“I lost a lot, a lot of blood very quickly. Like a lot.” She was rushed to the emergency room, and, only because she lived so close to the hospital, she survived.

The physical complications continued. She was diagnosed with Asherman’s Syndrome, where scar tissue forms, causing the walls of the uterus to stick together. Her inflammatory bowel disease was amplified; in 2024, she had her colon removed and was fitted with a stoma bag.

But the aftershocks weren’t merely physical. “I didn’t know how to live my life,” she recalls. After her near-death experience, her PTSD manifested in panic, fear and obsessive, intrusive thoughts. “All I could think about was tracking my blood pressure, haemoglobin, and temperature. It just completely consumed me.

“When I came home, I had no intention of looking after someone else. I didn’t have a relationship with my son.” She struggled to even recognise her partner, Ryan or her dogs. “He would be there, but he wasn’t a person I cared about,” she says. “I was living in a bubble, where other people didn’t really exist. I was very, very mentally unwell.”

The PTSD is more manageable now, but the triggers remain: “A siren going past, even a change in the temperature, or my body, just knowing it’s the date when a traumatic incident happened.”

“I can get really intrusive thoughts that just go round and round. I believe that I’m dying in those moments – the amount that I’ve spent on appointments, scans, and even box testing kits at home,” she says. “You can never unlearn the feeling of how scared you were.”

Luckily, Louise has “come out the other side feeling like a normal human with a brain that works and a body that works and a good relationship with my child who’s alive, and with my partner who I’m still with.” Many are not so lucky.

But wait, you may be thinking. How did we end up here? Where surviving childbirth is a matter of luck?

The statistics reflect the unequivocally dire state of the country’s maternity care: over two-thirds of NHS maternal services were deemed inadequate or requiring improvement by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) in 2024. Despite the previous Tory government’s promise to halve the number of maternal mortality cases, it rose by 20% between the 2009-2011 period and the 2022-2024 period with 252 women dying from direct or indirect causes during or shortly after pregnancy in the 2022-24 period. Thirty thousand women develop PTSD every year after childbirth. The NHS has now reached £27 billion in liabilities for medical negligence for maternity failings – “which is more than they spend on the actual maternity care,” Thompson says.

“It’s because of a fragmented healthcare system,” she says after passionately rattling off some of these staggering statistics herself. “I think now is really the tipping point where some change needs to be actioned and people need to be held accountable and really there just needs to be a unified system. A maternity commissioner is the first step in being able to implement the recommendations that have been made by inquiries for the last decade.”