Fifty per cent of women experience this health condition. Why has nobody warned them?

The memory is etched in Monique Vogt’s mind. It was 2022, and she was being wheeled down the corridor of the hospital, looking up at the fluorescent lights above. A nurse walked next to the bed and shook her, “Monique, stay with me, stay with me”. As everyone around her panicked, and the new mother haemorrhaged blood, she felt a wave of acceptance.

Minutes earlier, her first child had been born, ripped into the world by forceps.

“I remember this thought going, ‘OK, well, we didn’t know the sex of the baby and I got to find out I had a son and I got to give him his name. Mitch [her husband] is going to be a great dad without me, it’s going to be OK if I die’.”

Vogt, 33 at the time, was wheeled into the theatre where an anaesthetist squeezed her hand tightly. He said, “Monique, I’m going to save you.” And then she was unconscious.

When she woke up in intensive care two days later, her obstetrician explained she suffered a third-degree tear , where the vagina is torn down to the muscles of the anal sphincter, as her son, Levi, was being pulled out with the forceps.

She would later find out that her pelvic floor had been partially ripped from the bone, and she had a pelvic organ prolapse , which is when the bladder, uterus or bowel loses some of its support and moves downwards through the vagina.

The school teacher, now 37, recalls thinking, “I have no f---ing idea what this means. I’ve never even heard of this.”

About 50 per cent of women experience a pelvic organ prolapse (POP) at some point in their lives, with about 20 per cent experiencing symptoms.

“This is a public health issue,” says Professor Anna Rosamilia, head of the pelvic floor unit at Monash Health. “Something like 22,000 Australian women per year have some form of prolapse surgery.”

Last week, in an impassioned speech to parliament, Lambie told the Senate she suffered a prolapse six months ago, linked to an injury she sustained in 1997 while carrying a 40 kilogram backpack during army infantry training.

“My vagina was collapsing, and three months later, it was taking my bladder with it.”

Rather than wait years to find someone willing to operate for the “low rates” provided by Department of Veterans’ Affairs claims, and having heard nothing back from the department after putting in her claim, Lambie paid $7000 out of her own pocket to pay for surgery to treat the injury.

She begged the government to abandon planned caps on allied health services for veterans: “What would they do if their penis was hanging by a thread? … Would they say ‘OK no worries, I don’t really need my penis?’ I don’t think so.”

Birth Trauma Australia chief executive Amy Dawes says she sees women who are suicidal as a result of POP. “They are forever changed, they are shamed ... It’s still too often I hear women say, ‘Nobody told me that this could happen to my body’.”