Holly Smallwood is a woman who has experienced what childbirth contractions feel like, even though she's never been pregnant.
In 2020, Holly decided to get the copper IUD, and while being monitored after insertion (which is standard procedure), she told her nurse that her pain was getting increasingly worse. "I was like, 'Is the pain normally this bad, because I'm feeling these weird things?' She was like, 'Yeah, just give it a few more minutes. It's settling.' She comes back five minutes later and I'm like, 'Give me a bag, I'm going to throw up.' I started vomiting and I started to see black and I pass out within the next five minutes," Holly said in her TikTok, which has been viewed by over 1.3 million people.
This is when Holly says "all hell breaks loose." She continues on TikTok, "My extremities went numb. I couldn't feel my legs. I couldn't feel my arms. I'm sweating profusely. The nurse is progressively looking a little more concerned, but she's also like, 'You know some people just tolerate pain differently'...like 'we've seen things like this before.' And then I start to feel something that I've only ever heard explained in movies. I don't even know how I knew what it was, but I knew that I was having contractions."
After things kept getting increasingly painful for Holly, her doctor made the decision to remove the IUD. "She does an emergency extraction and once I can finally breathe again, I'm like, 'What the fuck just happened?' It had gotten placed on a nerve and it sent me into labor. My body was trying to push it out. So I was multi centimeters dilated. She said I would have already had an epidural if I was pregnant."
There were an alarming amount of people who rushed to the comments to share similar IUD experiences:
"If you read the comments, thousands of women feel their pain during IUD insertions is not taken seriously. Any procedure will have risks associated with it, but our job as doctors is to minimize that risk and, when there are signs of complications, to take them seriously," Dr. Sood said.
BuzzFeed spoke to Holly to get more insight into her experience. She was not offered numbing or anesthetic before the IUD procedure.
And about 10 minutes after the insertion, Holly experienced what she describes as the most painful experience of her life. "For context, I've experienced ruptured ovarian cysts, had an emergency appendectomy, and broken my left arm. I'd go through any of those things again over what happened that day with my attempt at an IUD."
She had to endure the contractions for about 20 minutes before the doctor was finally called in to examine her. "I very clearly remember the doctor doing an emergency extraction of the IUD and the IMMEDIATE relief that followed. The removal just felt like a pinch and then a whole body release. I had a few minutes of shaking and two to three more short contractions before my body returned to normal as if nothing had ever happened," she said.
Holly said she is not angry about what happened, nor does she have any anger or resentment toward her doctor or the medical staff at the time. "I believe that seeing women in excruciating pain after IUD insertion is simply so common and normalized to medical professionals that my nurse didn't see anything out of the ordinary or an immediate need for anything to be checked."
We also spoke to board certified OBGYN Dr. Fatima Daoud Yilmaz to learn more about IUDs and possible complications that can arise during insertion.
"Anything that irritates the uterus — be it an IUD, a menses, a growing pregnancy, an infection, labor, etc. — can cause the uterine muscle to contract," Dr. Daoud Yilmaz said. "This signal is carried by a complex group of nerve fibers in the pelvis to the brain and is interpreted as pain. Significant stress or pain can lead to a phenomenon called a vasovagal reaction. This is a response when your heart races, your blood pressure drops, and you feel lightheaded. Some people experience visual changes, sweating, or fainting."
Because of this, Dr. Daoud Yilmaz believes that this experience would have been possible regardless of the IUD's placement. "The nerve signal is activated simply through manipulation of the uterus, whether an IUD is placed properly or not. A vasovagal reaction cannot be predicted or prevented," she said.
