"Not feeling heard....again."

After previously having a traumatic birth at Karratha Health Campus a couple of years ago followed by a poor postnatal period, I opted to birth elsewhere for my second child. A couple of months postpartum I suspected that, having continued to bleed for 10 weeks, that I may have, similar to my first experience, retained placenta.

At 2-months post-partum my bleeding started to intensify and after waiting for almost 4 hours in the emergency room to be seen on a Monday morning with my exclusively breastfed 2-month-old, watching others go before me with their sprained ankles and coughs while attempting to feed and settle my little one, I was eventually seen and told in the mid-afternoon that sonographers were unfortunately no longer available to undertake an ultrasound and I would need to return again the following day.

Waiting in the emergency room with a baby for a substantial period, despite having a history of retained placenta was just the start of my frustrations, queue the back and forthing between Obstetrician's, GP's and sonographer's until a new doctor (and funnily enough the same wonderful man who listened to me in the Emergency Department when I felt others didn't two years prior) Dr Rajeev finally made me feel heard, reviewed my scans and booked me in for a surgery to remove calcified RPOC.

While I can hand on heart not fault Dr Rajeev, the surgery team and the post-surgery follow up and care, I admittedly remain frustrated for me and every other Mum, who I feel on top of trying to care for themselves and their baby, are made to feel that they do not know their bodies and need to go in to bat for themselves time and time again, even with a demonstrated history of a problem, which is quite honestly mentally exhausting.

I only hope that KHC can, if not learn from my feedback the first time, listen to it on the repeated occasion and that in other ladies postnatal experience's, KHC may, I feel, choose to pay more attention to what patients are reporting so that they feel heard and proactively supported and treated. I believe patients deserve to have a better starting experience of motherhood than I have had.