“They Convinced Me This Was Normal for Everyone.” After Giving Birth, Minsk Woman Resumed Exercising While Taking Painkillers and Discovered Her Injury Only Months Later

Reform.news Editorial Team · 9 November 2026, 16:42

https://reform.news/en/they-convinced-me-this-was-normal-for-everyone-after-giving-birth-minsk-woman-resumed-exercising-while-taking-painkillers-and-discovered-her-injury-only-months-later/

A Minsk woman named Alicia has shared her experience of giving birth at Minsk City Clinical Maternity Hospital No. 2 and the consequences in a Threads post. She genuinely believed that the delivery had gone smoothly. Just two and a half weeks later, after consulting an obstetrician-gynaecologist, she resumed moderate exercise. She considered the pain, which she could not bear without paracetamol, to be normal. She thought exercising would help her recover faster after childbirth. However, months later, she discovered that she had been discharged from the maternity hospital with an infection and a serious injury, and that exercise had been contraindicated. A doctor on duty at her local outpatient clinic was surprised that the patient had not been informed.

Alicia is a foreign national with permanent residence in Belarus. According to her, the labour was extremely fast: she never made it to the delivery room, and medical staff only became involved after she saw the baby’s head and called for help. The bed, she writes, had no safety rails — “because the baby could have fallen onto the floor.” She received no answer when she asked whether she had suffered any tears and, if so, how severe they were: “Complete silence and the remark: ‘I see, teacher, wants to teach everyone how to do their job.'”

Next, she says, came the postnatal ward, where she was given painkillers no more than twice a day, even though the medication’s effect lasted about eight hours. Alicia and her daughter were discharged on the third day “with an infection and sky-high levels of acute protein” — apparently referring to C-reactive protein, a laboratory marker of inflammation.

“They convinced me this was normal for everyone,” Alicia says.

She did not know about the infection. She took paracetamol every day — the only painkiller compatible with breastfeeding — and genuinely believed that this was normal after childbirth. Alicia relied on paracetamol for a month and even returned to exercise sessions with her two-week-old baby, at the “Sport for Everyone” project, which she had attended during her pregnancy and before it.

Back in August, she said that exercise had helped make her delivery easy: “We didn’t even make it to the delivery room; everything happened so quickly. Recovery is also much easier after exercising.”

One or two months after giving birth, the woman went to the emergency department of the same maternity hospital because of severe discomfort. There, she writes, she was asked “not to register the visit and not to get the doctor into trouble.”

Only months later did Alicia learn that she had sustained a serious injury. Because it had been “covered up,” she says, “the consequences will stay with me for life.”

“And nobody at the maternity hospital bothered to tell me. They kept silent. Yet I could at least have started rehabilitation earlier and avoided enduring daily pain around the clock,” she writes. “At the time, I did not know that I had significant pelvic organ prolapse, cervical elongation and fascial tears. And that the last thing I should have been doing was returning to exercise.”

She later visited her local outpatient clinic, where a doctor on duty was the first to raise the possibility of injuries: “The muscles are not working at all; they are probably torn, and it’s strange that I don’t know about it,” Alicia recalls in the comments. “She referred me to a private clinic specialising in such cases. That’s where I learned that my fascia had torn, that I had grade II prolapse and cervical elongation.”

Alicia is now undergoing painful procedures, and surgery lies ahead. “Why didn’t they stitch me up right there? Would that have ruined their statistics?” she wonders.

The woman says that if she had been informed about the injury before being discharged, she would not have resumed physical activity in the second week. Instead, she would have started with pelvic floor physiotherapy, which has been shown to reduce symptoms in cases of grade I–II prolapse. She would also have treated the infection immediately rather than spending a month taking paracetamol.

Reform.news cannot independently verify the woman’s account because it has not seen her medical records. Whether the injury itself could have been prevented, and whether doctors were obliged to detect it before discharge, are questions for medical experts, and the answers are not straightforward: such injuries can occur even when labour is managed impeccably and are rarely visible in the first few days. However, the other aspects of this story do not depend on medical interpretation. A woman in the pushing stage of labour should not be left alone; a doctor should answer questions about tears; symptoms of infection and the causes of pain should be investigated rather than dismissed with the words “this is normal for everyone”; and a visit to an emergency department should be registered regardless of whose reputation it might damage.

What Is Happening in Belarusian Maternity Hospitals

Belarusian maternity hospitals regularly feature in high-profile public controversies. This year alone, complaints from women who had given birth, posted on social media, have twice led to departmental investigations. The Healthcare Committee of the Minsk City Executive Committee has also acknowledged that there are systemic problems with the atmosphere in maternity hospitals.

This year’s scandals concerned Maternity Hospital No. 5. In August, a Threads user reported that a patient with a missed miscarriage at 22 weeks of pregnancy had been offered the option of giving birth directly in her hospital room. The hospital itself said that “nothing catastrophic had happened.” Around the same time, a Minsk woman named Anna complained that she had been denied a caesarean section despite carrying a baby weighing 5,130 grams. Her complaint is also being reviewed by a commission. On November 2, another patient at Maternity Hospital No. 5 recorded a video appeal to Aliaksandr Lukashenka. In February 2024, following the death of a newborn at the same hospital, the parents met with the Minister of Health. According to the mother, hospital staff ultimately received formal reprimands.

As for Maternity Hospital No. 2, there have been no reports of major incidents there in the media. Online reviews are mostly positive, although some patients complain about rude treatment and an episiotomy performed by a medical intern without prior warning. In the comments under Alicia’s post, several other women recall their experiences of giving birth at Maternity Hospital No. 2 “with horror.” One of them says she paid for the service, while another describes the hospital as “a branch of hell.”