Reply to Anyone have a Kira Dixon Johnson like experience?

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[quote=Anonymous]I was physically restrained during my delivery and forced to labor in a position against my clearly expressed wishes by a student midwife (but I didn’t know she was a student because I was deep in labor). Then later on I was verbally and physically abused by one of my L and D nurses (eg given an extremely aggressive cervical check that caused me to cry). Then when I complained about her to the midwife on call and learned that the L and D nurses weren’t even supposed to do that, that nurse was informed of my complaint and was permitted to keep caring for me, which meant she treated me worse. She yelled at my husband, forced me to lay in my own feces (during pushing) and waited a very long time to help clean me up so every one in the room - myself included - had to smell and look at my BM. In addition, that nurse and the other student midwife and another nurse at one point all got together at the foot of my bed and were whispering about me and laughed at me. That horrible nurse also told me I wasn’t going to be able to deliver vaginally when I was literally hours into pushing. I could go on but that gives you a sense of the mistreatment I experienced. Needless to say, that created a profound sense of flight/fright/freeze for me at a time when I was trying to labor unmedicated, it completely stalled my labor, and likely was the cause of a lot of medical interventions that were ultimately needed to get my baby out. (The irony is though, is that in a multiple day hospital stay I also had doctors, nurses, and other providers who were excellent, caring, and extremely compassionate so the juxtaposition of them in contrast to the other providers was extremely jarring and unexpected.)

The care of these 3 horrible providers was shocking to me, as me and my DH were honestly quite terrified during my complicated delivery and were trying to be kind and respectful to everyone. We literally felt like our child’s life and my life were in their hands and were so stunned when this happened that we were basically in shock and did not respond well in the moment to advocate the way we normally would if someone physically harmed or mistreated us. No one — and I mean no one — in your birth class or anywhere else in your life can prepare you for how to respond to medical abuse and mistreatment while you are in the middle of labor. And I say that as someone who was working in health care at the time of that birth.

I ended up with - not surprisingly - a raging case of PTSD after this experience that took multiple years to treat. I also have a lot of medical trauma and it took me a very long time to even be able to go near this hospital without having a panic attack and crying. Medical environments are also still very triggering for me, as are pelvic exams.

This experience happened at a well known DC hospital that many people rave about. I eventually made a detailed complaint to the hospital about my experience and got a response from them, and I know changes were made to some degree, but in hindsight I sometimes wonder if I should have pursued litigation or gone to the board of nursing about these providers. I was too traumatized to pursue that route at the time, and I’m past the statute of limitation now, but the experience  really scarred me and it’s honestly something I don’t think I will ever be fully over. [/quote]

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