WHEN Gill Castle gave birth to her son Sam six weeks early, she was expecting labour to hurt – but nothing could prepare her for what happened next.
After her baby became stuck in a birthing canal and his heart rate plummeted, medics used forceps to save his life.
The stitches Gill was given to repair tears she was left with caused trauma and life-changing injuries, yet her initial pleas for help fell on deaf ears.
As Sam was taken to a special premature baby care unit that October 2011, she lay in agony in her maternity ward.
Gill, 45, tells Sun Health: “I had this excruciating, burning pain.
“I had to drag my leg to walk. I couldn’t sit down and I was getting hotter and hotter.
“At first I thought, ‘Well this is how it’s meant to be. I’ve just had a baby and women go through this all the time.’
“But it just got worse and worse. Going to the toilet was the stuff of nightmares.
“I would ring the emergency buzzer because I was panic stricken.
“I was thinking, ‘Oh my God, are my insides falling out?’. The midwives kept saying, ‘You’re fine’.
“When I had a shower, poo was going down my legs. I was in massive distress again and pulled the buzzer.
“I actually bent over and said to the nurse, ‘Where is my anus? I don’t understand. I can’t feel anything.’ Again, I was told: ‘You’re fine’.
“Nobody was listening and I didn’t understand what was happening to my body. I was thinking, ‘People think I’m crazy’.”
Gill’s husband of 18 years, Chris, 47, an offshore commercial diver, supported her, trying to make sense of the situation.
“He’s a former Royal Marine so he is always very calm but he could see I was in a bad way and both of us felt helpless,” she says.
Five days later Gill, 45, collapsed in the hospital corridor and was found by a male midwife.
She recalls: “I looked at him and said, ‘I just can’t do this anymore’. He replied, ‘Maybe it’s your perception of the pain.’
“I thought, ‘This is it – I’m actually going to die here.’
“Luckily, the midwife must have said something because I was taken to be examined under gas and air on the sixth day.”
It was like seeing a sea anemone coming out of my stomach. It was totally alien
Gill Castle
Gill was told that she had a fourth-degree tear and she now had a hole between her rectum and vagina.
“I was pooing out of my vagina,” Gill says.
“I also had a massive abscess – presumably because of the poo building up – which later burst and became septic and left me with a permanently damaged sphincter.”
She was given a year’s worth of antibiotics.
She was also fitted with an emergency colostomy, or stoma– an opening made through the abdominal wall that connects the bowel to the surface of the tummy to divert the flow of faeces or urine.
Looking at herself in the mirror for the first time after the op, Gill felt “repulsed”.
She says: “It was like seeing a sea anemone coming out of my stomach because I was seeing my bowel on my stomach and it’s moving around. It was totally alien.
“I was thinking, ‘Oh my god, this is what I would imagine someone who’s been to war and been shot in the stomach to look like’.
“At the same time I was able to deal with it because I thought it was only for 12 weeks.”
But before the 12 weeks was up, Gill was told that – despite undergoing gruelling corrective surgeries – the damage caused to her was so severe her stoma would need to be permanent.
She says: “You can’t fight what you can’t change so I was quite quick to accept it, but acceptance is completely different to gratitude.
“I didn’t embrace it or make the most out of it for a long time.”
The reality of her situation hit even harder when she returned to visit pals she’d once worked alongside as a police officer in Bradford city centre, West Yorkshire.
She says: “It’s what new mum’s do isn’t it – visit work with your new baby – but afterwards I cried solidly for three days. I was absolutely devastated.
“I used to watch the TV series Juliet Bravo. She was my heroine.
“It took me two years to get into the Force but when I did, I was living the dream.
“After that visit I suddenly thought, ‘You can’t do this job the way that you are’.
“The fact that it was out of reach to me was horrendous.”
‘Survival mode’
In November 2011, the hospital – which she does not wish to name – wrote to say it was investigating her case.
Later that year, Gill and Chris left their home in Leeds and returned to Gill’s birth place in Alnwick, Northumberland.
There, with the support of nearby family and old friends, she began to turn a corner in her recovery.
She says: “Until the move back to Alnwick, I hadn’t bonded with my baby for seven months because I was just in survival mode.
“I remember all the women on my ward saying, ‘You poor thing, you’ve been separated from your baby’, but I felt nothing.
“Returning home meant my feelings dropped down a notch and I could finally let that love in.”
Sam, now 13, once asked if she’d regretted having him, given the birth trauma she endured.
“I said, ‘Well, has it ever stopped me from doing anything?’ And he said, ‘No, nothing’ and then he went back to his Playstation and that was one of my favourite chats,” Gill recalls.
“I want him to see that life is full of twists and turns but you get on and you adapt.
“It’s been my mission, all these years, to have the most normal life possible, even if my life’s not normal.”
In 2013, after being diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder as a result of her ordeal, Gill was medically retired from the Police.
She had only served four years and hadn’t ever returned since giving birth.
She says: “People just assumed my PTSD was related to the birth, but my main source of grief was the loss of my job and career.
“If I saw a police car, I had to drive somewhere else because I couldn’t look at it. I’d feel sweaty, panicky and anxious.
“One of my biggest fears was being stopped by the police, and then having to try to speak to a police officer.
“I couldn’t even think about the police because it would just flash back to everything that I used to love about the job and my colleagues.
“Then the pain and grief would be overwhelming.”
What's normal and what's not after giving birth
YOUR BODY goes through a lot when giving birth and it's normal to notice some lingering symptoms from it - from soreness, to tiredness and emotional changes. But some things require medical attention.
Stitches
If you’ve had stitches after tearing or an episiotomy (cut), bathe them every day to help prevent infection. Have a bath or shower with plain warm water then carefully pat yourself dry.
If your stitches are sore or uncomfortable, tell your midwife.
Stitches usually dissolve by the time the cut or tear has healed, but sometimes they have to be taken out.
Going to the loo
You probably won’t have a poo for a few days after the birth, but it’s important not to let yourself get constipated.
Eat plenty of fresh fruit, vegetables, salad, wholegrain cereals and wholemeal bread, and drink plenty of water.
Talk to your midwife or GP if you have constipation that won’t go away. A gentle laxative may help.
Also tell your midwife or GP if poo is leaking or you’re pooing when you don’t mean to.
Also tell your midwife if:
- you’re finding it really difficult to pee
- you feel very sore
- you notice an unpleasant smell
Bleeding
You’ll bleed from your vagina after the birth, which will be quite heavy at first, and you’ll need super-absorbent sanitary towels.
Change them regularly, washing your hands before and afterwards.
You may notice the bleeding is redder and heavier when you breastfeed. This happens because breastfeeding makes your womb contract. You may also feel cramps similar to period pains.
The bleeding will carry on for a few weeks. It will gradually turn a brownish colour and decrease until it finally stops.
If you’re losing blood in large clots, tell your midwife.
Source: NHS
In 2014, she was awarded a six-figure out-of-court compensation payout for all her injuries leading to the permanent stoma, and for the loss of her job.
She said: “Before they wrote to me I just thought I’d been very unlucky, but their report stated that the consultant had made a mistake when she repaired me after birth.
“She first thought I’d had a second degree tear, then a third degree.
“Each time she realised her mistake she had to undo the stitches and re-stitch and she did that too many times.”
Gill was one of more than 1,300 women last year to give evidence at The Birth Trauma Inquiry– the first of its kind to look into traumatic childbirths and call for an overhaul of the UK’s maternity and postnatal care as a result of the harrowing experiences it shone a light on.
But sending a stark ultimatum to Wes Streeting for not yet having acted on any of the inquiry’s recommendations, she says: “He once said that the lack of maternity care in this country keeps him up all night, yet he hasn’t taken any notice of the report, a year on, and that makes me so angry.
“He has a responsibility to the women who have dredged up trauma from years ago to help fix this broken system.”
Gill has made it her life’s mission to raise awareness of birth trauma injuries and to show that having a stoma can be positive and does not need to limit you.
In 2023, she became the first person with a stoma to swim solo across the English Channel, raising £50,000 for a charity she set up in 2022, called Chameleon Buddies.
She also raised £20,000 for the Birth Trauma Association through other challenges including triathlons and marathons.
Later this year she will lead an expedition up Africa’s highest peak, Kilimanjaro, with 19 other women, to raise money for a Kenyan hospital ward.
She says: “I see what’s happened now as the best thing in my life.
“I would never have had the experiences I’ve had otherwise – of swimming with record breakers, of becoming friends with other amazing people with stomas, like the artist Tracey Emin.
“Living with a stoma really doesn’t need to be different. We are far more adaptable than we think.
“I always say, you need to make your stoma fit around your life, not your life fit around your stoma.”
