrick died. Maybe I still do. I am his mother. I should have done more. I should have gone to a different hospital. I should have chained myself to the hospital bed and refused to leave.
But you know what? Why would I have done those things? Hindsight brings guilt. The human need to blame fosters guilt. But the guilt is ALWAYS unfounded. It is not real. It is something that my heart tells my head. Or maybe my head tells my heart. I know that I should not feel guilty for something that I had no control over. The guilt is irrational. The same is true for my feelings of shame (that is for another day!). No-one should feel guilty about the loss of their child. Since Patrick died, I have read, talked, and conducted research into stillbirth and baby loss. I think about it all a lot, maybe a bit too much. I think about what happened. How it happened. Why it had to happen... It was only when I realised that I was carrying a whole lot of guilt that I was able to do something about it. I was able to break the cycle that I was in - negative self-talk, berating myself for not being a good enough mother, depression, waiting to come up and out of the hole. I started to write about how I felt guilty over Patrick's death. I talked to others about how I thought that I should have done more and told people that I harboured feelings of guilt for not being able to 'save' Patrick. Voicing these feelings and thoughts allowed them to 'leave' my head. Voicing everything gave me the opportunity to talk about what I was feeling and how, even though I felt guilt, I knew that it was unfounded. And the great thing was was that no-one judged me. The healing element was that no-one enforced my feelings of guilt. The feelings of guilt which parents experience are unfounded. They are unnecessary. They are also incredibly harmful. And they are very much present for a great majority of people who experience a loss. I just hope that those people who experience a loss are able to realise that the voice in their head telling them that they should have done more, is not real. It is not the truth. It is fake. For me, I voiced those thought and feelings. I saw them as a part of my story with Patrick, and a part that was always going to be obvious when experiencing something so traumatic, but a part that was not true. I accepted this part and owned it. And then those feelings and that voice went away. What I am saying is that the guilt is an obvious emotion, but one that should not be taken seriously. There is nothing to feel guilty about and nothing that could have been done. Don't believe that voice in your head.
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This post, in fact this whole blog, has been on my mind for a long time.
I last posted almost two-years-ago and a lot has happened since then. I feel like the past four-and-a-half years have been an up-and-down roller coaster. There have been a lot of emotions, a lot of words, and a lot of conversations. But, I have always held the truth back. I do not really know why, but I know that this dishonesty has led me to block conversations, truths, and emotions. To other people going through a loss, and to me trying to battle my way through the 'after', I need to be completely honest. It is the only way to carry on fully. So here it is. On April 21, 2015, my son, Patrick, was stillborn because of the negligent actions of medical staff. It is a horrible situation to be in. For the past four years I have been battling with the emotions of burying a child, but also with the emotions (mainly anger, disbelief, and mistrust) of knowing that it never should have happened. I went to hospital that Saturday morning with reduced fetal movements. I was haemorrhaging. When a CTG was performed, it showed that Patrick's heart rate was very flat with no accelerations or decelerations. A Doctor fasted me for a c-section. A Consultant overruled it (for no reason. The Consultant had not even been in to see me which means that the c-section was overruled outside of the hospital room without checking me or Patrick first). The Consultant attempted an ECV (because Patrick had turned himself breach), took a kleihauer test, and then sent me home. The next day the results of the kleihauer test showed that there was 20ml of Patrick's blood in my system (which the Consultant admitted to reading wrong). The Midwife asked me to come in the next morning for Anti-D. I pestered the midwife for a few hours, they did a review of my notes, asked me to come in that night, and upon arrival, Patrick was dead. Argh, so heartbreaking! So close! There were so many errors and inappropriate comments made that it amazed me that we were sitting in the year 2015. Surely, in an advanced country with an advanced medical system, this sort of thing just did not happen anymore. But, it did. So this is the truth behind Patrick's death. Negligence killed my son. And there is no justice for that. None at all. |