I Matter Too

"The ax forgets; the tree remembers" ~ African proverb

http://www.cesarean-art.com/html/frames/framesetall.htm

What do you want? A baby. You got one.

People will smile at you and pat you on the shoulder.  "At least you have a healthy baby." they say.  Like I'm not greatful that I have a beautiful little girl.  That the way she was birth mattered more than her safety.  It doesn't.

But I matter too. 

It's like someone telling a tornado victim who just lost their roof that at least they are left with the four walls...some people don't even have that. 

No, more. An image of

laboring in harmony with the child,

in a loving helpful embrace with my husband,

soft music, a gentle cheering section

of nurses and midwives and doctors

in clean white gloves handing

the squirmy grateful puddle

onto my nurturing breast.

I can mourn the loss of experiencing birth and still love my daughter.  I can seperate the two, seperate an innocent baby from the horrific act. 

I wish someone had told me,

I wish I knew how much the section would hurt

for weeks, months later.

Years.

My throat closes up just remembering,

I shudder and get quieter.

I'm physically and emotionally scared for life.  There is a scar on my stomach and uterus.  Every time I look down in the shower I can see it.  I see it and know my soul mirrors my body.

It has healed beautifully, my physical scar.  Just a small white line...barely visible.  Just as my scar on my soul is barely visible to the public eye.  It has also healed nicely.

Most people don't know that sometimes it rears it's ugly head with rage and pain.  Just as they don't know that sometimes my lungs burn and I feel like I can't breath...just like when I was drowning in IV fluid.  They don't know that my scar will sometimes burn like when I was mutilated.

I'm shivering, so cold, please hold

my hand, don't go

away, don't leave me now, they're not

done with me, I'm lying here

awake and my body is open

to the air like some awful hara kiri,

crucified and

DISEMBOWELED ALIVE

 

Nobody understands how it feels to have what was supposed to be the happiest day of my life turn into a living nightmare.  To be so exposed and vulnerable.  To come close to death in the name of modern maternity care.  So alone.

I'm a moderator for a few different pregnancy and childbirth support groups.  I love learning about this topic that has become my passion.  I love knowing that I have helped women that I know have a beautiful vaingal birth. 

And yet, I am so jealous.  It makes me sad and angry that I have not given birth.  Anjali is from my womb but I was not an active participant in her birth. 

I was just a body,

these methodical doctors and

technicians working efficiently,

coldly, mechanically

Like a car they could just

disconnect the battery and close the hood;

I was not a person.

I was not a person for weeks, for months.

Dehumanized.

It was something painful and humiliating that was done to me while I was being killed by the very people I trusted. 

Not beeping machines and IVs and

stretched out on this strange cruciform

each arm reaching to the walls,

tubes in my spine, and the reflection

of my own bloody entrails

in the overhead fixture.

I've had an image in my mind for almost 10 years of what the perfect birth would be like.  I think about it often, more times than I care to admit.  One day I will have a perfect birth but I will never stop loving my daughter. 




WAR STORY

by Mary Most
June 94 After her first ICAN meeting

Anjali's Birth Story

"Now the whole room only cares about him,

why is he crying too

what are they doing to my baby let me see

him let me have him let me hold him

I can't ask with this mask on my face,

my empty arms strapped down,

my legs numb I cannot move.

Why am I here alone, no one left

to hold my hand and they're putting

bloody organs back inside me,

I am open to the wind and so alone

I don't even have my baby anymore."

Mary Most, 1994 "War Story" excerpt

 

Cesarean Art

 

I was reading this blog today and my thoughts drifted towards Anjali's birth story.  It's getting close to her birthday and I want to work this out now so that I can, maybe for once, have peace on her special day.  Every year as Jan. 10 approaches I am filled with joy and love for my baby girl.  I'm also filled with horror, humiliation, pain, anger, sadness in which the way she was born.  I didn't give birth to her.  She was carved out of my uterus and carried away as darkness took me.

I wrote this short story describing her birth the way I see it emotionally:

Once there was a woman who was happy and excited.  Someone came to her and convinced her, against her better judgement, to follow them. They led her to a dark room and the torture began. They shoved things into her urethra, they shoved hands into her vagina and she felt them scratch her insides.  She cried and begged them to stop. They laughed.  She was cold and not allowed to eat. She had to urinate on herself.  After 26 hours they took her to another room where they drugged her so she couldn't move but felt pain.  One of them took a knife and sliced her open.  She could feel everything.  She could feel their hand inside of her body and the pain overwhelmed her.  If felt as if she were on fire.  Nobody cared. Her lungs started to gurgle and she couldn't breath.  She coughed and she was yelled at.  Nobody cared.  Finally darkness consumed her.

It was the worst day of my life.  I can't even say it was also the best since I did not hold my sweet baby for another 3 days. 

Here is her actual birth story. It's been rewritten a few times and might always be a work in progress because it still makes me very emotional.

The Birth of Anjali Grace

I was supposed to go to the OB in two weeks and then once a week after that but I had to cancel the first one and go with DH to his immigration appointment. Instead of rescheduling me for 3 weeks out they did it 4. So I missed two appointments. I had been to L&D twice though because I felt like the baby wasn't moving enough and because I thought I was in labor. Both times they told me my blood pressure was a bit high but they redid it and it was fine.

I later read in my medical report that I missed them on my own accord like I just didn't want to go to my OB appointments making it seem like I was uncaring about the outcome of my pregnancy.

So on the 01.09.07 (Tuesday) when DH and I drove to town for my OB appointment I had been contracting for over a month (3 minutes apart for the last week and a half). I had developed some swelling but everyone had assured me they had worse when they were pregnant. Well when my blood pressure was checked it was extremely elevated.

Dr. Terrible told me that since my baby was term that we should get her out of there. I wasn't very educated at the time and didn't think about asking for high blood pressure medication. Didn't know that maybe she was using the wrong pressure cuff, hadn't found my baseline, I was nervous and a bit embarassed since I just was tested for Group B Strep.

She asked me how tall I was and when I told her I was 4'10 she recommended a c-section because I was too small to give birth vaginally. My baby would be too big.

Height does not correlate to small pelvis. It is extremely rare to have a pelvis too small to give birth and it's usually caused by malnutrition as a child or a pelvic injury. She sent me to have an ultrasound and after the tech said Anjali would weigh just over 6lbs they let me have a TOL. I was off to be induced. Too bad I did'n't know at the time that 1st time moms have a 50% chance of c-section when induced.

She wrote in my charts "c-section likely". I feel that she just had it stuck in her mind I was too short for a vaginal delivery and had no intention of helping me give birth vaginally.

At 2pm they started me on Magnesium and inserted Cervidel. They tried to insert a catheter so I wouldn't get up to pee but it was too large and caused bleeding and a great deal of pain. I had to basically scream NO to get them to stop trying to shove it in. My DH helped me use a bedpan for the next 24 hours.

I'm so upset and sensitive it's torture every time they check my cervix. My anxiety is just shot through the roof. (I wasn't even in a labor room because they were full and my DH slept on the floor next to me.)

So now I have a major headache from Magnesium, stonger contractions that aren't changing my cervix even with the help of Cervidel.

The basically write in my charts that I am a whiney patient. I have just been scared by the OB and nurses into thinking my baby is about to die because of my blood pressure. Everytime they come in they make snide remarks and give me condescending looks.

At 12am my water breaks and at 2am on the 10th they start my pitocin. I hang on until 6am and then I call my mom and wake up my DH. I'm still determined to wait as long as possible for an epidural. My mom and DH take turns rubbing my back. I last until 12pm and ask for an epidural and recieve it at 2pm. I'm pretty proud of that fact...I really did hold on as long as I could. I still think I would have made it without one except they wouldn't let me up out of bed so it was making the contractions more painful. After about an hour it starts to wear off so they give me a bolus to top it off.

Laying in bed when my water broke caused my baby to have cord prolapse (According to them. I highly doubt it since my daughter had an extremely cone shaped head suggesting she was deeply ito the pelvis and her heart rate never once dropped) that wasn't discovered until my c-section. If they had let me walk around my baby's cord would not have gotten in the way and her head would have put pressure on my cervix helping it dialate. Walking in labor also helps with pain and I would not have needed an epidural, which slows labor and puts stress on the baby.

They check my cervix again and tell me I'm just barely 2 centimeters dilated and the baby has only gained one station. After all the time and pain so very little change really upset me. I was worried I would put stress on the baby so at 4pm I consented to a c-section.

Labor in a natural setting can take days. My body was making progress, I had gained a station and upon reading my records I was now 90% effaced.

Now, my epidural was only a walking epidural. I had full sensation of my legs, could move them, feel pain if pinched, etc. So they did a spinal on me while in the operating room.

And that's when the problems really began.

While hunched over getting the spinal I started to feel like I couldn't breath. As if I had inhaled a lot of water. I was having a really hard time not coughing and it seemed to take forever for the anesthesiologist to get done. He kept yelling at me to stop moving, to stop coughing. I try but it's a reflex and I'm starting to panic because I can't breath right.

Most hospitals have a ridiculous rule for women in labor. Nothing by mouth. So they put women on IV fluids and pump them full of fluids that can lead to a host of problems. I overloaded on this and it caused my lungs to fill and my intestines to shut down. It also caused my daughter to be jaundiced and bloated...she lost more than 10% of her body weight on FORMULA.

Finally, my DH is allowed in and he is there holding my hand when they start to operate. There is another problem. I can feel it. Not just pressure but I can actually feel pain. I'm screaming that I can feel it and I'm coughing because I can't breath and it feels like eternity while they get the baby out. They put an oxygen mask on me and I try and inhale and not fight it. I keep waiting for the general anesthesia to kick in. I vaguely remember them telling me that my baby was born and I was quiet for just a second and I could hear her crying but then they started to work back on me. They made my DH leave the room. I don't remember much after DH left the operating room. Just the feel of him letting go of my hand and leaving and me screaming for someone to help me and begging him not to leave me. I know it's irrational and not fair to him but I feel like he abandoned me.

Anesthesia awareness happens in roughly .1% of people under general and it is higher for women undergoing a c-section. What gets me is that I know another woman that had her c-section at the same hospital and had anesthesia awareness. I find it odd since there is such a low risk of this happening.

They had me on morphine and had induced a coma. I had to be placed on a ventilator. I remember waking up for a couple of times that would be just a few minutes. Every time I would just gesture for my baby and to my breasts because I wanted to breastfeed so bad.

My DH was so wonderful throughout everything. He named our daughter Anjali because that's the name I really wanted even though we had agreed on Angelica. He called all of our friends who are doctors and 5 of them showed up to the hospital to make sure I was getting the best treatment. At one point he heard my mom say that I was having high blood pressure because I hadn't seen the baby so he went to the nursery and convinced them to bring her to ICU (they didn't want her in there since people are actually sick there) for me to hold for a few minutes. And my blood pressure dropped.

By Friday afternoon they moved me to the postpartum wing and my DH had to return to the city where we lived because he had now missed all his days that we set aside for when the baby was born.

I had an NG tube down my nose into my stomach. It was making me gag. The nurses would tell me it was the Magnesium making me sick and I held on as long as I could and then I pulled it out myself. I wasn't sick again. Saturday morning I woke up and impressed the doctors on my progress.

They let me go home on Monday morning.

I don't think I will ever truly forget the feeling of being sliced open without anesthesia or forget the feeling of drowning in my own fluid. I am so bitter that I didn't hold my daughter until she was 3 days old and I barely remember it. I have no pictures of us in the hospital.

I have a video from while I was in labor and it shows me being wheeled away and then...nothing. It's very creepy to me.