Here’s how I envisioned my Hollywood birth going: My water would break in dramatic fashion and I’d rush to the hospital. An hour later, I’d be pushing out my own gooey bundle of joy, with everyone in the delivery room alternating between cheers and tears.
In the real world, my water did break, but my labor went badly. I had to be induced, and my son’s heart rate dropped when I started pushing. Before I knew it, I was being wheeled into the operating room to be sliced open – the latest member of the C-section club.
Of course, most people know what a C-section is; about one in three women in this country gives birth via this method. But I had to learn a few things about C-sections the hard way, such as:
* I’d probably never again feel as completely out of control as I did that day. It all happened so fast and I was so out of it. When they handed me consent forms to perform the operation, I had no idea what I was agreeing to. I could have been co-signing the nurse’s car loan for all I knew.
* I realized just how major of a surgery it was. Just try and get up and walk around unassisted. You have no abdominal strength, so you just end up trudging along like you have to take a dump. And the surgical staples! I couldn’t even look at them. My husband did and told me I looked like a zipped-up purse.
* I began to distrust the medical community. Did they really have to do this to me? What if a different doctor had been on duty? Well, at least it made me feel better to steal everything from my hospital room that wasn’t nailed down (excluding the blood pressure machine and that slab of concrete they called a “daddy bed”).
* I mourned. Yes, I mourned for the vaginal birth. Instead of cuddling my son after he was born, I was wheeled back to a recovery area after the C-section. I stayed there for a couple of hours, so I never got to see my family’s reaction to the new grandson. I felt selfish because my son was healthy, and I knew people who couldn’t have children and would gladly trade places with me. But still, I mourned. And to this day, I can’t watch TLC’s “A Baby Story.” It’s too frustrating to watch the easy labors of others and some jerk dad from Jersey saying, “My wife, she was a real troopah. I mean, one second she’s having – what do you call them, contraptions? – and the next, bada bing, bada boom, the baby fell out.”
The important thing is to let yourself mourn. Don’t let anyone trivialize your feelings. And if you find yourself really, really down, don’t be afraid to talk with someone, whether it’s a loved one or someone who charges $200 an hour.
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