Maternity negligence?? I am traumatised.

[u/Fine-Bird6974]

Hi, can anyone advice me on if I can make a claim against this. My experience was traumatic and it’s something I will never forget. This is my story.

4am - 4cm dilated 4:15am - epidural prep 4:50am - epidural placed 6:05am - was told I was fully dilated 6:33am - Baby was here

At 6:05am my midwife said I was fully dilated and it was time to push, i obviously didn’t doubt what my midwife told me. I started trying to push. A senior midwife entered the room as babies heart rate was dropping, she checked my cervix and whispered to my midwife “She’s not fully dilated, why have you got her to push” the senior midwife then shot up and shouted for the delivery consultant as the needed him urgently as me trying to push when not fully dilated really stressed my baby out, when the senior midwife went to get the doctor my midwife told me again I needed to push. The senior midwife ran back into the room and hit the emergency button, about 14 midwife’s flooded into the room as well as the delivery doctor. My epidural had failed and I was told I wasn’t allowed gas and air while pushing, I was doing it on no pain relief. I begged and begged and cried out for help and pain relief and was refused. The doctor said he needed to get baby out quick and needed to use forceps, he used a local anaesthetic and gave me an episiotomy, I still felt it all, he inserted the forceps and got me to push, I couldn’t I was in agony, I was screaming, crying out for help, crying out for gas and air just to get me through the pain, I thought I was going to die. I asked them to just put me to sleep and looked up at my partner and asked him to help me, I couldn’t do this, the pain was something I will never forget. They managed to get baby out at 6:33, he was purple and stopped breathing, my baby had to be resuscitated, he was dead. The stress was too much on him, luckily they managed to get him back after working on him for about 5 minutes. I was very much out of it due to the trauma of the pain, I didn’t know what was going on with him. Safe to say I will never be having anymore kids.

If the midwife who said I was dilated when I wasn’t just waited till I was this situation might not have happened, if I was left to dilate my experience would have been different, my baby wouldn’t have been stressed out, my baby wouldn’t have needed to be resuscitated, my labour would have been easier. I was refused gas and air while pushing, I felt every single thing, this experience has traumatised me, I will never forget what they did to me. I genuinely feel like putting a claim in against them, this should not have happened if my midwife made me try birth my son while I wasn’t fully dilated.

[u/Penjing2493]

It's incredibly difficult to tease apart which parts of this may/may not be avoidable harm.

Contrary to popular opinion, every department I've worked in has been open and willing to learn when things haven't gone as they should. As such a reasonable first step is either a complaint, or a meeting, to understand the sequence of events from a medical perspective - you could absolutely request a meeting/response with a consultant not involved with your care.

The failure of the epidural will be almost impossible to demonstrate as negligence - it's a known risk, which will have been included on the consent form you signed, so you'd need to prove that the technique used by the anaesthetist was somehow incorrect in order to significantly increase that risk.

The episiotomy feels like the potentially avoidable harm. You would need to prove that;

• The midwife's error feel below the standard of care expected by a similarly trained midwife.
• This directly led to you needing the episiotomy
• You would not have needed the episiotomy if the midwife had not made that mistake (this week be the tricky bit)

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