Reconciling the Report

I got my records today from BabyGirl’s birth. I’m just wrecked, shredded… I feel absolutely awful. And I’m even more lost about it than I was before I had the details. In a nutshell, the official reasons for the cesarean were consistent with what I was told at the time: pitocin caused fetal distress and my dilation was stalled. The most positive thing is that I have a low-transverse incision, which means they cut horizontally across my lower abdomen. If I’d had a classical (vertical from belly button down) or anything similar to that (there are also occasionally T-incisions) there would be a much greater risk of complications. Of course, I was not particularly surprised by this, but because of the nature of the operation one can’t be sure unless she’s told it is so – the scar on the outside is no indication of what they did on the inside. I also found out that she was OP – which means she was malpositioned, facing up. This part is hard to take, because I really believed all along that she was in there properly, and I had painful contractions but no back labor. There’s a recent study that says women who have epidurals before 5cm are more likely to have malpositioned babies, and I was at 4 when I received mind, so maybe that’s why. But I suppose I’ll never be certain. When they took her out, they had to use vacuum suction 3 times before she would come, and they had to lengthen my incision by 2cm. So maybe she really was stuck in there, but I have all these questions like, if I’d had better support, maybe I could have relaxed more and she’d have had more room to move properly, or maybe I could have tried other positions to allow her to pass through properly. The worst thing about getting these records is that I'd hoped they would provide me with a definitive "Yes, this was necessary" or a "This could totally have been prevented". Really, it didn't. It actually in many ways has made me feel worse. Of course, I blame myself for the whole thing. Even though Dr. Evil was clearly a misogynistic asshole, I had choices, and I could have left his practice when I first realized it. I wish I hadn’t been so stupid. Just reliving this whole thing has been so difficult. I was anxious about learning the details of the report in the first place to the point where I was crying in the exam room before the NP or MW or whomever she was came in. And then when My Beloved and I got into the car I couldn’t stop crying all the way to my parents’ house. I was like a zombie the whole day, crying every moment I was alone because the thoughts would creep back in. And later, when MB came from work to pick me up from my parents’ house he was mad at me for some silly remark I’d made (really, a nothing kind of remark and if my tone hadn’t been so flat from the whole day, he might have gotten it that way) and didn’t want to even speak to me and when we got in the car and told me so much, I freaked out and… well… it was a long night. I haven’t had a freakout like that in months, and was feeling so pleased with myself, because when I was pregnant with BabyGirl I’d had a few by now. I was just looking for someplace soft to let it all out and instead, I met a brick wall with sharp pointed spikes sticking out of it. He had no idea that I was still upset, and thought that all that rage pouring out was as a result of the report – which, it was more than anything, but I wouldn’t have freaked out if he’d been kind to me instead of cold. We’re both better now, but it’s been rough and I know I haven’t completely recovered. I’m just trying to let the energy and the positivity of life and pregnancy trickle back into my system, which is somewhat of a battle at the moment. But I’ll be all right…

Catching up

It’s been a while, oops!

More or less, my pregnancy has been uneventful. By this point when I was pregnant with BabyGirl, I was still throwing up regularly, and starting to have braxton-hicks contractions, and even had gone to the hospital because I was concerned that they were too regular. I also was semi-convinced I had gestational diabetes after an incident where I was visiting a friend and her newborn in the hospital and I very nearly fainted, but in both the cases of the contractions and the gestational diabetes, all was for naught.

This time, I’m much less worried about such things, so that’s the good news.

I am typing this offline right now because I seem to have problems with blogspot when I hit return, so I’m not sure exactly where I left off other than it was sometime in April. But I have officially committed to my illegal apprentice midwife, who is wonderful and kind and absolutely on the same page as I am. I also continue to see the OB as shadow care… I’m somewhat more confident about her interests, but of course I’ll always have doubts. The only thing I’m worried about right now is that we were just informed that our insurance says we’ll have to pre-pay her office 10% for the labor and delivery, so I’m not sure what happens when she doesn’t get to do it. Plus, it’s going to be really hard to come up with that cash, though it’s not really that much.

By the way, according to our ultrasound a few weeks ago, it’s another girl!