Influencer Madeleine White is getting candid about her labor experience.
“OK, you want my birth story, I’ll give you my birth story. This is the first time I’ve ever put a trigger warning at the beginning of my video. But if you are pregnant, I would maybe skip. If you are triggered by traumatic birth stories, traumatic labor stories, just [swipe] OK? Where do I begin?” White recalled in a Wednesday, July 1, TikTok. “I guess where it actually begins to be honest is when you guys diagnosed me with preeclampsia in my comments section when I couldn’t get my rings off after a game of golf.”
She continued, “That happened when I was 31 weeks pregnant. My hands got really swollen, like very suddenly overnight. My wrists, my face and my ankles and my feet. And I posted this video taking my jewelry off, thinking nothing of it, and then all of my comments were like, ‘Uh, do you have preeclampsia?’”
White shared that she then headed to the hospital, where she had to have her blood pressure checked every 10 minutes for 3 hours. White alleged she was then told she did not have preeclampsia, sharing that she was “quite f***ing humiliated” by the fact that she went home.
The next week, White went to the doctor and was told she had gestational hypertension and was given another preeclampsia test — which she did not hear back about. After going home, White then woke up a couple days later and felt “really terrible.” White then discovered she was bleeding later that night and went back to the hospital.
“I actually swear one of the worst parts about this whole labor experience was standing in the lobby when they’re asking me for ID and insurance information as blood was just running down my legs. To me, it was the biggest emergency in the world. To them, they were like, ‘Can you spell that again?’” she said, sharing that the overnight doctor was “not sure” at first whether it was a placental abruption.
She continued, “Because I was bleeding, but she was like, ‘You’re not bleeding heavily enough that we need to c-section this baby right now.’ They tested to see if there was amniotic fluid in my blood, which there was. But she straight up told me, ‘I don’t really know what the best course of action is here because you are so early. We might be able to keep the baby in a couple of days and give you the steroid shots to develop Juliette’s lungs. The bleeding might stop and we might be able to keep you here.’”
White shared that she was told to “go to sleep,” adding that she had “no pain” and did not feel like she was in labor. The content creator recalled nurses coming into the room and telling her she had contractions close together, which she did not realize. When her OB came into the hospital, she was informed she had preeclampsia.
“Just as the doctor went to look at how much I was bleeding, I felt this really big gush. They said, ‘No babe, you’re having this baby right now.’ The time that they prepped me for the c-section was the scariest time of my whole life,” she recalled. “All I kept saying to myself was, ‘Mum did this. Your friends have done this. Loads of people you know have done this. You can do this. Don’t freak out, you can’t freak out. The baby needs you.’”
She continued, “While he was doing my c-section, he said, ‘Oh, this was definitely a placenta abruption.’ Obviously Juliette was admitted to the NICU. I thankfully didn’t have any more complications after I gave birth. I was discharged two and a half days after I gave birth. Juliette came home after three weeks and one day in the NICU. Definitely not the labor I would have chosen for my first baby and it definitely makes future pregnancies a little bit more complicated.”
“She made a dramatic entrance just like her mommy! 💅🎀🤍,” White captioned the video.
White shared in June that she and husband Andrew Fedyk welcomed their first baby, a girl, at 33 weeks. The pair named their little one Juliette.
