On a wholly different topic

Slight deviation from usual topic, to complain about Amanda Holden.
I should add, as a disclaimer, that I'm not a vast Amanda Holden fan and never have been.

So, last month, heavily pregnant Amanda Holden was feeling a bit rough and took time off her BGT audition stint to go and get checked over in hospital. Her daughter was born the next day, and the postnatal period was very traumatic. She lost a massive amount of blood and needed multiple transfusions, and from what I can gather, uterine artery ligation. This is a fairly drastic, operation, done to conserve the uterus. Apparently, she required her heart restarting.

Yet, two and half weeks later, she was back at work.

Now, I understand wanting an early hospital discharge very well, especially since her previous pregnancy ended in stillbirth. And I understand the mentality that childbirth is not an illness.

Herein lies a problem though. Normal vaginal delivery, whether spontaneous or induced, is KNACKERING. It doesn't matter whether you have a two hour labour, a small baby, whether you tear, you are shattered afterwards. You lose approximately half a pint of blood, as standard. You push a head out of your vagina. And this is in non-exceptional cases. If you have complications, be they tearing, haemorrhage, assisted delivery or any of the myriad other things that can go wrong in the pueperium, you need EXTRA time to recuperate.
There is a reason you are supposed to have a minimum of six weeks off work after having a baby.

What Amanda Holden has done, in going back to work (even if it is 'just' sitting about watching acts with her baby close to hand) is undermine every woman who isn't able to WALK properly two weeks after childbirth. You're only just out of the puerperal fever dangerzone at two weeks. After my easy second labour and birth, following which I had a moderate haemorrhage, I felt dreadful for a week, and barely less dreadful for a second week. By week three, I was still bursting into tears at nothing and bleeding heavily. The last thing I would've wanted anyone to think, the last thing *I* should have thought of, on seeing me was 'Well, Amanda Holden managed better than this".

It is bad enough that women compare themselves to these lunatic supermodels who are back on the runway mere weeks after giving birth. But Amanda Holden's image is one of an 'everywoman', doing it all, but sensibly. She's supposed to be faintly realistic, something for us to at least try and aim for.

I'm pleased she has had a safe delivery, and I sincerely hope her return to work was sanctioned by her doctors, but in slathering her story all over the inaugural issue of the Sun on Sunday rag, she has given millions of women a wholly unrealistic postnatal aspiration.