20.01.12 C Section Review

I’m bloody mad with my obstetrician. He’s made a complete mess of my caesarean scar. The last one settled into a nice silver line and he was supposed to carve me up in the exact same way. But for some reason he kind of veered off and one end and not only that, he’s left a couple of lumps of flesh sticking out at various points. It looks like I’ve been knitted together by a toddler using chopsticks. And it’s not healing as well as last time. I keep having to dab it with iodine and antibiotic cream and it’s, er, leaking. Yuck.

I never thought I’d see the day when I preferred something the NHS did over a private hospital. But the c-section this time was brutal. We started half an hour late because the good doctor had lost his wallet (he told me later). Yes, really! Only one of the most important days of our lives but no, you go and scan the canteen for your wallet mate, feel free. The epidural was agony and took 20 minutes to complete – I know because I was facing a bloody great digital clock as they were shouting at me to ‘bend your back like a C’. Well for your effing information dumbwit, I have scoliosis (slight curvature of the spine and not in anything like a freaking c-shape) plus a great big belly up front here so I can’t effing well lie on my side in a bloody C, alright? Because, and I’m hoping I’m right here, you must have done this procedure a thousand times by now and not always on someone who can get their back into a perfect C, so use whatever initiative you have and freaking well GET ON WITH IT. Then they wouldn’t let Pete in for ages, until the forgetful doctor arrived in fact. So we were both nagging them about getting him into theatre with me but they just played dumb and ignored us. Which is never a great strategy. Stress levels nicely elevated the doc finally turned up, with his all important wallet presumably, and then proceeded to treat me like Santa’s sack, only much more brutal, like he was scraping a barrel or something. I’ve never felt so jostled, shoved and pushed around, and from the inside too. I felt bruised for days, like I’d done ten rounds with Tyson, only on the inside. Are you getting the picture? And he used forceps to pull our boy out, leaving horrible red marks on his face and skull. Forceps for a c-section, is that normal? And to top it all off nicely, he stapled me back together like a remedial monkey let loose with teacher’s staple gun for the first time. Cheers.

They did ask me if I wanted to go to sleep for the sewing up debauchery and I asked the sadistic anaesthetist how long it would take. When he said an hour (really? For the worst scar in history? Because to do a bodge job like that would take me, say, 5 minutes) I said OK. Little did I know that I wouldn’t be seeing my gorgeous new baby for 3 hours! THREE hours! Which is like an eternity for a new mum. They sedated me for 2 hours instead of the promised 1 hour and when I woke I cried for 20 minutes to be allowed to see my baby (who was by then several floors up in the hospital, bonding nicely with Daddy but desperate for a feed of course). No, they had to observe me for an hour before I was allowed up to the baby ward. WHY? What can possibly happen in an hour when I could be gazing at my gorgeous boy, helping him feed and, AND, be whisked away in an instant if something diabolical does occur – I mean, I am in a f***king hospital for chrissakes.

There was worse to come. Not only had they starved me for 6 hours before the op, which, you know, is fair enough, but I wasn’t even allowed water (they did put me on a drip though, unlike the NHS who waited until I was super-dehydrated before this occurred to them). And to add insult to injury, I was only allowed ice chips until the following lunchtime. ICE CHIPS for ALMOST 24 HOURS after a major op! Hello? I needed FOOD, SUSTENANCE, a bit of STRENGTH for crying out loud. Not crunching bloody ice chips for hours on end. I wish I’d packed some snacks so there is a Top Tip for you, should you find yourself in a similar situation.

All this misery is forgotten once you hold your baby of course, and I reckon that’s what they are counting on. Doesn’t matter what we do, she’ll soon be holding her precious and all memories of anything that went before will be miraculously wiped out. Ha! I mean, in the greater scheme of things, none of this was entirely earth-shattering and it could have been a lot worse blah blah blah. But, a lot of this kind of treatment was also avoidable which is what makes me mad. For all it’s a progressive, modern hospital, it seemed very old fashioned in lots of ways. And now I have the scar to remind me of it, every single day. Great.