I was 7 months pregnant, a gemellary pregnancy, when I was diagnosed with a severe preeclampsia (proteinuria 12g/24h). So I was hospitalized. Two days later, at 32 weeks of amenorrhea, I had to undergo an urgent Cesarean. Due to a fibroid, I had a massive hemorrhage of delivery (transfusion of 6CG and 6PFC plus filling of 2000ml).
I heard my first baby crying, they put it on my arm, then the second one, but I couldn’t look at it as I felt big pain in my other arm, at the place of the perfusion. I heard the panic of the team for reanimation and surgery, ‘she is bleeding, ask for a backing up team of surgery and reanimation, and go looking for blood’. Then I lost consciousness.
I felt my body sliding towards an intense light that I never saw before, white and of all rainbow colors at the same time, a beneficial light. I was also sliding towards a source of happiness, of intense love, such as I never had been feeling. I felt good, had no hurt anymore, my body was light as if I was floating, I was happy. I told myself that I should go there, let myself go towards this wonderful place, as if I deserved this, that I needed to let go. Then I started to think at my husband, my two babies, I saw them as silhouettes, and I realized that if I was letting myself sliding towards this place, I would die and leave my husband a widower and my children as motherless orphans. Then I decided to come back and I struggled, as if tearing myself away from something, this took me so much energy that it hurt, but I gave everything, I screamed and woke up.
I was in the surgical unit in a kind of heating plastic, I felt completely emptied. The medical staff seemed glad that I came to, then a lady said, ‘Oh you are getting back some colors, that’s good’. I myself was unable to reconnect to this world, I would like to say.
Then I was accepted in recovery unit for 48 hours, as I have a high blood pressure and a neurological irritability, which manifests by sudden reflexes together with visual trouble. At once I still had this impression to find myself between two worlds.
Once I was out of recovery and when I could see my babies, it was then that I started to reconnect.
However, following this I had a maternal exhaustion even a postpartum depression. I tell myself that maybe there’s a connection, that I didn’t assume this choice to come back, that it was too hard, too painful?