C-section Horrors

I have always been scared of surgeries, especially after both my parents underwent terribly painful ones. I prayed that I should be spared of it forever in my life. But it was not to be so. I underwent my first at just 23 – an emergency c-section.

People somehow do not consider a caesarean as either an important surgery or a painful one. This is especially true of those who had a normal labour. The only thing I feel like telling them is to please undergo one before coming to such rash conclusions.

After delivery, every mother has to undergo bleeding, yucky sweating, afterpains, cramps, constipation, incisional pain, breast engorgement and what not – along with sleepless nights with colicky infants. Now we c-section veterans underwent not only all this but also terrible pain in the stitches as the anaesthesia wears off (did you know pain relievers are given only once in 8 hours – medical science does need to improve!), inability to even sit up (forget sitting up – we couldn’t even turn to the sides while lying down; & still we continued to feed an infant who needed his meals every hour), terrible indignities like
• wearing a hospital gown that even Pamela would think twice before donning,
• having a nurse change your pad,
• having these strange men popping in at all odd times to change the urine bag (they also loudly declare the quantity in it – I was so embarrassed the first time that guy screamed out “550 ml” to the nurse on the other side across the lobby)
• having an escort to the toilet for the first post-surgery piss,
• and worst of all, having a nurse pop into your room when there are visitors, questioning loudly, “have you peed yet?” and you have to answer her!

I knew of all this only after my first surgery and decided not to have any more kids. I knew the doctors would only put me under the knife again. But my persistent hubby tricked me into believing that I would have a VBAC (vaginal birth after caesarean) and I believed him. Maybe, I wanted to believe him in the hope of having another cute little chubby bubbly around the house. But it was not to be so. Four years five months and one day later, I had to undergo a c-section once again.

I’ll talk about both of those experiences in the next post!