Guest Post by Zoey Martin, mother of one daughter, and author of Good Goog: Adventures in Parenting. Here she writes about her cesarean, secondary infertility, and the things we often avoid researching during our first pregnancies.
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There I was. Half naked on the table. Freezing cold. In the brace position. So I could stay still while they injected a needle into my back. Staying still would have been challenging enough. But I was in the middle of a contraction and it took all my concentration not to move. Which I managed even when the nurse holding me in the brace lost their grip on me. I couldn’t breathe through the gas mask because my nose was blocked from crying. I was unprepared. Woefully unprepared. I’d never had any kind of surgery, and here I was having a c-section. Something I hadn’t even acknowledged as a possibility.
I recorded umpteen birth stories while I was pregnant and deleted all the ones that involved c-sections. I skipped over that chapter in the book. Because I wasn’t going to have a c-section. Or drugs. Women have been giving birth naturally for thousands of years, how hard could it be?
The procedure itself was violent, but brief. And before I knew it my beautiful baby daughter was in the world – bright eyed, chubby and perfect. The recovery was difficult for someone like myself who likes to do everything on my own, and I couldn’t even bring myself to look at the scar for weeks. I might have had an irrational fear that my innards would spill out at any moment. So I knew early on that I wanted to have a VBAC.
I’m not currently pregnant, but I’m a planner. And planning keeps me distracted from the fact that 6 months in, I’m not pregnant and doctor’s are starting to throw around words like ‘secondary infertility’.
It was only when I started the planning that I realised that the fact that I had a c-section wasn’t an unhappy series of events. I unknowingly made some mistakes which led me to a c-section but also latch problems later on.
If I’d done some research I would have found that our local hospital had a c-section rate of over 50%. If I’d known a bit more about babies, I would said no to the pitocin when I arrived for my induction and found out I was already in labour. As a result, I had weeks of extremely damaged nipples and mind numbing pain thanks to a poor latch. I dreaded feeding and would drench my baby’s head in tears as I gritted my teeth through it. I thought about quitting many times. But I didn’t. Breastfeeding was one thing within the realm of my control, and I clung onto it for dear life.
I cannot know what would have happened if I’d done things differently, but I do know that the chain of events made a c-section pretty inevitable. And ever since I’ve cringed every time a c-section is talked about as the ‘easy option’, the ‘painless way’ or as a (misguided) way of preserving vanity.
I want to have a big family, so a VBAC is extremely important to me. Everybody responds differently and some people are capable of having multiple c-sections but it is very possible that the c-section scar tissue would determine the number of children my husband and I could have. Not what we had in mind when we started our family.
I live in a regional area of Australia. There are three hospitals near where we live. The closest one does not accept high risk patients. Which leaves me two options. The hospital I originally went to has a VBAC success rate of 2%. Not encouraging. Thankfully, the third hospital has recently implemented a VBAC program. That’s who I’ll be calling just as soon as we get those two lines on a pregnancy test. And I’ll be prepared to throw everything at getting a successful VBAC. Next time I won’t be skipping any chapters.
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This post was written by Zoey Martin of Australia for The Feminist Breeder’s Guest Post series. Zoey is a mother of one, author of the Good Goog blog, and as you can see, trying to conceive a second child. Follow Zoey’s “Adventures in Parenting” on Twitter @zoeyspeak or on Facebook.
my thoughts exactly on the 'cringing' when people speak so casually of c-section. Anyone who can think that's an easier recovery hasn't done the homework. I've gone to walmart with a friend less than 24 hours after her son was born. I couldn't even get out of the bed on my own for 48.
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