O90.9

O90.9 is the ICD-10 code for unspecified postpartum complication. The unspecified is the indictment. This book is the appeal.

Written by a behavioral health executive and new mother from inside the postpartum experience, O90.9 covers everything the pamphlet left out - the physical symptoms that arrive without warning and go unnamed for months, the psychological aftermath the Edinburgh scale was never designed to catch, the rage that nobody screened for, the intrusive thoughts nobody told you were common, the identity that went somewhere you cannot locate, and the systematic failure of American postpartum care to adequately support any of it.

Seven parts. Sixteen chapters. Forty-eight women who finally have language for what they experienced.

For the woman who scored fine on the Edinburgh scale and is not fine. For the C-section mother told she took the easy way out. For the woman who checked the monitor forty-seven times last night. For the woman who has had a thought she hasn't told anyone. For the woman who sat in the parking lot in the rain after the appointment that was supposed to help and thought: I don't know if I can do this.

This book was written for her. From inside the same experience. Not from the other side of it.

You were never alone in it.