I Almost Died Giving Birth — Twice. This Is The Lifesaving Knowledge I Wish I'd Had.

"'What happened?' I asked. 'You hemorrhaged again,' she said. 'This time you lost over a liter of blood.'"

After I almost bled out during the delivery of my first child due to postpartum hemorrhage, or PPH, I had nightmares about it happening again. One week after giving birth to my second, my fears came true. I developed a pulling pain in my abdomen and called my doctor. Instinctively, I knew it was another retained placenta.

The World Health Organization recently released a road map to address PPH, the leading cause of death for women in childbirth globally. According to WHO, around 70,000 women die from PPH every year.

During the delivery of my first child, the doctor spent over 45 minutes trying to manually remove my placenta from my uterine wall. It ended up taking too long and I was losing too much blood, so I received an emergency dilation and curettage, or D&C. I returned to my hospital room after the surgery — shaking from adrenaline, pain medication, and the shock of losing so much blood — with my husband and baby by my side. I had survived — barely.

When I became pregnant with my second child, my doctors assured me that I didn’t need to worry about the same complications happening again. They said things like “you’re overthinking it” and “we have you covered if we run into any trouble.” Though I trusted my doctors, I also trusted my intuition. With my first delivery, I knew it was not normal for the doctor to be visibly frustrated when removing the placental tissue from my uterus. I always wondered: Why did it take so long for them to decide to do a D&C?

This wasn’t just anxiety-based fear. I had done my own research, and I knew that as a woman who had experienced PPH, I had a higher likelihood of having the complication again.