This whole last week has been an absolute whirlwind. Appointment and errands and company and friends and running to the store and and and-
And baby. Of course!
I do promise though, that this will not turn into an All Baby, All The Time blog. It’ll be that for just a little while longer. ;-)
I sent out replies to those who asked for pictures. Lemme know if you didn’t get it. It’s possible that I missed your email.
I said I was going to rant, but I lost my ranting mojo for a bit. Mostly I’m just disgusted- with the doctor, the nurse, the experience that she had. One that, at 17, has made Jes say she’s too afraid to have another child.
I know that time changes things and her declaration to never ever do this again will likely not hold. But it could. And it’s just sad that she feels that way even now.
It’s supposed to be a beautiful, memorable experience. It’s not supposed to be trauma.
Amber asked why she didn’t get an epidural. Or why she didn’t get anything for the pain.
Because they were worried about the baby, right? That’s the simplest answer.
Personally? I think the nurse just didn’t want to call the anesthesiologist in the middle of the night. Everytime Jes asked for it, the nurse would talk her out of it. She was good at it too. She never (at least not until the end) explicitly said that Jes couldn’t have an epidural. She’d just be all calm and rational and say things like “Let’s try this first and then see where the pain is at, okay? Because epidurals don’t last forever and you don’t want to get it too soon and have it wear off!” or she’d say “Okay, honey. But I’ll have to call and wake the anesthesiologist up from home, and he’ll have to drive here and get everything ready and that’ll take a lot of time. So, in the meantime, why don’t you try doing this or this this… and then we’ll talk about it again, okay, sweetheart?”
Jes is not an assertive demanding kid. Well, she is with us, but not with strangers. The nurse would suggest these other things and Jes would just agree.
That’s incident number one of my own mommy guilt- where I failed to see what was happening and failed to step in on her behalf.
So, because Jes was struggling so hard through the contractions (remember, no childbirth classes, no idea what contractions were doing, no clue how to deal with them), I think that’s why baby started struggling. Jes was holding her breath through the contractions. If you are holding your breath, the oxygen supply to the baby is diminished. Results? Distressed baby.
Had Jes been allowed to get on top of the pain before it consumed her, I am convinced baby never would have gotten to the point where they were at all concerned about her heart rate.
Next. Episiotomy. As in, there wasn’t one. I saw one of the interns approaching Jes with needle and scissors in hand, and the attending doc shaking his head and saying “She doesn’t need one.”
Result? Tearing. And lots of it. I understand there are some controversies surrounding the effectiveness of epsiotomies, but I had one (and, hehe, Jes weighed exactly what Anna weighed at birth) and I didn’t tear.
Although the doctor’s report says Jes had second-degree tearing, another nurse present at the birth later took me aside and said that in her opinion, Jes’s tears were at least third-degree, bordering on fourth-degree.
So, here we have ripped, swollen, sore tissue immediately after child birth, right? There is no doubt that she needs to be sewn up.
Baby was out and perfectly healthy (9 out of 9 on the Apgar). Jes was also doing fine. No excessive bleeding, no immediate concerns to her health.
In other words, A B S O L U T E L Y no reason to rush through sewing.
Except, perhaps, that maybe Doctor Evil had a Saturday morning golf game that he was late for.
He starts sewing.
Jes starts screaming.
They give her a shot or two of lidocaine. Continue to sew.
She continues to cry out.
For 30 to 45 minutes, she squirms, cries, begs, and resists being sewn up. She repeatedly tells Dr. Evil that she can feel it. He repeatedly says that they’ve already given her lidocaine, that she CAN’T feel it, and that it has to be done. She’d cry out, scream, tell him to stop, and he’d look up all exasperated and say “Just what are you feeling?” and she’d say “Sharp! I can feel the needle!” and he’d just.. keep going.
There were, at times, 3 and 4 doctors milling about the room during the stitching process. There were at least that many nurses. Occasionally, someone would say to the doc “Let me get her something for the pain.” and the doc would wave it off. Or they’d ask “Can we just slow down for a minute and let the lidocaine kick in?” and he’d completely ignore them.
But nobody indicated, that I could see, that he was in the wrong. Not the other doctors, not the nurses. I’m sitting there, new baby forgotten, trying to coach Jes through this process just as I was trying to coach her through labor, knowing that it wasn’t “right” but thinking that I had no choice but to follow the cues of the other people in the room.
You know. The professionals? Those people that you rely on when you’re ignorant of medical procedures? Yeah, them’s the ones.
So let’s say that it was a third-degree laceration like the nurse said. “A third-degree laceration is a tear in the vaginal tissue, perineal skin, and perineal muscles that extends into the anal sphincter (the muscle that surrounds your anus).” That means she was stitched, layer by layer, and felt every bit of it.
The part that I’d assured her she wouldn’t feel. Because she wasn’t supposed to.
There was no reason that the doctor couldn’t have waited for a stronger pain med to work. No reason to ignore her. No reason to, as another nurse angrily told us later, “torture her that way. He’s lost his compassion and at this point, he should stop practicing.”
I agree.
So does Jes.
She said that portion was 100 times worse than the labor and delivery. That she hadn’t sobbed from pain through the entire L&D, but did through the stitches.
She said she will never have another baby. The pain was supposed to be over after baby made her entrance. Not just beginning.
You know. I’ve had a needle in my labia. It fucking hurts. I cannot even comprehend the pain involved through stitching up torn, swollen, painful internal tissue, layer by fucking layer. I just can’t. It makes me so, so, so angry.
At the doctor who had the needle. At the other doctors who dispassionately watched. At the nurses who stood by.
At myself.
I don’t know how many times I’ve told myself that doctors are not Gods and that there is no reason to sit back and silently accept something that hurts or is uncomfortable when nobody’s life is on the line.
And not only did I do that, I did it to my own kid. When SHE didn’t know any better. She relied on ALL of us, every single person in that room, and we all let her down.
That’s incident number two of mommy guilt.
Of course AFTER all the pain and trauma was over- they doped her up to the gills.
How lovely, you know? When she was supposed to be bonding and enjoying the little person she worked so hard to deliver, she was knocked out on narcotics for hours.
At that point, I’d been awake for about 29 hours. Jes is drugged up and passed out. And they tell me that baby stays in the room, that they only open the nursery during third shift.
Are you fucking serious?? You knock the mom out with a hefty dose of narcotics and THEN tell her that she has to take care of the baby?? It might have been a good idea to let her choose whether or not she wanted to be doped up when you tell her she has to remain functioning. I mean, the painful part was done at that point. What was the fucking hurry in knocking her out NOW.
Fucking A.
I stayed, of course, and let her sleep.
But even after she woke up, she was in too much pain to do much. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t walk. Well, she COULD, she wasn’t crippled, but… man… she was hurting. Bad.
They kept her in the hospital longer than they normally do because there were concerns that the lacerations weren’t healing well. They weren’t sure if the dark spots they could see were bruising or dead tissue. There was talk of possibly having to take her to the OR and redoing everything.
Wouldn’t that have been the topping on the sundae?
Fortunately, they decided that *most* of the dark spots was just bruising and that there would be SOME tissue that would die and “harmlessly” fall off.
Seriously. Rotting and dead tissue falling out of your vagina? How lovely for a 17 year old girl.
They kept her on a regular schedule of pain meds. And that’s the number one reason why she ended up not breast feeding. Not only was she upset that the meds would be transferred to baby, and in too much discomfort herself to function *without* pain meds, the first time she did try to breastfeed, it hurt. And I think she’d just had her fill of hurting, you know?
Fortunately, Anna took well to the bottle, and Jes is happy with the decision. So, while it’s not the ideal method of feeding, it’s working and I’m not going to judge that decision. (If any of you are? Save it. Kthnxbye.)
You’d think that would be the end, huh?
Nope.
Jes has to go get physical therapy.
Her hips are out of alignment. The poor girl can’t seem to catch a break. Most likely from the loosening of ligaments and having her legs in stirrups and from walking so funny because of the pain.
Though that part is not really the fault of anyone’s treatment (or mistreatment) during the birthing process, it’s still just another tally on the side of “childbirth is traumatic” instead of “childbirth is amazing”.
She is still on regular and heavy doses of pain meds. Now less for the perineal pain and more for the hip pain. As a result, like I said before, we’ve all had to do more for baby care than we should be doing. For awhile, Jes couldn’t walk and carry the baby. She couldn’t lift her up out of the bassinet. She couldn’t move fast enough that baby wasn’t screaming her fool head off for having to wait. Her room is downstairs, the kitchen (and bottles) are upstairs. So, yeah, there were many many times that someone was fetching, carrying, handing, moving, helping.
But it’s getting better. The last trip to the doctor (not the delivering doctor!), Jes’s doc realigned her hips and she’s been able to walk without hopping from one stable hand-hold to the next. She’s able to carry Anna from room to room. Day by day is an improvement.
We (I should say Jes) made a formal complaint about the delivering physician. We spoke with the patient advocate at the hospital. And, at least one of the nurses (the nice one!) reported the doctor herself. While Jes would like to “see him get fired!”, it’s unlikely that anything will come of it.
Doctors get a free pass to be mean. And that just sucks.
/rant
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Uncategorized | kaya | 
Friday July 31st, 2009 12:03pm | 
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