What They Left Behind
Nobody prepares you for what a medical system can do to a woman in her most vulnerable hour. This is what happened to me.
If you have been reading from the beginning, you know what it took to get here. You know about the year of trying, the ectopic pregnancy, the surgery, the fallopian tube that was removed. You know about the fear that lived in my body through an entire pregnancy during a global pandemic, the three days of unacknowledged labor, the angel midwife, the two hours in the dim light with my daughter on my chest. You know how long I waited for that moment and what it cost to get there. If not, please read through the previous articles of this series.
The series follows a highly sensitive woman through the most vulnerable and most feminine chapters of a life. If you are reading this one first, the previous two are here:
This post is about what happened next. I have been working with this trauma for a long time. I will write it as practically as I can.
The Hours After
The horror that came after was thankfully not concerning my newborn daughter. Only me.
During those first two hours with my daughter my womb was not getting smaller as fast as they expected, so the assistant began trying to push it, which caused heavier bleeding. Then a young woman doctor came to check me. She was not satisfied and consulted with an older colleague. Even though I had only minor external injuries that she had already sewn right after the birth, with me surviving that only thanks to the gas and air, she decided that now, two hours after the birth, when all the hormones protecting me from pain were gone, without asking, without local anesthesia, she would resew my stitches.
It was extremely painful. I was yelling at her, asking for anesthesia. It did not help.
I physically survived. My body even healed completely afterwards. But it was the biggest traumatic experience of my adult life. From that moment I had terrible coccyx pain and could practically not sit for the next nine months. I felt it as if that traumatic event had been saved and stored in my coccyx. As if my body had nowhere else to put it.
One Month Later
And this was not the end of what that doctor left behind. A month after giving birth, when my bleeding got worse instead of better, I had to leave my newborn daughter with family and go to the emergency room. I asked for sensitive treatment because of what I had already survived. My body was still very much in a healing process. The verdict was clear: a large piece of placenta had been left inside my womb. Surgery was needed to remove it.
I cried in the doctor’s office, completely broken. She told me not to cry, that it was not a big surgery, that they would have me first in the morning because I was breastfeeding, and that I could go home the same day.
I had a weekend to prepare my milk for my baby, who I had no idea would even drink from a bottle for the first time, and I was living in an unimaginable nightmare after everything I had already been through.
It was hell. Hell for a highly sensitive woman who had just become a mother and had a newborn baby at home. It was the opposite of a safe and peaceful postpartum. I was living through my worst nightmares without a single moment of psychological support.
The surgery itself went okay. While I was in the hospital my baby, in her quiet wisdom, drank from a bottle for the only time in her life until she was a toddler. Before the surgery I was pumping milk, because full anesthesia was required. I walked to wait for the surgery myself. On my feet. While bleeding. It was somewhere in the basement of an old hospital, the most nightmarish place you can imagine, and I was facing the most intense fear I have ever known: that I would not wake up and would never see my baby again.
I did wake up. I was bleeding heavily. They said it was normal. I could not sit because of the coccyx pain. But I walked out of that hospital. My partner picked me up and his family took care of us, and I was immediately holding my baby.
And Then They Found More
And if you think the nightmare ends there, it does not. At a follow-up appointment a few weeks later, my gynecologist told me there were still placenta residuals inside. She saw no other option than another surgery.
From the lowest place I have ever been, I had to find the will to heal myself another way. And I did. That force I found, and the path I took to avoid that second surgery, is described in full in this article.
I used Chinese herbal therapy, craniosacral biodynamics, special excercise, and I spoke to my body every single day, thanking it, reassuring it, asking it to heal. A month later the ultrasound showed my uterus was completely clean. Without any more bleeding. My gynecologist never asked how.
This was a healthy pregnancy without any complications. And it ended with a woman who almost sank into despair.
And why? Why the fuck did I have to go through all of this?
I have decided to keep all of this free because it is important that it exists in the world. Below you will find something I needed far more than any second opinion or surgical referral. A letter from the woman I deserved to have beside me. Not a doctor, not a therapist, but a patient rights advocate. Someone who had seen cases like mine many times before. Someone with cold precision, deep knowledge, and the particular kind of anger that comes from years of watching this happen to women who had no one in their corner.
She is writing to me. But if any of this is yours too, she is writing to you.
A Letter From The Woman Who Knew Your Rights
Dear Selene,
I have read your case. I have seen cases like yours more times than I want to count. And I am going to tell you some things that no one told you then, clearly and without softening them, because you deserved clarity and you received none.
What was done to you two hours after giving birth was not a standard medical procedure. It was performed without your informed consent, without anesthesia, on a body that was postpartum, hormonally depleted, and in its most vulnerable possible state. You asked for anesthesia. You were ignored. You were conscious and in pain throughout. That is not a complication of birth. That is a violation of your rights as a patient.
You had the right to refuse. You had the right to demand pain relief before any procedure. You had the right to ask for a second opinion, to ask for time, to ask for an explanation. Nobody told you any of this. You were alone, exhausted, postpartum, and in shock from the birth, and a doctor made a unilateral decision about your body without your agreement. The fact that your body healed does not make what happened acceptable. Healing is not the measure of whether consent was given.
One month later you went to the emergency room because your bleeding was getting worse instead of better. You asked for sensitive treatment because of what you had already survived. That request was reasonable, appropriate, and entirely within your rights. It should have been documented and honored throughout your care. A large piece of retained placenta is not a minor oversight. It required surgery to address, and you faced that surgery alone, with a newborn at home, still bleeding, walking on your own feet to a basement waiting room, carrying a fear that you would not wake up.
And then, at a follow-up appointment weeks later, you were told there were still residuals remaining. You were offered nothing but waiting and another surgery. You were a breastfeeding mother with a newborn at home, weeks postpartum, still in physical pain, without psychological support of any kind. The appropriate response to your situation was not “come back in a few weeks.” It was a referral, an acknowledgment, a plan, a human being in that room who understood what you were carrying. And the knowledge that what was done to you had consequences worth pursuing.
What I do know is this: you were not treated as a whole person at any point in this process. You were treated as a body producing outcomes that needed to be managed. Your history was irrelevant to them. Your sensitivity was invisible to them. Your fear was an inconvenience to them. And you absorbed all of that, because you had no one telling you that you did not have to.
You should have recorded everything. Not because you are litigious, not because anger is the point, but because documentation is the only language that system understands. Your pain was real. Your experience was real. And you deserved to have it taken seriously in the one language available.
Now I want to tell you something else.
Your body healed. Not because the system supported it, but despite the fact that it did not. You found the people who could help you, you learned to speak to your own body, you chose a path that the doctor who dismissed you could not even conceive of. You avoided a second surgery through knowledge, trust, and a refusal to accept that one way was the only way. That is not luck. That is what happens when a woman who has been written off decides to take her healing into her own hands.
The coccyx pain that stayed with you for nine months was your body holding what it had no other place for. That is a body doing its job under impossible circumstances. And you worked with that too. You always work with it.
You did not fail in that hospital. The system failed you. Those are not the same thing, and I need you to know the difference.
What happened to you was wrong. You are allowed to be angry and seek consequences. You are allowed to grieve it. You are allowed to wish it had been different without it diminishing what you survived.
And you survived it all.
With precision, with respect, and with more anger on your behalf than I will put in this letter,
The woman who knew your rights
Inside Sensitive Enough Movement, I write for highly sensitive women who are looking for better understanding of their body and mind patterns, more fitting healing approaches, and a space where sensitivity is taken seriously instead of dismissed.
Among the pieces that resonated most with readers are: my story of healing an “incurable” skin condition through lifestyle change, working with deeply attuned holistic specialists to avoid surgery, the importance of psychosomatics, and a very personal sneak peek into what happens in the psychotherapy room.
All written through a highly sensitive lens.