What exactly happened to my mother during/after my sister's birth?

July 5, 2022 9:12 PM

I'm at an age when doctors ask me how old my mother was at the onset of menopause, but I have no answer. Mom never menstruated while I was growing up, due to whatever happened after my sister was born. But...what was that, and why did it have that effect? Details of what she told me inside.

I grew up as a girl in a household that never had menstrual supplies around. I vaguely read about them in outdated books (Judy Blume), but had never seen such a thing. (That was definitely not optimal when I got to an age to need them!) At some point, my mother explained to me that after my younger sister was born, she came home from the hospital and was fine for some days, but then started bleeding heavily - she said she had pads but didn't even think of them with that amount of blood; she soaked it up with bath towels and was taken to the hospital. Apparently they fixed whatever was wrong, and told her that "they could give her an injection to start her periods again". She said no, since she was done having kids, and, seriously, who would want that, otherwise?

So...what the heck happened? I know my sister's birth went a bit wonky, with Mom being incoherent because, you know, labor, and getting knocked out with ether (!) due to being allergic to the caine drugs and the nurse panicking and not being able to get an OB to turn up (rural hospital fifty years ago - Mom said she remembered hearing "every OB in X county" being paged).

It sounded like some of the placenta might have been retained? But, what would have caused her to never menstruate again? She didn't have a hysterectomy. (Evidence: no scar, never said she had one, and in conversation about a friend of mine having one, Mom never implied she knew what it was like. Also, you can't reverse a hysterectomy with an injection.)

I suppose I should have pressed her for details when she was alive, but clearly this wasn't exactly a fun memory, and, well, it's not like I need to know. It's just always kind of bugged me, and I was talking to my sister about it today, and I assume that a doctor (who is not my doctor, but Knows Stuff) would know. My thanks for your insight!

posted by LadyOscar to Health & Fitness (17 answers total)

Response by poster: Related to this family story - does anyone know anything about ether affecting hair growth? I've Googled to no avail. Mom describes going to the hairdresser for the first time after my sister was born and the hairdresser being a bit snippy, then asking, "where'd you get the perm?". Mom replied that she'd been off having a baby and of course hadn't had a perm. Mom says that before my sister was born, her hair was like mine (very straight) and pictures of her bear that out. All the time I knew her, though, her hair was quite curly, and a bit coarser, and she was given to understand by a doctor that it was due to the ether. (I envied her the curliness, but I understood the disorientation of having one's hair suddenly change!)
posted by LadyOscar at 9:30 PM on July 5, 2022

Might be helpful if you shared the year your sister was born? Fifty years ago, you say?
posted by bluedaisy at 9:45 PM on July 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

It’s not uncommon for hair texture, thickness and waviness to change with age and hormones. I used to have more naturally wavy hair and it was easy to make it curl. Now it won’t curl and it’s a bit more fine. Have had one child, no ether. Hair changed prior to peri-menopause symptoms.
posted by amanda at 9:50 PM on July 5, 2022 [6 favorites]

After I had my second baby (but not directly after, maybe a year later), I had a dramatic bleeding like the one your mother describes. I was on my bike, and dripped blood all the way home like I'd been attacked with a knife. I panicked and called the hospital, where they said it was a normal, but not typical, sign of early onset perimenopause. I must have been 36. They also said they wouldn't do anything. I was kind of angry about that, but remembered I had read that early menopause can happened if you are very thin, as I was then, and I started eating a lot. Really a lot. And my periods came back and I had my menopause at about 20 years later, now no longer thin at all.
About the hair: mine has always been wavy but it is definitely more curly now.
posted by mumimor at 11:19 PM on July 5, 2022

Drugs like Tamoxifen might contribute to a sudden cessation of periods ... did your mother have cancer that was caught early and treated with that, or with a similar drug? I am not a doctor.
posted by Armed Only With Hubris at 12:04 AM on July 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

I think the most likely candidate is that your mom started taking birth control and that led to the suppression of menstruation. Even if that was never disclosed, it's not an uncommon suggestion after a pregnancy/birth that requires significant recovery time. Also possible that scarring from d&c to remove placenta or deal with other causes of heavy bleeding led to the same effect. Maybe both of these at the same time?
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 2:14 AM on July 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

Placing my bets on Asherman's syndrome, a complication from uterine procedures (among other things) that causes the front and back of the uterus to adhere, sometimes resulting in the complete cessation of menstruation. Source: I am not a doctor but I do have Asherman's syndrome.
posted by MagnificentVacuum at 3:07 AM on July 6, 2022 [5 favorites]

Anecdata: My hair definitely changed texture and growth pattern after my pregnancy, but no ether was involved. That might be have been a real change but a false correlation.
posted by nkknkk at 4:44 AM on July 6, 2022 [3 favorites]

Also anecdata: my hair became much, much curlier after birthing my two children. No ether involved here either.
posted by lydhre at 5:09 AM on July 6, 2022 [3 favorites]

This sounds maybe like Sheehan syndrome. Maternal hemorrhage can cause hypoperfusion and ischemia of the pituitary leading to necrosis. Pituitary makes LH and FSH which are responsible for regulating ovarian function, which would affect menstruation.
posted by honeybee413 at 6:24 AM on July 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

But do any of these issues/syndromes cause cessation of menstruation that can just be started up again with an injection? That's the part that seems very unlikely.

My mother had a pituitary tumor when she a teen. It was treated with radiation and some other therapy in the 1950s. It's hard to know what the real story is with my mom because, like a lot of people in that generation, talking about health issues especially ones around reproduction can be fraught. Whatever the therapies were, she didn't menstruate at all or with regularity and was under the impression she could not get pregnant. In any case, she and my dad adopted two children and then later in life, she did have a period and was able to get pregnant resulting in a natural pregnancy and birth. I heard about this mostly in patches around when I started my own period as a teen. This reproductive journey for my mom seems uncommon so it's hard to extrapolate whether other people would have similar experiences. Given that this happened over an extended period of time with different doctors and developed modalities, it's hard to know exactly what was going on.

One thought is that your mother may have been told that hormone therapy might restore menstruation at some point in the future?
posted by amanda at 7:24 AM on July 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

"yes, and"-ing honeybee, FSH is injectable to stimulate ovulation. So what they really meant was that your mother was still fertile, but would need injections to initiate the process. "Start her periods" might be a simplification of that explanation.
posted by Dashy at 7:59 AM on July 6, 2022 [2 favorites]

My mother had a pituitary tumor when she a teen.

I have one of those. It's not growing so it hasn't been treated. The only real symptom is that I barely menstruate. My doctor told me I could take pills to restore my menstrual cycle if I wanted to have children. I didn't, so I didn't. This wouldn't explain all the facts of your mother's situation, but it's another angle to consider.
posted by jessamyn at 9:46 AM on July 6, 2022 [2 favorites]

My guess is that, due to the telephone game that is medical anecdote, this story is incorrect.

Something that happens frequently is that the doctor does a poor job of explaining medical issues to people who experienced them. They speak fast, use jargon, skip essential details, and fail to check for understanding. They also talk to the patient at a moment when the person is least able to receive complex and new information (right after birth in this case). What lodges in the patient's memory is misremembered and misunderstood. Then the person repeats the story over many years (50 in this case??) and like all memories, it degrades and deforms over time. Finally, the recipient of that second hand explanation, you in this case, bring your own biases, misunderstandings, assumptions, etc to the story. There are so many opportunities for the facts of what happened in the hospital to be poorly explained, misunderstood, and misremembered between when they happened and now that it is just more common than not for these stories to be wrong. Additionally, the story as you explain it does not make sense. There is no injection that can reliably and immediately re-start stopped menstruation. This gives me further reason to believe there are inaccuracies in this story. I don't say this as any kind of judgement! I'm just saying this is an extremely common phenomenon and the most likely explanation.

I am a nurse and spent a decade or so working with midwives and attending births. I have heard many, many medically impossible family anecdotes over the years. It's just how this stuff goes.
posted by latkes at 10:52 AM on July 6, 2022 [15 favorites]

When you're pregnant, you're in growth mode, including your hair. After you give birth, you tend to lose hair, and the texture can change.

Many women who breastfeed don't have periods while breastfeeding.

Unreliable narrator filtered through childhood recollection doesn't lead to facts.
posted by theora55 at 5:02 PM on July 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'm guessing that as latkes describes, there are medical inaccuracies in the story... but for reproductive health it can be more complicated than just rushed communication at a moment in time.

I'm not a doctor but I am close with people who have done a lot of reproductive health access work in different places.

One thing to keep in mind is that you don't have to go back that far in the bast to find that they didn't have the same culture around casual knowledge of more in depth detail around these sorts of health issues that we do today. In many places (perhaps particularly in a rural hospital), many women would not have learned terms for their own anatomy the way we do today. All the places that have bad sex ed these days -- go back 50 years and it was worse, much worse. So a doctor in that setting is not going to be accustomed to giving the sorts of explanations patients would expect today. Your mother might well not have even been told exactly what had happened at the time.

I've found in my own family that people tend to fill in these details after the fact - they learn words they didn't know before and next thing you know instead of a story about how great aunt Suzy had "female troubles", there's some random more accurate medical term that got tossed in there by someone who might or might not have even understood the meaning of that word the way we would today, let alone actually had any details about the specifics of what great aunt Suzy's situation.

My own experience is that at some point in trying to get my family medical history figured out, there were certain details which made so little logical sense that it became very obvious that the information very earnestly being told was completely unreliable. What I do when talking to doctors about this family medical history is just explain that I don't have good information or any way to get good information, and the doctor doesn't press for more info after that.

She didn't have a hysterectomy. (Evidence: no scar, never said she had one, and in conversation about a friend of mine having one, Mom never implied she knew what it was like. Also, you can't reverse a hysterectomy with an injection.)

Some scars might be difficult to see.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysterectomy#Vaginal_hysterectomyd

Also women were not always told that they received a hysterectomy. In the US (and probably other places, certainly Canada and perhaps elsewhere too, but most of my personal reading on this has concerned the US) there is a long and horrible history of women who are Native American, Black, or poor (or stereotyped as being poor due to living in a rural area) being given hysterectomies without their consent or knowledge. And this practice continued for far far longer than you might suspect. There is a lot of documentation online about the details... obviously this is a heavy topic for many people so I'm not going to link, but the wikipedia article on Sterilization of Native American Women might be a good place to start and has links to many sources for those wanting to know more.

Keep in mind that it was common not all that long ago to avoid giving patients information about their health because it would "upset them" (literally to the point of not telling them they had cancer even when the patient was in the hospital getting cancer surgery -- the concept of informed consent is relatively new). Women were not even able to have access to home pregnancy tests until 1977 because of sexist views that they should not be able to learn this about their own health. It's not hard to imagine that a patient might be told a story about a shot instead of being given actual information. I would say it's hard to imagine women being denied their bodily integrity being the accepted and common practice, but these days it is all to easy to imagine... ***gestures at everything in USA***
posted by yohko at 6:37 PM on July 6, 2022 [5 favorites]

Adding this link because it's hard to understand just how very different things used to be than what we would expect now. Linked article goes into detail on the history, but this passage is particularly notable:

There is also evidence, however, that physicians' views about proper consent practices even in the late 1960s differed markedly from the consensus of opinion and convention today. For example, in one study, half of the physicians surveyed thought it medically proper, and 30 percent ethically proper, for a physician to perform a mastectomy with no authorization from the patient other than her signature on the blanket consent form required for hospital admission
posted by yohko at 6:48 PM on July 6, 2022