I pressed the emergency button after 54 hours in labour — nobody came to help

When Rachel Coles gave birth in September 2021, she was in labour for an agonising 54 hours.

She ended up losing three litres of blood due to a haemorrhage that she alleges had been caused by a ‘lack of intervention.’ Emergency sugery followed, but when Rachel came around from the op – confused and exhausted from the two-day ordeal – she says nobody came to help.

Now, a national probe has been launched – and it’s reviewing the maternity care provided under 14 NHS Trusts. Experts have warned that women and babies are not receiving the ‘safe, compassionate care they deserve,’ and Sky News has delivered a new documentary about the perceived failures.

And, since chairing a review into maternity care that started in August, Baroness Valerie Amos has said that the stories she’d heard so far have been ‘much worse’ than she expected.

Amos said she was looking to identify ‘systemic changes’ to improve the quality of care given by maternity units across the country, recounting stories of ‘women bleeding out in bathrooms.’

24 hours after her waters broke, Rachel was not progressing and had not reached 4cm dilation, so she was placed on an antenatal ward while experiencing ‘severe contractions.’

‘My husband was sent home and was told he could only come back when I was going to be admitted to the labour ward,’ Rachel, who is 29 and lives in Essex, tells Metro.

Two days after she first went into labour, she was still on the antenatal unit where she was given a sweep. ‘I did not consent to it and it should not have been done as my waters had broken,’ she adds, noting that after six hours of labouring on that day, she was finally given a bed. Up to this point, the only pain relief she’d had access to was gas and air.

After several pleas, she was given an epidural – but it failed twice and had to be redone.

‘After what felt like forever, I got told I was ready to push. At this point, the epidural had completely worn off and I could feel the pressure,’ she says.

It took two hours of pushing to get her son out, while several doctors were concerned that he would ‘get stuck.’

Concerningly, while she was pushing, Rachel overheard one doctor say that ‘we should have given her a c-section hours ago’ – a comment which gave her a final burst of energy and, subsequently, her son was born.

However, Rachel’s problems didn’t end there. As she had been experiencing contractions for over 50 hours and had been on a Pitocin drip for ‘longer than recommended,’ her placenta had started to ‘disintegrate’ inside her.

‘When they gave me the injection to birth the placenta, it broke up and left a small tear in my uterus, which caused me to lose three litres of blood,’ she details. ‘About 20 doctors’ ran into the room, and she was handed a form to consent to surgery that could’ve ended in a full hysterectomy if they could not stop the bleeding.

Three hours later, she woke up – but the midwives never ‘really explained’ what had happened. She wasn’t offered any aftercare and was told if she wanted more information, that she needed to book a ‘birth reflection review’ – an appointment that was only scheduled almost three years after she gave birth.

‘I started to see a private therapist who diagnosed me with PTSD due to the birth trauma,’ Rachel reflects.

‘It took me a long time, but I am now recovered. I do want a second child, but my concerns are still there, and I do think the trauma might resurface if I were to be pregnant and be approaching birth.’

‘I remember pressing the emergency button after I’d come out of surgery and a lady came in and said she couldn’t help me, said it wasn’t her baby, wasn’t her problem and walked out and left me there,’ she recalled.

News of the latest probe reflects longstanding concerns relating to maternal healthcare in the UK. In 2023, the House of Lords found that Black women were at a greater risk of maternal mortality in the UK between 2018 and 2020 when compared with white women – and were 3.7 times more likely to die in the first year after pregnancy.

‘Giving birth should be safe. They should have explained to me what happened in surgery and why I bled out. Thinking that you’re going to die in what should be the happiest moment of your life is a hard pill to swallow,’ Rachel says.

‘There was blood splattered up the wall everywhere’

After giving birth to her first child 16 years ago, in March 2008, Beccy Dickson had a post-partum haemorrhage. Doctors only realised something was wrong when she turned grey because she’d lost so much blood.

When she went to the toilet after giving birth, she realised that something was wrong as she passed an ‘enormous’ lump of blood. Telling the nurse what happened, she was told ‘what do you expect? You’ve just given birth.’

‘To my memory, there was blood splattered up the wall everywhere. The nurses just didn’t seem to think there was a problem,’ Beccy, who is 41 and lives in Kent, says.

‘Around midnight, the nurse came over and realised that I was turning an impossible shade of grey. Once they understood the magnitude of what was happening, they rushed me off to A&E. I had lost a serious amount of blood, and it was too late to sedate me, so while on gas and air. The doctor extracted a shopping bag full of blood clots out of me.

‘The nurses apologised for not recognising there was a problem. My midwife followed up and told me that a woman who had decided on a home birth that same day had had the same – postpartum haemorrhage – and had died as they couldn’t get her to the hospital quickly enough.

‘I remember lying on the bed after the surgery before the blood transfusion, looking at my baby girl, thinking how beautiful she was and that I could die happy,’ she adds – a similar experience to Rachel, who said as she was bleeding out, she knew at least that her son would have a ‘good life with his dad.’

Like Rachel, 41-year-old Meg Hill was left with PTSD after giving birth. On her due date, she had to unexpectedly attend the hospital after suffering an accident and was subsequently injured. When she and her husband arrived, though, she felt abandoned by the staff.

‘From this point, the lack of care was evident and set the tone for labour,’ Meg, who lives in Stockport, tells Metro.

‘We’d rushed to the hospital because I’d damaged my spine and ribs, so we didn’t take my notes with us. My husband was sent home for them before we even found out if our baby was okay.’

The care that she did receive didn’t feel personalised, either.

‘From the moment I arrived in hospital in labour, I wasn’t helped, it was like I was just a parcel on a conveyor belt,’ Meg recalls.

‘Nobody tried to help alleviate my fear, nobody made any suggestions about how I could do things differently – I wasn’t encouraged to keep active or re-try the pool for pain relief (I got out because it was too cold).’

And when her baby was delivered, she lost a significant amount of blood – so much that she felt weak afterwards when she arrived at the postnatal ward.

However, she wasn’t helped by staff as she struggled to walk, and her doctors repeatedly referred to her as the ‘forceps delivery’ on ‘more than one occasion because it had been incorrectly written into the notes.’

The aftercare she received was shocking, too – and she was even gaslit by a medical professional.

‘We went for a birth debrief with a senior midwife, hoping that would help alleviate some of the stress, but the notes didn’t match up with what we remembered happening,’ Meg details.

‘The midwife tried to blame that on the medication I’d taken during the birth – except my husband also remembered it the same way as me and he didn’t have any.’

This article was first published on May 19, 2024.

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