The First Delivery Story - Part I

When I first came to know that I was pregnant, I was ecstatic. I bought all the pregnancy books available on the stands and read them in detail. My obsession was so bad that I could even quote from most of them. I was through most of them even before my second trimester could begin. Then I started on the baby care books. In devoured them and knew everything necessary about caring for babies months before mine was born (at least theoretically! – it is only later that I came to know you can never know all about baby & child care; each one is different & they will constantly continue to surprise you) However there was this one section that I totally ignored in all these books. Since mine was a normal and uneventful pregnancy, I ignored the possibility of ever having to undergo a caesarean.

The very little that I knew about c-section was what I had learnt in a 30-minute session in my pregnancy classes. So when my waters broke at around 11.30 p.m on February 20, 2006 and my hubby, mom & dad rushed me to the hospital, I was horrified to know that the baby had passed meconium and I needed to be operated immediately. I broke down completely. I just remember flashes of the conversation and buzz around me…

- Dozens of nurses poured in and each one was doing a variety of stuff to get me ready for the c-section
- The word “fetal distress” was being whispered all around
- The voice of my gynaec, Dr Nirmala Jayashankar. It was an answer to my prayers as I seriously wondered whether she would turn up at 12 midnight on a Sunday
- The constant ticking of the fetal monitor
- My mother asking me to remove all my gold jewellery

And amidst all this, I heard the nurse ask the doctor, “Her husband wants to meet her. Can I permit him?”

Immediately, I wiped my tears and tried to put on a brave front. He came into the room and kissed my forehead. It was unbelievable. My hubby dislikes any form of public display of affection and here he was kissing me in front of the entire battalion of hospital staff. It was such a beautiful moment in my life. In fact, whenever me & my hubby have quarrelled and whenever I have had the urge to knock him one on the head, I recall this kiss and it has saved him many a time!

Then I was wheeled into the operation theatre. My mom and dad stood in tears helpless and I tried to smile and wave at them. I’ll continue the rest in the next blog.

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!