Dun read below if u r pregnant or gg 2 've baby soon.....it's really horrible.....

ST Feb 22, 2006
Baby & Child
Baby so big he tore mum apart
A new mum was wheelchair-bound for eight months and had to go through four operations. She can never carry her baby - or have another. Lee Hui Chieh reports.

Giving birth to her first baby should have been one of the happiest moments in Mrs Jenny Lim's life, but she was left unable to walk for eight months, incontinent for life and unlikely to have a second child.

Her baby had been too big - 4.3kg at birth - and the doctor eventually had to use a device to suck him out of her, in a process known as vacuum extraction.

Her pelvic bones were forced open so wide, and the ligaments holding the bones together so badly torn, that she could hardly stand and had to sit in a wheelchair for the next eight months.
Her bladder slipped out of place and both her vagina and urethra were ruptured, causing her to suffer from total incontinence, or an inability to control urine flow.

The vagina is the birth canal from which the baby is born, while the urethra is the channel that runs beside it through which urine is discharged from the bladder.

Over the next 11 months, she went through four operations to try to repair the damage.

The first two procedures were unsuccessful. The latest one, in September last year, reduced the extent of her incontinence significantly. Still, the 31-year-old manager will have to rely on sanitary napkins for the rest of her life.

She said: 'In the second trimester, the gynaecologist told me that my baby was considered normal but on the lower end of the range. So I kept eating because I was worried about the weight of my child. It's so ironic.'

The day her son was born, Oct 15, 2004, became what Mrs Lim calls her personal 'Good Friday' - her day of extreme suffering for the love for her child.

She said: 'All I remember was that I saw a lot of people rushing in. Four nurses - two on each side - were pushing my thighs apart and asking me to push with my greatest might.

'I gave a huge push and there was a very sharp pain even though I had been given an epidural and I shouted very loudly. That was when my pelvic bones just gave way, but I had no idea how severe it was.

'One of the nurses screamed at me: 'Quiet! The more you shout, the more painful it will be.' So I tried to control my pain.'

Mrs Lim's concern then was for her son's well-being.

Her engineer husband, Mr K.P. Lim, 34, who was in the delivery room with her, said: 'I saw my son's head come out and I was shocked to see that it was purple. My wife gave a shout and his shoulder came out. He gave two cries and then grew quiet. He refused to cry even when the nurses slapped his feet.'

The vacuum extraction had left the boy's head 'rocket-shaped' and with 'slit eyes', said Mr Lim. These have since returned to normal.

The hospital kept Mrs Lim on the epidural for the rest of that day, after the traumatic labour.

She said: 'When the epidural wore off the second day, I practically couldn't sit up.'

She started to run a high fever and was given antibiotics for it.

An X-ray showed that the joint holding her pelvic bones together in front - known as the symphysis pubis - had been very badly torn, the left and right sections separated by 7.5cm.
She also had tears at two joints in the back of her pelvic girdle, each measuring 2mm.

The pelvic girdle is formed by three major bones that are held together by joints and ligaments to form a circle. The main joints are the symphysis pubis in front and the two at the back are known as the sacroiliac joints.

During pregnancy, the cartilage of the joints is softened by the body's hormones so that the pelvis can stretch and allow the baby to emerge. The normal distance between the two bones is about 4mm to 5mm for a non-pregnant woman, and up to 9mm for a pregnant woman.

It is very rare for women to experience such a wide separation of the symphysis pubis.

An orthopaedic surgeon reassured Mrs Lim that it was nothing to worry about, that the tear would recover naturally and asked her to see him after three weeks.

So after about five days, Mrs Lim went home, wearing a catheter that channelled her urine from her bladder into a bag. Despite that, urine still leaked and she had to use sanitary napkins.

She was 'waddling like a duck', said her husband. Every step made her feel 'like someone was stabbing me with a knife', so she used a wheelchair to move around.

She could not go to work or take care of her baby. Her mother had to quit her job as a nurse to help look after the boy. And after a month, Mrs Lim also moved to her parents' place so that they could take care of her when her husband was at work.

A week or two after her discharge, Mrs Lim returned to the same private hospital and underwent day surgery to stitch up the opening of her urinary tract. But there was no improvement at all.

She turned to KK Women's and Children's Hospital for help. Doctors there tried to reconstruct her urethra by stitching up the torn tissues and muscles. Her condition improved slightly, but she still had to wear diapers that had to be changed every two to three hours because they would be soaked through.

It was back to square one in a month. The stitches had given way.

The Lims were referred to an orthopaedic surgeon and a urologist at Singapore General Hospital. They realised that the problem was that Mrs Lim's pelvic bones were not healing on their own, like most women's do, because her rupture was too serious.

So in April last year, they made a 15cm-long incision down her pelvic area, realigned her bones and bladder and inserted two metal plates to hold the bones together so that the joint in the centre could heal.

There had been a risk of infection and bleeding to death in such a major operation. It was the darkest period of the Lims' lives.

'I felt totally hopeless and had suicidal thoughts,' Mrs Lim said.

'I'd been to see so many doctors but they all said: 'We don't know what to do for you.' I just cried every night and I wondered: How am I going to take care of my son?'

Mr Lim remembers an evening when he returned home alone after visiting his wife at her parents'. Remembering how they used to walk down the path home together every day, he broke down and sat on his sofa in a daze for three to four hours.

He said: 'I imagined what it would be like walking back alone from now on. I was afraid my wife was going to die.'

Luckily the operation went well. About two months later, Mrs Lim was finally able to walk after eight months of moving between bed and wheelchair.

Then, in September, the urologist reconstructed her urethra again and also cut a flap of tissue from her vagina to support it.

Mrs Lim said: 'After the surgery, my whole lower body swelled up like a balloon.'

The swelling lasted for a month, but her condition has since improved greatly - she can get through a day on a pantyliner or sanitary napkin.

She returned to work - partly because her company warned her that it would have to replace her if she did not go back.

'But I will never be back to normal again,' she said.

Her back aches if she sits or stands for too long, and she cannot roll from one side of the bed to the other. She also cannot carry heavy things - her son included.

When she tried to carry the boy, now 13kg, in her arms in June last year, she felt a sharp pain.
One of the metal plates had broken.

The doctor warned her that she should not risk doing that again, and also advised her against having another baby because her pelvis was too fragile to carry another baby to term or to survive another delivery.

'I see other mothers carrying their children, something that they take for granted. It's a luxury that I'll never have,' she said.

'We love children and we had wanted two or three. I'm very sad I won't get a second chance.'

E-mail: huichieh@sph.com.sg