After Giving Birth, She Started To Stink So Bad Down There – Husband BF Thought He Succeeded, Until | HO”

In the weeks after giving birth to twins, 33-year-old Rachel Donovan Mitchell began to notice a smell she couldn’t explain. It wasn’t sweat, or blood, or the usual discomfort associated with a healing C-section. This was something deeper, sour, and unmistakably wrong—something she tried to hide even from herself.

Her husband, David, chalked it up to hormones. Her doctor, Jonathan Mercer—a man who had stood beside David since the eighth grade—dismissed her concerns as normal postpartum healing.

But the smell kept getting worse.

By the time another hospital finally scanned her abdomen, what they saw stunned every physician in the room and uncovered a conspiracy far darker than a medical mistake. Investigators would later ask a question no one imagined could be real:

Was this an accident—or had someone intentionally tried to destroy her from the inside out?

This is the story of obsession disguised as friendship, of a surgeon who weaponized trust, and of a mother whose instincts saved her life.

A Childhood Built on Principle and Instinct

Rachel Donovan grew up just outside Richmond, Virginia, in a quiet brick house where her father, Richard, raised her after cancer took her mother far too soon. Richard was a man of precision—an electrician who taught his daughter to trust her hands, trust her instincts, and fix what was broken. His lessons would become her lifeline decades later.

By the time Rachel met David Mitchell—a warm, charismatic business major from Norfolk—she believed her life was finally settling into a kind of peace. Their relationship grew slowly, then all at once. She married him in the same church where her parents had wed. They bought a home. They adopted a golden retriever named Biscuit.

And after years of trying, Rachel became pregnant—with twins.

When they learned the babies would be delivered by David’s lifelong best friend, Dr. Jonathan Mercer, everyone seemed to agree the babies couldn’t be in better hands.

They could not have been more wrong.

The Doctor Who Was Always There — Watching

To understand what happened in June 2019, investigators had to go back 20 years—back to the University of Virginia, where three young adults crossed paths and only two of them knew they had begun shaping a future tragedy.

“He watched her before he ever knew her.”

At UVA, Jonathan was brilliant but painfully awkward. He studied alone, walked alone, lived inside textbooks that came easier to him than people ever did. His entire social life revolved around David Mitchell—the boy who once traded him a bag of chips in middle school and unknowingly became the axis of Jonathan’s life.

And then one afternoon, in a crowded dining hall, Jonathan saw a girl laughing with her friends.

Rachel.

He rearranged his life around her presence. He memorized her routines. He rehearsed what he would say. When he finally approached her, she was kind. Polite. Brief.

She forgot the conversation by dinner.

Jonathan remembered every word for the next 15 years.

What neither of them knew was that three weeks later, at a Halloween party, she would meet David. They would talk until 3 a.m. They would exchange numbers. They would fall in love.

**For Jonathan, David hadn’t just found a girlfriend.

He had taken something Jonathan believed belonged to him.**

He said nothing. He smiled. He attended their wedding. He toasted them with words he wrote in a journal afterward:

“She made her choice. Choices have consequences.”

He waited.

The Pregnancy That Reawakened Everything

For more than a decade, Jonathan maintained his role as “family friend.” He sent birthday flowers. He bought expensive holiday wine. He attended gatherings where Rachel felt something she could never articulate—a discomfort that lived just under her skin.

When Rachel and David finally announced they were expecting twins, Jonathan said all the right things.

When they asked him to be their doctor, he said the words he had been waiting half his life to say:

“Of course. I’ll take care of everything.”

Behind the scenes, he began researching something no doctor should have been researching before a scheduled surgery—not fetal development, not twin delivery risks, but this:

Retained surgical instruments complications

How long before infection develops

How long before organ failure begins

Can intent be proven in medical malpractice

Timeline of symptoms from foreign-object infection

Searches he tried to delete. Searches investigators later retrieved.

The Appointment Where Rachel’s Instincts Warned Her

During Rachel’s first prenatal appointment with Jonathan, something happened she later described to detectives but had kept silent at the time.

With David briefly out of the room, Jonathan leaned closer.

“You look exactly the same as you did in college,” he said.

It was said too softly, too intimately, too knowingly.

Rachel brushed it off. Jonathan was awkward, she reasoned. Socially unnerved. Harmless.

Her father disagreed the moment he met him.

Something was off, he told his daughter.
If she felt uneasy, he said, she needed another doctor.

Rachel didn’t want to offend her husband or hurt his oldest friend.

She should have listened.

The C-Section: A Moment of Life and a Moment of Something Else

On June 14, 2019, Rachel entered one of the coldest rooms in any hospital—the operating room—believing she was an hour away from meeting her babies.

She felt the pressure of the surgery. Heard the cries of her son. Then her daughter.

What she did not see was what nurse Sandra Wellington saw:

Jonathan pausing over her open abdomen.

Not working.
Not stitching.
Just… staring.

For nearly 30 seconds.

She had assisted in more than a thousand surgeries. Surgeons did not pause like that. They did not freeze. They did not think mid-procedure.

They acted.

Jonathan resumed work as though nothing had happened.

But something had.

The Missing Scissors—and the Silence that Nearly Killed Her

Every surgical nurse knows the rule:

Count the instruments twice.
If something is missing, you stop the surgery.

But the circulating nurse that day—a young woman named Patricia—discovered one pair of 7-inch curved scissors missing from the tray.

She approached Jonathan.

“Dr. Mercer, the count doesn’t match.”

His response stunned her.

“The count is correct. Finish your paperwork.”

No surgeon overrides a missing-instrument report.
Not unless he wants to hide something.

Patricia documented the discrepancy anyway—a note that would later become the single most important piece of evidence in the entire case.

Rachel was wheeled into recovery believing she had survived childbirth.

She had only survived the beginning.

The Smell No One Could Explain

The first signs seemed harmless—a low-grade fever, soreness, fatigue. Jonathan prescribed antibiotics and assured Rachel it was “normal healing.”

But she kept getting worse.

The pain localized. The fever climbed. She lost weight. She couldn’t lift her babies. And then came the symptom no one could ignore:

The smell.

It wasn’t postpartum odor.
It wasn’t blood.
It wasn’t infection alone.

It was decay.

Richard nearly collapsed when he hugged his daughter and smelled it for the first time.

“Something is dying inside you,” he told her. “We’re going to another hospital.”

He saved her life that day.

The Scan That Revealed Everything

At a hospital 40 miles away, away from Jonathan’s reach, doctors conducted a full abdominal scan.

When Dr. Elellanar Webb walked into the room, she was accompanied by two colleagues and a tablet displaying Rachel’s internal images.

Rachel braced for bad news.

Nothing prepared her for what she saw.

A clear metal shape—seven inches long.
Blades curved.
Edges unmistakable.

Surgical scissors. Inside her abdomen.

Embedded in infected tissue.
Perforating her uterus.
Killing her from the inside.

She stared at the screen and whispered two words that changed the entire investigation:

“He knew.”

Emergency Surgery: What They Found Inside

The second surgery lasted more than four hours.

Doctors removed the scissors, drained multiple abscesses, scraped away necrotic tissue, and tried to salvage what remained of Rachel’s reproductive organs.

They could not.

Her uterus was beyond saving.

A hysterectomy was performed.

At 33, five weeks after giving birth, Rachel lost the ability to ever carry another child.

When David arrived at the hospital and heard the news, he collapsed into a plastic chair and sobbed.

Not because his wife might have died.

But because the man he had trusted since childhood was the one who put her in that position.

The Investigation: From Tragedy to Crime Scene

The moment Dr. Webb filed her report, everything set into motion.

Hospital administrators pulled surgical logs.
They compared the pre-op and post-op instrument counts.
They traced the signatures.

What they found:

Only one count was documented.

Jonathan had signed off on it alone.

The required second verification was missing.

Patricia’s note about the discrepancy had been ignored.

The final paperwork falsely stated all 12 instruments were accounted for.

Then came the digital forensics.

Search history that proved planning.

Months of searches about retained instruments.
Infection timelines.
Legal definitions of intent.
Case studies of doctors who harmed patients.

One search, made the night before surgery:

“Complications retained scissors cesarean.”

This was not negligence.

This was preparation.

The Motive: A 15-Year Obsession

Investigators uncovered messages between Jonathan and a former college roommate—messages that began as heartbreak but evolved into something darker.

2015:
“She looked beautiful. She looked at him all night. It never gets easier.”

2018:
“David gets everything. The girl, the career, now a family. What do I get?”

2019, after learning he would deliver the twins:
“He is putting her in my hands. Life has a strange sense of humor.”

And two weeks before surgery:
“She made her choice 15 years ago. Choices have consequences.”

The prosecution would later argue that he did not intend to kill Rachel.

He intended to punish her.
To take something from her.
To leave a wound that would scar her life forever.

He succeeded.

Until he didn’t.

The Arrest

On August 3, 2019, police arrested Dr. Jonathan Mercer at his home.

He did not resist.
He did not plead.
He simply asked to change into appropriate clothing.

He was charged with:

Aggravated assault with intent to cause bodily harm

Medical malpractice resulting in permanent injury

Reckless endangerment

The potential sentence: more than 25 years.

Rachel, recovering in a hospital bed, did not celebrate when she heard.

She simply nodded.

Justice had begun.

The Trial That Shook the Medical Community

The trial began in January 2020, drawing reporters, physicians, and members of the public who had never imagined a case like this could be real.

The prosecution argued:

The scissors did not end up inside Rachel by accident.

The missing-instrument report was deliberately overridden.

The search history proved intent.

The messages showed motive.

The falsified records showed cover-up.

The defense argued:

Jonathan was socially awkward, not malicious.

His searches were due diligence, not planning.

The missing scissors were a tragic mistake.

No one could believe a respected physician would do such a thing.

But then Rachel took the stand.

She looked at the jury and said:

“Accidents don’t plan themselves.”

It became the defining quote of the trial.

Four days of deliberation ended with a verdict:

Guilty. On all counts.

Sentencing: A Judge’s Words That Will Be Remembered

On March 15, 2020, the judge delivered a statement that echoed through the courtroom:

“You used your profession as a weapon. You violated the trust given to you as a physician. You inflicted harm not through error, but through intention. You robbed a woman of her health, her safety, and her future fertility—all because she loved someone who was not you.”

Jonathan Mercer was sentenced to 15 years in state prison, with no possibility of parole for 12.

His medical license was permanently revoked.

Rachel Today: A Mother, a Survivor, Not a Victim

Rachel rarely speaks to the media. But in a single interview one year after the verdict, she said:

“I have two beautiful children. I’m grateful for them every day. But I also mourn the children I will never have. Jonathan didn’t just leave scissors inside me. He stole a future I can never get back.”

She paused, then added:

“But he did not take everything. He did not take my marriage. He did not take my father. He did not take my babies. He did not get the ending he wanted.”

Today, Rachel is raising Ethan and Emma with a steadiness born of survival. She still undergoes occasional treatment for complications from the infection. The smell that haunted her early recovery is gone, replaced by the soft scent of baby lotion and the warm reality of a life reclaimed.

Jonathan, meanwhile, sits in a prison cell, surrounded by the consequences of a fantasy he never let go of.

He thought he succeeded.

Until Rachel lived to expose him.

Conclusion: Trust Is Not Always Safe

This case left a brutal truth in its wake:

Sometimes danger doesn’t come from strangers.
Sometimes it comes from the person you trusted most.

Rachel’s instinct saved her life.
Her father’s insistence saved her future.
A scan saved her from death.
And a guilty verdict saved others from becoming the next target of a doctor who mistook obsession for destiny.

What lingered longest about this case was not the medical horror but the emotional betrayal:

A best friend.
A trusted doctor.
A 15-year obsession disguised as loyalty.

In the end, one woman’s survival exposed everything.

And the smell that started it all became the warning the world couldn’t ignore.