After her own birth trauma, Carole Rankin was inspired to compile personal stories and bits of meaningful fabric to create a community quilt that brings awareness to perinatal mental healthShivering cold and sweating hot, Carole Rankin strained her neck to see her limp, newborn baby on her chest and screamed, “Why isn’t he crying? Why isn’t he crying?”“He would have popped a bottle of champagne,” says Rankin, who lives in Halifax. “He was just so unaware … so happy and excited to be a dad.
At the peak of COVID-19, Rankin, unaware of what was amiss, waited in an emergency room for eight hours in extreme pain.After begging her husband to pick her up, Rankin left for 20 minutes and called her family doctor, who told her she likely had an ectopic pregnancy and to rush back to the hospital. When Rankin returned, she was triaged again.
About seven hours after he was born, Rankin was wheeled to the NICU to meet Eddie Archie, who had an IV in his head, and other wires and contraptions that monitored his heart and breathing. After posting her story on her Instagram page, which until then had mostly consisted of sewing-related content, notifications lit up on her phone from people who related to her story, and wanted to share their own stories around pregnancy, birth, trauma and loss. The hobby sewer came up with a plan: she’d collect stories and bits of fabric to build a community quilt to create a safe space for women to share their perinatal mental health stories.
Kendra Read, Johanna Ysselstein Qadri and Carole Rankin were among the women who worked on the quilt. The percentage results were highest in Nova Scotia, and were above the national average in Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador, too.