Rewritten by Birth: My Emergency C-Section Awakening

By Holly Hayes 

**This story comes with a trigger warning for Cat 1 C-Section under a General Anaesthetic.

I hesitated to share this story (not once, not twice, but even the third time I typed it out). The raw, heartbreaking truth of my birth story is that it shattered me in ways I never expected. It took me months to even find the words, and now, at eleven months postpartum, I feel a strong pull to reflect on those early challenges and how they shaped me.

Each version has been different, at 9 weeks, I was drowning; at 9 months, I was searching for meaning; and now, at 11 months, I finally see how it all transformed me.

If you’ve read my book ‘Looking Forward, Looking Back’, you’ll know I’ve encountered my fair share of trials and triumphs. But this time, the challenge was different. As someone who’s built a career helping others, I questioned my own strength. I felt like an imposter.

It’s so tempting to only showcase the highlight reel, especially on social media. But today, I’m pulling back the curtain to share a more vulnerable side of my journey, the version I was once too afraid to tell.

Birth is a journey filled with expectations and dreams. We plan, prepare, and envision how it will unfold. But sometimes, life, and baby, have other ideas. My birth story took an unexpected turn, ending in an emergency C-section. It was nothing like the empowering home birth I had so carefully planned.

With each passing day beyond 40 weeks, I felt my dream slipping away. I tried to stay positive, telling myself that my body and baby would know when it was time. But as I approached 42 weeks, I started acupuncture sessions more frequently, hoping to “help things along.”

Then, on a Friday afternoon, after yet another acupuncture appointment, I came home, went for a walk, and slumped onto the couch. Absentmindedly scrolling my phone on the couch, I suddenly felt something happening….wait, was that...?

Birthing classes always tell you, “Your waters won’t break like in the movies. No dramatic gush, no sudden flood.”

Phew. Well. Guess what?

I barely made it to the tiles before it happened, a full-on, movie-style, unmistakable GUSH. I pulled down my leggings to check. The amniotic fluid wasn’t clear. Meconium was present.

And just like that, I was disqualified from the home birth program.

Instead of settling into my calm, familiar space, I was suddenly heading to the hospital in peak-hour traffic on a Friday night.

Upon arriving, things moved fast. Induction was strongly suggested, just as my birthing classes had warned: “The moment you walk through those doors, you’re renting a hospital room for 24 hours. They want you in and out as fast as possible.”

The medical system is overwhelmed and understaffed, I get that. But as women, we deserve better. We deserve the space to advocate for ourselves without feeling rushed, dismissed, or pressured into decisions we haven’t had the time, or clarity, to fully process.

When the doctor suggested induction, I asked calmly, “What if I say no?”

She looked at me like I had two heads. Her eyes practically bulged out of her skull, as if I were some naïve girl who knew nothing about her body or its capabilities.

In that moment, I knew I was in for a very, very long night ahead.

What I also learned in my birthing classes is that medical intervention often leads to a cascade of further interventions. Despite my best efforts to avoid that path… it happened.

Once I was finally in the birthing suite and with my midwife, I felt a sense of comfort return. She explained the process of a really low-level induction, and after hearing her out, I decided to try it.

In that moment, I truly thought I was making an informed choice. I had done the mental prep. I had the notes from class. I’d trained my mindset for this exact situation.

But what I didn’t realise was how quickly all of that could slip away. When you're in it, truly in it, it’s a whole different world.

After 18 hours of labour, what my hospital notes later described as “labour dysphoria” I had tried every pain relief option they offered. Funny, really… I’d planned to do this at home. No drugs. Just breathwork, presence, trust, and the birthing pool as my natural pain relief.

But eventually, I begged for an epidural as a last resort. 

Each attempt was more agonising than the last. Because of my curved spine, I wasn’t an ideal candidate, they had to call in a specialist. He had to try between contractions. 

I was shaking. He was shaking. Millie held my hands while I screamed through every attempt.

The needle hit. I screamed. He tried again. I screamed louder. I could feel everything. And somehow, I had to stay completely still, because one wrong move could cause permanent damage.

And after all of it? It failed. Not once, but three times.

I was broken open in every way. I heard Millie and Mum quietly start to cry, trying their best to hold it in. But I felt it. I knew.

I was left with two choices: Keep enduring the kind of pain that makes you leave your body… or be put under general anesthesia for the C-section I had tried so hard to avoid.

When the C-section team presented me with the option the following morning, after a night of no sleep and excruciating pain with no end in sight, they honestly felt like my guardian angels.

In that moment, I was so broken down, that I couldn’t see another way out.

Even though, in reality, this is what they’d been waiting for all along. Let’s be real, natural births are boring for doctors. What they really want is to get you on the operating table and do what they love: operate.

As they came to collect me and wheel me into the theatre, I couldn’t escape the contractions. I couldn’t sit, and I certainly couldn’t lie down. I was in complete survival mode. My eyes shut tight, I just kept begging for it to stop, please pain, stop, please, please, please, over and over like a mantra. I couldn’t catch my breath. I couldn’t catch a break.

When I arrived, they asked if I could move from the trolley to the table. I screamed “NOOOOO!” the idea of moving felt impossible. They counted “1, 2, 3…” to lift me, and I screamed again. I was gone, completely outside of my body, yet somehow still feeling everything. As they put me under, I was still begging for it to end.

And then, they put me under. Just like that, silence.

My son came into the world with my eyes taped shut. I wasn’t there to see him take his first breath. I didn’t hear his first cry. I didn’t feel the weight of him on my chest.

He met the world without me. My Mum was the first one to hold him, an instant bond that still runs deep to this day. 

The next thing I remember, I woke up in a hospital bed, dazed, drugged, and groggy, meeting my son for the first time through a medicated haze.

What followed was something I can only describe as a shamanic death, a complete unravelling of who I thought I was. The next eight weeks were the darkest of my life. I barely recognised myself.

When I finally made it home after four harrowing nights in the hospital, nights where they couldn’t get my pain under control, I genuinely thought I might die there. Saying that now feels surreal, maybe even dramatic. But truly, that’s how my recovery felt: like I had been cut into a million pieces, physically, emotionally, spiritually shattered.

I couldn’t see anything bright about the future. I was raw, broken, disoriented. And now, I had this beautiful baby boy in my arms, a baby I had no memory of bringing into the world. One moment I was pregnant, the next I was staring into his tiny face, numb and disconnected. I couldn’t lift him, couldn’t feed him properly, couldn’t mother him the way I had imagined I would. All I could do was hold him close and hope that somehow, that would be enough.

But then we’d have those moments, skin to skin, and he’d nuzzle in, calm instantly, and drift off to sleep. And in that quiet stillness, I knew: I was enough. Even if I couldn’t do everything, I could give him love. I could give him presence.

The whole experience would have been unbearable without my birthing team, my Mum and my cousin Millie. My Mum was my rock through everything. The one who quietly held me when I needed her and spoke up when I didn’t have the strength to. And Millie, my ride-or-die since day one, somehow managed to bring comedy into the chaos. She kept me laughing through 18 hours of labour, even as everything started to unravel. She still has a list in her phone of the ridiculous things I said mid-contraction.

A few highlights:

– “Maybe I’ll just have a check and they will send me back home” 

–  “I can’t wait for it to be YOUR turn Millie, and I’ll sit there snacking”

– “Put the Hypnobirthing mediation back on, F**K”

At one point, during a midwife shift change in the early hours, they genuinely thought Millie and I were a couple, probably because I was stark naked from being in and out of the shower all night, and at some point, I made her give me the shirt off her back when I got cold. We were delirious with exhaustion.

Once the chaos settled, reality hit. I haven’t mentioned this yet, but I’m a single mum. My relationship ended during pregnancy, and now, I was recovering from the birth from hell, bleeding, barely functioning, and trying to process everything while feeling like a shell of myself.

I’ve always been fiercely independent. The one who held it together. The one people came to for strength and wisdom . So stepping into the unknown of emergency C-section recovery felt like falling without a net. I couldn’t even let myself cry, because I knew my mum was in the room with me.

And when I lost it… she lost it.

So I held it in. I clenched my jaw, buried the tears, and wore a brave face, just praying we would all make it through the night and see the next morning. Survival mode doesn’t even begin to describe it.

After four nights of this, and almost no sleep, getting home felt like a sacred relief. A safe place. But I was still struggling. Struggling to breastfeed, struggling to function, struggling to feel like myself.

At any hour of the day or night, I’d find myself staring at the bare tree outside my window. Winter was settling in, and I realised I was in my own deepest, darkest winter. That tree, stripped of every leaf, looked completely lifeless.

And yet, I knew… it would bloom again. No one would tell it how. No one would help it. It would just know how and when to bloom.

That tree became my symbol of hope. If nature could trust the timing of its rebirth, then so could I.

Thank god for all the postpartum support that exists, because I was definitely depressed. I just didn’t have the words for it yet.

I took in the advice of other mothers that felt like a sham to me: "It's just a phase." I truly thought my life was over as I knew it. I walked into the hospital feeling powerful and in control, and I walked out totally defeated, a shell of the woman I once was.

I didn’t suppress anything. I didn’t pretend to be okay when I wasn’t. I didn’t sugarcoat it or rush the process. Recovery didn’t look like what I had imagined. At first, I thought I was never going to recover, but every day, I got better and better. By about two weeks, I was fully charging ahead. (Not in a pushing-the-boundary way, but I honestly did just bounce back well.)

Hot tip: I attribute that bounce-back to all the Pilates and Aqua Aerobics I did during pregnancy. The foundation I built helped me heal faster.

Step by step, I began to rebuild. I allowed myself the space to grieve, knowing that healing wasn’t something to rush. I didn’t force myself to “move on” before I was ready. I embraced the process of becoming whole again, understanding that even though I felt like a mess, I was growing into the woman I was meant to be for this season of my life.

Eventually, I found the words to tell my story. I went from feeling broken to feeling stronger than I had ever been. I knew I could face whatever life had in store for me next.

And so, here I am, 11 months later, still on this wild journey. Still mothering, still growing, still healing. Still becoming.

That tree outside my window? It’s bursting with life. And I am too.