‘If You Hemorrhage, Don’t Clean Up’: Advice From Mothers Who Almost Died
Four days after Marie McCausland delivered her first child in May, she knew something was very wrong. She had intense pain in her upper chest, her blood pressure was rising, and she was so swollen that she barely recognized herself in the mirror. As she curled up in bed that evening, a scary thought flickered through her exhausted brain: “If I go to sleep right now, I don’t know if I’m gonna be waking up.”
What she didn’t have was good information about what might be wrong. The discharge materials the hospital sent her home with were vague and confusing — “really quite useless,” she said. Then she remembered a ProPublica/NPR story she’d recently read about a New Jersey nurse who died soon after childbirth. Lauren Bloomstein had developed severe preeclampsia, a dangerous type of hypertension that often happens during the second half of her pregnancy. But it can also emerge after the baby is delivered, when it is often overlooked — accounting for dozens of maternal deaths a year. McCausland realized that she might have preeclampsia, too.
The 27-year-old molecular virologist and her husband bundled up their newborn son and raced to the nearest emergency room in Cleveland. But the ER doctor told her that she was feeling normal postpartum symptoms, she said. Even as her blood pressure hovered at perilous heights, he wanted to send her home. Several hours passed before he consulted with an OB-GYN at another hospital and McCausland’s severe preeclampsia was treated with magnesium sulfate to prevent seizures. Without Bloomstein’s story as a warning, McCausland doubts she would have recognized her symptoms or persisted in the face of the ER doctor’s dismissiveness. “I had just come home with the baby and really didn’t want to go back to the hospital. I think I probably would have just wrote it off.” In that case, she added, “I don’t know if I’d be here. I really don’t.”