I am one of those moms who has to hang her head low and say, “Yes, he was born via c-section.” It’s true, after nearly 24 hours of natural labor my son was born via c-section. While I obviously wasn’t planning for this to be the outcome, there were also a few other things I wasn’t planning on with the c-section. There were just a few key things that all of the doctors, nurses and fellow moms somehow managed to leave out.
You are expected to walk around…the next day.
Seriously. I’ll give you a moment to that let absorb. Yeah, I couldn’t believe it either. The day before you spend hours in agonizing labor, get whisked off for an emergency c-section, then you have layers of skin, fat and organs cut open, THEN a doctor pulls a 6-10 pound bundle of joy from a gigantic hole in your stomach. Then the previously mentioned hole is sowed/stapled shut. And the next day you are expected to get out of your bed. If men had this procedure done I can assure you they would be in a medically induced coma for weeks following the procedure.
However, if you’re lucky enough to be a woman you get just the opposite treatment. The day…approximately 18 hours later a nurse walks into the room and tells me we’re going for a walk. I laughed. Seriously, I laughed. I couldn’t believe that this nurse was serious. But, she was very serious indeed. She had me get up and walk around the room. Granted, she didn’t have me doing a marathon, but after a surgery like that, they might as well have broken out the hurdles and the balance beams because that’s what it felt like.
The pain gets worse.
The first few days really suck, I’m not going to lie. Looking back, I considered those the honeymoon days of the pain. You still have the mondo dose of painkillers from the epidural running through your system for the first few days and none of your nerve endings have come back yet, so even though it’s bad, it’s a much more dulled version of what’s to come. Then after you’ve been home for a day or two you start getting feeling back…with a vengeance. You begin to understand why people bitch when they have surgery.
I will never forget that moment when things started to hurt like hell. I was laying in the recliner with my son and went to stand up and I literally fell back down in the chair. I thought the worst was behind me by that point, before that I remember thinking, “Yeah, this sucks, but it’s not so bad.” Boy, was I wrong, like ridiculously wrong. When the pain comes back it hits you like…like you had a baby pried from the walls of your uterus and your stomach was sliced to bits a few days ago. I was trying to think of a catchy little comparison, but really, there is no comparison that could give justice to that experience. Oh, and you don’t even get the “good” drugs for pain, and if you do it’s not for more than a few days. More than likely you’ll be sent home with a prescription for some Ibuprofen…does that sound familiar? It should, because Ibuprofen is basically just Advil. Yep, you get some Advil to cope with that pain.
You still have to take care of the baby.
Yeah, even after all that happens to your body and you’re left lying there like an abused, deflated balloon they still expect you to care for your baby. You’re beyond tired, beyond sick (did I not mention the uncontrollable puking for the next 24 hours?) and just beyond done…and then they give you this baby and say, “Feed it!” I remember being so thrilled to see him but also wishing I could take a nap. But no, after the lovely experience of having a c-section you then have to learn to breastfeed. I seriously thought that since my body had been through such an ordeal I would get some time, at least a few extra hours, before this all got started, but nope, not even close. As soon as we were back in the room there I was whipping my boob out and trying maneuver a nipple into my son’s mouth. I couldn’t even pee without a catheter or feel my legs yet but I was expected to provide 24/7 care for my baby.
People will assume you took the easy way out.
After your long recovery and feeling like total shit for weeks to come you start to hear the lovely remarks from people. They start off really subtle and then eventually become blatantly obvious. A lot of people will insinuate that you got the easy end of the deal, others will just tell you straight out that you are a wimp for having a c-section. I labored for nearly 24 hours before having a c-section and people still assume that I had a c-section by choice. Many people have let me know that I probably just didn’t try hard enough.
You will get this too. This might not happen right away but eventually you’re going to have that mom who got to deliver her baby the normal way. And she’s going to ever so subtly jam that proverbial fork into your side with a simple statement of, “Oh, you’re lucky, you just had a c-section, I had my baby vaginally.” You’re going to have to muster all of your strength to not yank her hair out and make her eat it. It’s the ultimate burn to the mother who tried so hard to have a normal birth and ends up with a c-section to hear the words, “You’re so lucky,” from a vaginal delivery mom. And you will learn to smile and nod because no matter how much you tell them how bad recovery sucks, they still assume you took the easy way out.
Sex still hurts for awhile.
Like I’ve said before I had labor and pushing…my kid was basically almost out, he just refused to come out the last little bit. We knew what color his hair was before he was born, I’ll put it that way. For whatever reason, I just assumed that since he didn’t actually come out of my vagina that sex wouldn’t hurt afterwards. WRONG! It still hurts like hell. And not only does your vagina hurt during sex but you also have a brand new wound to worry about during sex as well. The first time we tried to have sex was worst than my actual first sexual encounter. It was painful, awkward, painful, gross, painful, unenjoyable and did I mention painful? Yeah, I don’t think of either of us enjoyed that experience. I was pretty sure my son would be an only child because the thought of repeating that ever again was laughable.
Eventually it got better, but it took awhile. I even went back to my doctor to make sure my kidneys hadn’t somehow found their way into my vagina during the c-section…I was convinced there was something in my vagina that wasn’t supposed to be there, that’s how bad it hurt. But, it DOES get better, just don’t go expecting some sexy Lifetime Movie moments the first few months post-baby.
I’ve since come to learn that regardless of how my son born, I did the best I could. For months afterwards I felt guilty for not being able to give him a normal birth and hold him seconds after his birth. I still feel bad that he was held by 10 other people before I even got to see him, but I’ve come to terms with this and I’m okay with it now…kind of. And no matter how shitty of an experience that c-section was, I’m still up for round two when the time comes. There’s nothing that could ever stop me from wanting to hold another little baby in my arms in for the first time, or see that proud smile on my husband’s face.
One word. . . AMEN!
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