Being told you will need an emergency Caesarean section to deliver your baby is a scary event. Imagine the terror of going under the knife for the procedure and having the anesthesia wear off in the middle of it. That’s exactly what happened to Danielle Perry, of Shotton, Wales in the UK.
The single mum was elated to find out she was going to have a baby. Everything was going as planned with her pregnancy until Perry reached 37 weeks. She had to be induced because of an issue with her liver. She explained, “My birth was just one problem to another. First I was induced at 37 weeks and then I was on a drip to make my contractions happen. I had two epidurals, which is supposed to numb pain, but both of them failed. Then I was dilated but he wasn’t coming out so they took me for an emergency C-section.”
After a spinal block and C-section Perry heard the beautiful sound of her baby’s first cry.
Then the unthinkable happened: the anesthesia wore off just as the baby was delivered. She wrote on her blog:
What happened next was something I wish upon no one. Sensation in my body was returning, the numbed tugs and pulls I felt were now producing pains; throbbing, stinging, burning, every type of pain imaginable. To my horror the spinal block had worn off and I could feel the surgeons putting my internal organs back in the correct place then stitching me back together. My voice was shallow and croaky but I tried my hardest to tell them I could feel it. It was dismissed and I was simply told I “couldn’t feel pain” due to the spinal block. They were wrong, I knew what I was feeling, how could they possibly know?!
She described it later saying, “I could feel them doing everything, and moving around my organs. But I was so out of it that all I could do was cry, I couldn’t shout or anything and when I told a doctor he didn’t believe me.”
Her baby, Gruffydd, is now a year old and Perry has been diagnosed with PTSD after suffering panic attacks from the trauma of her ordeal. “I never dreamt that giving birth would give me PTSD,” she said. “It should have been the happiest moment of my life, but it was a nightmare in the end.”
She shares her experience on her blog, “Mum from the Green Room,” which has garnered her more than 18,000 followers on Instagram. Perry has chosen not to take any legal action against the doctors or hospital for this rare occurrence saying, “I guess I was just the unlucky one, but when I look at my beautiful son, I feel anything but unlucky.”
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