Sarah was in labour but was sent home because the midwife wanted a cup of tea and she ‘wasn’t in enough pain’. Then her waters broke in the garden… and she saw something unthinkable in the mirror

Most men, it’s fair to say, have to be dragged kicking and screaming to get a vasectomy. Not my husband. After our two children were born, Matt, then 34, was insistent he was having the snip.

There were to be no more babies for us. On this, he was absolutely immovable.

Not because he didn’t love our children – a girl and boy, now six and four. He adored them. And not because he wasn’t a good and supportive husband. He was.

In fact, he was insistent on his vasectomy because he loved me.

Matt had his operation in January 2024 because my care through both of my pregnancies, births and postnatally was nothing short of horrific.

I am incredibly lucky to be alive – and to have healthy children who are, too.

My husband was desperate I never became pregnant again – despite how much I had always wanted three children – because he feared I would die or a child of ours would be killed or left disabled at the hands of our dangerous maternity care system.

And despite my deep longing for another child, I was petrified of the risks as well.

I had been constantly scared through both of my pregnancies because negligence, errors and even downright callousness persisted in so much of my ‘care’.

I saw around 30 midwives over the course of my pregnancies and I met just one who showed me any empathy at all.

Some midwives seemed bored and disinterested. Others were dismissive, patronising and bullying. Some made me feel nothing less than terrified for my life and my unborn children’s.

So you might imagine I’ve greeted the recent damning reports about the state of maternity services with relief that the truth was being uncovered. Like the one in June this year by expert midwife Donna Ockenden which found that more than 500 mothers and babies suffered potentially avoidable harm or died at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust because of a ‘toxic bullying culture’.

Or the 2024 parliamentary inquiry into birth trauma, which found women were treated like a ‘slab of meat’ – and berated by midwives for soiling themselves and told to just ‘stop stressing’ after their babies died.

Instead, though, I just feel numb. How many more reports are needed to understand that vulnerable women and newborn babies are dying unnecessarily – and in the place where they should be the safest?

So bad was my care that, less than 24 hours after my excruciating emergency caesarean with my daughter, I asked to be discharged from hospital because I felt overwhelmingly I would be safer at home.

I had been left lying on a mattress filled with my own blood after I had haemorrhaged, despite pleading to be cleaned.

I had been left without any pain relief at all – not even a paracetamol – despite begging for it, and having endured a surgery which involved my stomach muscles being torn by hand and my bowel and bladder being lifted out of my body. I had been left to care for my baby alone by midwives who were aggressively dismissive when I asked for help because I could not move.

And yet somehow I made myself walk out of the hospital unaided, with my baby, less than a day after enormous surgery.

That’s how bad the care was – and how much I felt my baby and I had to get out of there.

It is worth saying here that this was during Covid, when the entire health service was under severe pressure.

Yet maternity care has not improved since. Midwives are among the lowest paid of all NHS medical staff. Maternity wards are ill-equipped, underfunded and chronically short-staffed.

Women should be able to give birth in safe hands. Not tired hands. Not depleted hands. Not single hands, running from bed to bed.

I recognise how many challenges midwives face every day, and that they most likely entered their profession because they wanted to help women and infants. And I would hate anyone to think I am bashing midwives – but I cannot imagine working in healthcare, and not having empathy for a woman giving birth, or for a tiny baby taking its very first breaths.

I can accept things go wrong and mistakes are made. But I cannot process the callousness.

It’s also clear to me from my experiences that there’s an endemic problem with misogyny in midwifery, with women bullying women. Even if this is a result of chronic understaffing, it’s completely unacceptable.

I have always been the kind of person to cope with things with a dark sense of humour – and when writing my new book, which tells the story of my experiences, that certainly helped me despite the obvious seriousness of what happened.

When I conceived, aged 34 in 2019, after many months of trying and resorting to fertility treatment – taking a drug called letrozole to stimulate my ovaries – Matt and I literally danced for joy.

We had been together for two years, Matt was busy working as a joiner, while I ran several cafes and a party supplies business, having previously been a comedy scriptwriter, working for, among others, the BBC.

All our home needed to feel complete was a family.

From the off, though, I was bounced from midwife to midwife throughout my pregnancy – the consistency of care was zero, and my appointments were haphazard because no one ever answered the booking line.

Because there was no constant, I felt as if things were easily passed over, which only added to my anxiety.

Like my constantly high blood pressure – and the fact that by the time I was approaching my due date, my bump was incredibly solid, almost hard.

My daughter also seemed to move around a lot in there.

Even at the latest stages of pregnancy, midwives seemed to find it hard to tell whether she was head down, or not.

The last midwife I saw at 41 weeks – who audibly whispered ‘for f**** sake’ when she saw how chaotic my appointments schedule had been – decided to give me a sweep (where your cervix is stimulated) to get things going.

Just as I was bracing myself, she stopped, then said as if she’d only just remembered: ‘Now if for any reason I’m not absolutely sure this baby is head down, I won’t be able to do it.’

‘OK,’ I said, remembering the faces of all the other midwives who had previously tried to work out which way round my daughter was. She concluded my daughter was head down, gave me the sweep and I left with the following guidance ringing in my ears: if I went to the hospital and was under 4cm dilated, I would just be sent home. In short, I wasn’t to waste anyone’s precious time.

But when I went into labour the next day, things progressed quickly. Just a few hours after the first twinge, I could scarcely walk for pain. The contractions were coming thick and fast. I knew in my bones our baby was not far away.

But when I got to the hospital, the midwife said I wasn’t in enough pain to be in labour and refused to examine me.

When I tried to argue, she cut me off, saying: ‘Look I’ve just delivered twins, I’m exhausted and I’m on my way to get a cup of tea – so come back in a bit when your contractions get stronger.’ When I got home, and tried sitting in the garden, shaking and on the verge of a panic attack, my waters broke in a flood.

Horror of horrors, I could feel something else. When I went upstairs and looked in a handheld mirror, I could see what I thought was a small, tiny, purple hand.

The fear was indescribable. When I rang the hospital and told the midwife who answered, the line went quiet.

Completely quiet.

I could tell she had no idea what to say. How can a patient go from apparently not being in established labour with no need to be examined to a baby nearly falling out of her body within 40 minutes?

She ordered me to get into the downward-dog yoga position – feet and hands on the floor, bum in the air as high as it could go.

‘We are worried about a prolapsed cord,’ she said over the phone.

A hard round ball of fear formed in my chest. Prolapsed cords kill babies by cutting off their blood supply.

‘By staying in this position you’re taking any pressure off the cord so oxygen can still get to your baby,’ she added.

My baby was here this morning, she was moving, I remember thinking.

‘Can you feel your baby moving?’ Liquid fear flooded through me. No movement.

She asked to speak to Matt, who’d been pacing the floor in terror, and told him to have a look. Then he told her: ‘I can see a big toe. It’s not a hand, it’s a foot.’ I thought about how I had not grown this baby inside me for it to die at the last minute, to have a midwife who needed a brew and a biscuit to lead to my baby’s death.

Indeed, I later learned that a footling breech baby, as this is known, was rare and profoundly dangerous. I also was told there was a chance that my very hard bump was a sign I could have had excess amniotic fluid, making it possible for my daughter to turn at the last minute.

An ambulance was called, I was carried on a stretcher in that undignified position until I got to hospital.

By now there wasn’t just one foot, there were two – and I was 10cm dilated.

I remember shouting across the room filled with medics: ‘I’m ten centimetres dilated and you sent me away!’

The room went silent. An emergency caesarean was carried out.

The moment I saw my daughter, I was awash with love. Without that feeling, I don’t think I would have survived the utter hell that was the postnatal ward.

There were almost too many indignities to mention.

Being sick after the anaesthetic and no midwife available to help me clean myself.

Lying in my own blood for hours, it spilling over the edges of the mattress and midwives ignoring it. Ringing the call bell, desperate to feed my baby, and being told bluntly: ‘Pick her up then.’ My overflowing catheter bag spilling out onto the floor.

Asking for painkillers stronger than the offered paracetamol, and the midwife replying very loudly ‘No, I will not give you anything stronger,’ making sure everyone on the ward knew what an utter disgrace I was.

Six hours later, despite asking two separate midwives for it, I hadn’t even had the paracetamol.

I asked to be discharged and a cardboard bowl was thrown at me. When I urinated into it, I would be allowed to leave.

When I did, I asked why I hurt so much and a midwife gave me this answer: ‘Sometimes surgeons will tear the abdominal muscles rather than cut them. This is because if you tear them with a blunt instrument or fingers, they tend to heal better than if you cut right through them, but it’s also quicker.

‘So, if they needed to get the baby out quickly, this is what they would have done. Anything else?’

At home, the community midwives were less than reassuring.

One barked at me: ‘The most important thing is don’t do any housework. I had a lady the other day who picked up the vacuum cleaner and her bowels fell out. She walked into triage holding two handfuls of her intestines against her stomach. Do not under any circumstances get the hoover out.’

Just over a year later, I am pregnant again and desperate to avoid a caesarean thanks to my last experience. I get no less than seven leaflets about vaginal birth after a caesarean by my carousel of midwives, but it’s only thanks to Google I learn a natural birth within two years of a caesarean has a higher chance of uterine rupture. And 50 per cent of uterine ruptures result in maternal or foetal death.

My anxiety spirals, as I tell one midwife. ‘I’m really worried about uterine rupture.’

She looked at me, vacant. ‘Why?’

‘Because one in 100 women has one after a C-section.’

She looked bewildered. ‘Rupture… I think we might have a leaflet.’ 

‘No, I don’t want another leaflet. I’m just worried.’

‘Well, don’t. I’m not sure what uterus rupture is, but you don’t need to worry because in labour we can hook you up to all the machines and bits of stuff. I’ve never dealt with one, it probably won’t happen.’

A sign of uterine rupture is pain in your scar, which sure enough I develop when nearly full term.

But so deep is my trauma about my last birth I can’t consider a C-section.

Instead, in May 2022, I have a sweep, desperate to stay in control if I can, and labour begins.

When I refuse gas and air, saying by way of explanation: ‘I’m just really concerned about watching out for signs of rupture,’ my midwife, Gene, who hasn’t read my notes, rolls her eyes, as if it was the sort of thing that only ever happens in movies. ‘You’re only hurting yourself,’ she says.

I feel bullied – then things get even worse.

It becomes clear that, no matter how hard I push, my baby is stuck, back to back, with his spine against mine rather than the other way as is normal.

The room slowly starts to fill with medics as my pain increases, searing through my C-section scar. ‘They turn at the last minute,’ said Gene.

I lost it. ‘Listen to me!’ I shout. ‘The pain is not going away. I have been pushing for over three hours, he hasn’t moved at all, and I feel like he is completely stuck!’

Gene left the room.

‘I think you need to do a C-section,’ I continued. The other medics all looked at me, horrified I was telling them what to do. ‘I’m in constant pain. There could be a tear in my uterus.’

‘We can’t,’ said the consultant. ‘There’s someone else in the theatre.’

What? Panic. Blind, raging, panic. ‘Don’t you have another theatre?’

“Yes. But we don’t have another anaesthetist.’

If they couldn’t operate, we would both die.

Eventually, another anaesthetist made his way to us.

When they finally got me on the table for a caesarean, my son was indeed stuck in my birth canal, and I did have a tear in my uterus – which was thankfully sewn back together.

Once again I left the hospital as soon as I could – having at least packed my own painkillers this time.

Little wonder, then, that Matt insisted on his vasectomy. I fought him at first, begged for another chance – before finally giving up.

In many ways I am lucky. Despite everything, I became a mother, with two healthy children.

But there’s no avoiding that there are babies who are not here today who should have been, because of what happens on our maternity wards.

Our Prime Minister has said he wants a National Care Service for the elderly. And that’s laudable. But we shouldn’t forget that the tiniest, most vulnerable members of our society need better care too – and fast.

Adapted by Maureen Brookbanks from This Did Hurt by Sarah Close (Saraband / Contraband, £12.99), to be published October 29. © Sarah Close 2026. To order a copy for £11.69 (offer valid to 10/11/26; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to books.mailshop.co.uk or call 020 3176 2937.