the things that hurt
Posted by: LizzieBesides the obvious physical pain of recovery, this cesarean has been hard on me in ways I didn’t think possible. Every day I’m feeling a little bit better but I am still sore around the incision. It’s been three weeks since my body was opened and my insides pulled out. I often forget how serious this kind of surgery is since I never really had time to consider the implications it would have on my body. How people “elect” to have this procedure, I don’t know or understand.
The first week was hell. Merely trying to pull myself into a semi-reclining position in my hospital bed had me in tears. Walking to the bathroom, hell, even using the bathroom was agonizing. Coughing and laughing were out of the question. Coughing is still uncomfortable and I grab my belly every time for fear of my incision opening up and all my organs spilling out.
I wonder if it hurts more and is taking longer to heal because I had a vertical incision.
What I want to write about is the emotional pain.
I don’t want to look at the pictures I took of the birth kit or the birth tub as we were doing a test-inflation. Thinking back to the day I wandered around the store buying the supplies we needed for our home birth, I feel sadness for that woman who poured all her hopes into the shopping cart. What am I going to do with a painter’s tarp now? And what happened to the birth kit we never used? It was all gone and put away when I got home from the hospital–like we never planned a home birth to begin with.
I’m about to remove all the beautiful home birth photographs from one of my Pinterest boards. My hope was to have my friend come over and take photos of our birth. I wanted to have those precious first moments captured. I pinned other families’ home birth pictures for inspiration. Instead of the idealistic portraits of the post-childbirth tears, I have darkness. I have those last few seconds of consciousness and the loneliness of a recovery room. I have a picture of me reaching into a clear plastic box and saying goodbye to my baby moments before she was whisked away to another hospital.
Even though these things hurt, I’m not the kind of person to want to discuss them. Writing like this is the most therapeutic, as is commiseration with other home birth cesarean mothers:reading their stories and sharing my own. It’s good to know I’m not the only one who felt betrayed by my own body or like I jinxed myself out of a home birth because I talked about it so much. But not knowing why things happened, or not knowing what caused the abruption…that will always bother me. I’m the type of person who needs a logical explanation. The term “idiopathic” isn’t satisfying.
November 8th, 2012 at 1:25 pm
Lizzie! I’m so sorry it ended up the way it did. I can understand the disappointment, having had an emergency c-section myself. I often felt disconnected from the whole process, like I didn’t even birth a child. It must have been un-imaginably worse being the complete opposite of what you had planned. In the end though, I’m glad you get to snuggle your miracle baby everynight, just as I do.
November 8th, 2012 at 11:20 pm
Grieve it, honey, grieve the loss of what you wanted it to be. I totally still do sometimes. Iwasn’t planning a home birth, it was still vastly different than what I was preparing for. I know she would not have survived labor, I know it was the only decision, but it made me so, so sad. And I knew in advance it was going to have to be a cesarean, I can only imagine how hard it is happening the way it did for you. And I feel guilty, like somehow I could have changed the outcome, even though I know that’s not the case. (And same thing for breastfeeding, for me, I’m not over how that ended up.) I guess it’s normal maternal guilt? I hope you can eventually let go of some of the hurt.
And yes, I think that having the vertical incision is much more painful. Not that the horizontal was fun, I certainly will do everything I can to avoid it next time, but you got the worse deal and your muscles will know at least for a while that something radical happened. I can still tell things are different, particularly when I’m doing yoga. I’m so, so sorry that your final pregnancy came to such a scary and dramatic end. I’m so glad you are both ok.
November 12th, 2012 at 11:42 am
Lizzie, for months after I had to have a c-section with Stella, I couldn’t even look at the pictures Thom took while we were in the hospital or all the natural birth books I had checked out of the library and renewed a hundred times. I was almost ashamed at the version of myself who had thought everything was going to be so easy. But three years later, it really doesn’t matter to me how she was born, only that she is healthy and here. I’m so sorry you had to have such a hard birth– way harder than mine was– and that you didn’t get to have your baby in your arms for such a long time. And I’m so glad you and your sweet baby are both well and togehter.