The Body Remembers
I. Before the Breaking Point
The stories I once heard about birth suggested something protected and warm — a place where pain had meaning and someone was always there to steady you. But when it came time for my own body to open, I learned that some thresholds are crossed alone.
It was 2020; the pandemic stole the pregnancy experience I thought I would have. Social distancing rules pressed against every expectation, narrowing the world around me.
Hyperemesis Gravidarum swallowed weeks of my life. I wasn’t just nauseous; my body felt hijacked. The taste of bile, the burn in my throat, the way hunger clawed at my ribs while my stomach lurched at the thought of food. The smell of onions frying, laundry detergent, even my own skin — anything could send me retching. Some days I crawled across the floor because standing felt impossible. It didn’t last the entire pregnancy, but when it hit, it felt like dying slowly while the midwives insisted it was “just morning sickness.”
II. First Signs, First Dismissals
When the leaking began at thirty-six weeks, I reached out for help.
“It’s probably just pressure,” the midwife said.
Normal, apparently. A word tossed out like a blanket over something sharp.
The blood came days later — sudden and difficult to reason with. Fear rose fast. At the hospital, hands pressed and prodded, clinical voices assessing me as if I couldn’t hear them. Pain flared and I said stop, but the room moved on without me.
III. Induction Without Choice
Admission. Monitoring. A ward of strangers breathing through their own private terrors. Machines chirping in dissonant rhythms. Rumours of the balloon induction spreading like second-hand smoke. I asked for another option. I was refused.
The insertion was a shock of pain, a procedure pushed past my limits.
She told me to breathe.
I tried.
In that moment, my body didn’t feel like mine — just something to be acted upon.
The cramping arrived like a storm, ruthless and unrelenting. I walked as instructed, each step a surrender to pain that felt both ancient and newly invented just for me.
Twelve hours later, the balloon was pulled free.
Photo by Almos Bechtold on Unsplash
So I screamed. Again and again. The pain unspooled in me, merciless.
The night passed without a single moment of sleep. Every surge tore through me with a violence that left no room for silence, no room for dignity. Every four to six minutes, as each contraction rose, a scream forced its way out of me—loud, uncontrollable, primal. I couldn’t hold it in. My body wouldn’t let me.
Under the guise of “checking the baby,” they performed sweeps I had not consented to.
My voice — small, cracking — did nothing to stop their gloved fingers. It hurt.
IV. Labour That Felt Like Survival
Contractions grew like a tide with no moon to guide them. By the time pain relief was offered, it barely skimmed the surface of what I had already endured. The request for an epidural became my anchor. I held onto it with the desperation of someone drowning.
“No pain. No baby,” they kept saying.
“Wait for a bed on labour ward,” they insisted.
No one on that ward could have slept. I’m sorry for that. But in those moments, the only release I had was sound—the only way to keep myself from shattering completely.
And still, there was no voice offering reassurance. Just my own leaping off the walls.
Inside my mind, a frantic monologue churned: This can’t be normal. I can’t breathe. I can’t think. How long until the next one hits? Please let it stop. Please, someone help me.
V. The Brief Mercy of Numbness
When I was finally taken to labour ward, the anaesthetist’s voice met me with rare gentleness. She saw me—really saw me—and for a moment, the ground returned beneath my feet.
The epidural eased the pain. The screams stopped. For the first time in what felt like forever, the agony finally loosened its grip.
But the relief didn’t last.
VI. When Everything Tilted
My waters broke, or maybe they had broken earlier; no one seemed certain anymore. Examinations layered on examinations, hands and voices overlapping, questions piling on top of confusion. I searched for clarity, but all I found was doubt looking back at me.
They advised me to get some sleep, as I’d need the energy for the push.
I managed to drift off, slipping into a fragile sleep, the kind where your mind never fully let’s go.
But then the alarm.
Footsteps.
Hands.
Eight figures orbiting my body.
“Your baby is in distress. We need to act now.”
The words didn’t land all at once. They hit in pieces — dread, disbelief, surrender — and before I could gather them, I was already being pushed through corridors. I remember saying, “I’m not going to survive this,” and someone — a voice steady as a hand on the back — saying, “You’re doing alright.”
VII. The Operating Table
On the operating table, I was sick. I vomited, unable to turn my head; someone turned it for me. Blood traced a path I couldn’t see. I felt opened — not just surgically, but existentially. By then I was beyond exhaustion: sleep‑deprived, hollowed out, my body already wrung through hours after hours of pain.
I felt me sliding out of my own centre. I hovered somewhere above myself, watching my own body lie there — pale, limp, compliant — like a conscious dead thing that others worked on. I knew I was alive, but I felt untethered from the fact of it.
Photo by Rob Dean on Unsplash
And then: a cry.
Small. Fierce. Proof of life.
But she was lifted away before I could reach for her, and suddenly I wasn’t sure what was real anymore. I slipped in and out of consciousness, trying to piece together moments that felt more like a nightmare than a birth.
Then I caught fragments of their conversation — a baby born with Covid‑19 — and panic ripped through me. I opened my mouth to ask if they were talking about my baby, but nothing came out.
When she was finally placed on my chest, love took over so sharply it hurt in its own way. My very being, though, was a broken place.
They told me I had lost a litre of blood. My mind registered the number, but I didn’t react. I couldn’t. They said it was “normal,” as if that word could stable anything inside me.
VIII. Aftermath
Later, in the postnatal ward, I was in a state of shock — happy beyond words that my baby was safe, yet unable to respond to her cries with the speed or presence she deserved. I had just come through major surgery. I was wired to drips, a urinary catheter, monitors. My body swollen and sutured.
My call bells rang unanswered. Promises were given but not kept. I could only lie there, half‑broken and half‑reborn, wanting to hold her, wanting to be what she needed, and physically unable to be anything more than a mother pinned in place by trauma and tubes.
Eventually, they discharged us. Walking out felt like crossing a finish line I hadn’t trained for, hadn’t wanted, but somehow survived. And as I held my daughter against me, so small and warm and real, I whispered a truth in her ear:
We made it through. You and me.
IX. The Wider Truth
What happened to me shouldn’t happen to anyone — a realisation reinforced by the wider truth that emerged years later.
The birth trauma inquiry came. The testimonies. The statistics. The confirmation that dismissal, neglect, and danger were not isolated incidents but national patterns. That women across the UK had been harmed in rooms like the one I laboured in. That pain like mine was not aberration but trend. That women of colour were — and are — more likely to be disbelieved, endangered, left to cope alone.
So it wasn’t just me.
My trauma wasn’t imagined — it was part of a wider failure. A system not built to listen. A system not built to protect.
X. Reclaiming Myself
Healing didn’t arrive all at once. It unfolded slowly, unevenly — a process I learned was anything but linear. In the months and years that followed, I sought therapy where my voice was finally heard without question. When I had the strength, I listened to other mothers’ birth stories, offering the support I once needed so desperately. Their pain echoed mine, and in those shared truths, something inside me softened. There are still moments that trigger the old fear, reminders that the body remembers even when the world moves on. Still, every step toward healing is a step toward reclaiming what was taken from me.
Now, when I watch light spill across a quiet room, I think of the struggles I moved through.
Motherhood didn’t arrive gently. It arrived like survival.
And in surviving, I found a voice I will never again let be dismissed.
About the Author
Hana Melroy is a London‑based writer who spends her spare time journaling and writing across creative nonfiction, short fiction, and poetry. She approaches writing as a place of refuge and reflection, valuing its therapeutic and escapist qualities.
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