Cesarean after breech position

So I’m sitting here in the middle of a heat wave in the Northeast. I’m five weeks postpartum. Fans and ACs blasting. You can hear that in the background.
Where to start? I planned to deliver in a birthing center and was seeing midwives for the duration of my pregnancy and it was a totally uneventful pregnancy right up until the end, or almost the end. I didn’t have gestational diabetes. Blood work was always normal. Had no problems. No major symptoms. First trimester, had a couple really bad days but otherwise I was fine. That was probably the worst of it. It was in the first trimester.
But at 37 weeks this baby went breech, which is pretty unheard of for that to happen so late. And all of a sudden everything changed. Everything became very medicalized compared to what we’ve been experiencing up until that point. And he had been head down for a while but he flipped at 37 weeks. And so we had to go see a doctor for a consultation for an ECV, which I don’t remember what all the letters stand for, but it’s a procedure where they try to manually flip the baby from outside the body.
It’s very medieval. Frankly something they probably have been doing since the middle ages, if not earlier, where they just like dig their hands into the side of your stomach and try to lift up the baby and rotate him manually. And so I was in a hospital waiting for that to start. It happened a few hours late. We were kind of sitting around for a while. And once it started it was so painful, so immediately. And I had read that it was painful, but it was very painful. And there were so many people in the room, so many nurses, at least one doctor, maybe a couple doctors.
And the moment they started I immediately felt this intuition of like the baby’s in distress. But how are they going to know? Because there was no fetal heart monitor or anything on and their plan was to kind of try to move him and then check his heart rate. So as soon as they started I asked like how do you know he’s okay? And I don’t know if me saying that got them to check him faster than they normally would, but after this movement that they attempted they checked and his heart rate had completely plummeted.
And so then everybody started kind of freaking out. Everyone except the doctor. Someone, one nurse looked me right in the eyes and said we’re moving you to the OR right now. But that didn’t end up happening. Luckily the doctor we had – and this is the best hospital in New Jersey by the way – the doctor we had remained calm. She was like no give him a minute for his heart rate to recover and it did and she told us later people often don’t give the babies enough time for the heart rates to recover but this baby is not moving. He’s stuck where he is. It could be because of the umbilical cord we don’t know but he’s not going to rotate. And based on his position he wasn’t putting any pressure on my pelvis and so there was no way I was going to go into natural labor with him and breach. And so we were going to have to schedule a C-section.
I’d been working throughout my pregnancy on detaching from things I have no control over and I was surprised at how little attachment I had to the birth center experience, the natural birth. I was really proud of myself at how relatively easily I was able to accept the fact that I was going to get a C-section which is something I never wanted and knew a lot of downsides about it including you know baby being more likely to grow up to have allergies, missing out on all this stuff you know they’re supposed to get the birth canal etc but we didn’t have a choice. So I accepted it for what it was.
That got scheduled and two weeks later we were back at the same hospital for a 1pm C-section but it didn’t end up happening until 1am. 1am is when I was being moved into the operating room. There were just so many babies being born, so many emergencies coming in and prior to the operation I wasn’t allowed to eat or drink anything. And so in the end I ended up going 30 hours without eating or drinking and while I was waiting for that procedure to start you know it wasn’t like we knew early on that it was going to happen at 1am. It just kept moving, kept moving, kept moving. Oh maybe the next half hour, maybe an hour from now. We were just hearing that over and over and over again for 12 hours. And that was exhausting and I couldn’t sleep.
We were in one of those rooms with a little curtain around it so all these other sounds from other people like the five other patients in the room who I couldn’t see but I could hear a fetal heart rate monitor on one. I could hear a baby crying in another one. There’s so many different sounds and never being able to sleep because there were so many people walking back and forth past our curtain and there were conversations in the hallway and we were always listening to see if we could glean some kind of information about where our doctor was and we would hear her name and kind of figure out that oh she’s gotten pulled into some other surgery and there was just no way I was going to sleep. So I was physically exhausted and so hungry. I’d have these periods of just extreme hunger, like hunger pangs that would hit me, and I just felt so sad, so sorry for myself because the experience that I was preparing for with the birthing center and with the midwives. There was a midwife with us at the hospital who was very helpful.
She was constantly going out and trying to get whatever information she could and coming back and getting me more pillows and stuff like that. But I just couldn’t escape the weight of that feeling of being like a commodity, and again this is at a great hospital. But this feeling of like no one cares that I haven’t eaten at that point in 24 hours. No one cares, you know, how long will I be left here? At what point is it like okay this person, you know, this nine months pregnant woman and her baby are starving, like does that matter? Like it was just so, it was so dehumanizing to be in that position for so long, and so often with very little information.
That was really hard, that was honestly one of the hardest parts.
But once I was going into the room I had a couple minutes, if that, to talk to the anesthesiologist in advance to talk to the doctor in advance. I have a rare, not super rare, but a relatively rare spinal condition that I raised with the anesthesiologist. He didn’t seem familiar with it. I thought there might be implications for how the anesthesia would be delivered but he wasn’t worried about it. And in the end the team I had in the operating room was incredible. But it was very scary, you know, coming into this super bright room alone.
I don’t know why my husband wasn’t allowed to come with me for at least the part where the anesthesia was happening. And super bright, you know, in this little medical gown I’ve been in for 12 hours. So tired, so hungry, just trying to keep a smile on, trying to keep a positive attitude, just knowing I was on one side of that. I was on a precipice – if I allowed myself to fall over the side, I would have an absolute complete breakdown. And so I was doing mindful breathing, just something to focus on as the needle went into my spine and then it just lay me down and I’m just totally exposed. I feel like just laying there, totally naked in the middle of this room with all these people, my legs were in a frog position because they had to put the catheter in, just feeling like totally not human, like a piece of meat or robot being assembled or something. It was just so surreal, the contrast between that and what I had planned to experience at the birth center and this empowerment of a natural vaginal birth and the words I had been surrounded by for nine months as I had been with the midwives and I had been going through all my childbirth classes with that and everything and feeling so alone because my husband wasn’t even in the room yet. But it went as well as it possibly could have and it was truly bizarre feeling. I knew I wasn’t going to feel pain but I hadn’t thought about what I would feel and it was very surreal. It was like being in a dream. It felt like my entire stomach was wide open and being just jerked around. It felt like a giant 20 foot python was being wrestled out of me. I felt like a complete vessel, not like a human woman by any means. Very bizarre. Surreal and bizarre are two of the words that come to mind most frequently.
Then I heard him scream, cry, I heard his voice for the first time and it was like the fabric of reality ripped open. At this point my husband was next to me and suddenly I had access to this level and this type of love that no one could ever have prepared me for or explained to me until in that moment it literally felt like the fabric of reality ripped open and I could suddenly feel and witness something that had been completely closed off, invisible, up until that point.
I didn’t even know what I didn’t know. I heard him crying and my husband was brought over to cut the umbilical cord. I hear my husband say he has hair which as a baby I was totally bald for almost two years so I think he was surprised and that’s why he said that. Then finally my baby all swaddled crying, crying, crying, he was brought over to me after the Apgar test and everything and the moment my nose touched his cheek he stopped crying. Then for 40 minutes the three of us were together like that.
My husband’s face on one side, my face on the other, baby in the middle and he was at peace. He was awake but he was rooting around with his mouth. I just couldn’t wait to get out of that room and to nurse him for the first time and after about 40 minutes, or so I’m told 40 minutes, time ceased at this point to pass in a linear or logical way. They finished in about 40 minutes, we got wheeled out back to the same recovery area we had been in previously and he latched right away and from that point my entire mind, my body, my soul was just fixated on him. I was a totally different person and I was so in awe of his ability to just come out of the womb the way that he came out and to latch on and breastfeed right away. It just felt entirely like something he was doing.
I had no agency and I was just along for the ride with him.
From there it was still a long night. I ended up not sleeping for over 36 hours straight. It was hard being in the hospital, even for three or four days, just the constant interruptions of people coming in the room, constant, constant, all hours of the night, all hours of the day, all kinds of things they were coming in to do.
He was a perfectly healthy and is a perfectly healthy baby. It just seemed so unnecessary to me, all of this constant checking and a lot of it was checking on me and checking on my incision and giving me pain medication. I know it was necessary but I felt like a prisoner and this was in a very nice hospital with really great staff who had fantastic bedside manner and I still felt like, like I was in like a Swedish prison or something. I could not wait to get home and then finally we got to go home.
He was born 1.47 a.m. on a Friday morning. We went home on Sunday. I think it felt like a lot longer, we were at the hospital than we actually were. I was glad we got to get discharged then. I didn’t have to wait until Monday. I got to introduce him to our dog and she’s just been totally different ever since he came through.
She feels very responsible for him I think. It’s been pure bliss since then. I haven’t had any of the big hormone swings.
Honestly I felt like I was on ecstasy and was waiting for the come down but instead it was just a slow return to some kind of normalish baseline, but my brain is completely different. I’ve become really good at certain things and really bad at other things. For instance really good at multitasking. My mind is always just inhabiting 10 places at once but on the other hand more superficial things like social niceties and expectations I’ve become worse at. Scheduling, just linear thinking of any kind has gotten harder for me. Never know what day it is. Never really know what time it is. I just don’t care either.
I think I’ve had an easier C-section recovery than most and I still have not liked it by any means. It’s not one of those listen to your body type of healing processes which I imagine is more what women who have a vaginal birth experience. Instead it’s just my scar starts burning. My incision starts burning out of nowhere and it’s really painful and I just can’t be standing anymore. Five weeks later it still hasn’t fully resealed so it’s very weird. It’s very kind of alien to me this incision.
Getting used to my postpartum body has been very hard. It just looks so different. Still I think 40 pounds above my pre-pregnancy weight. I see myself in pictures and don’t even recognize myself so realizing there is still a lot of ego and things I have to work through. That’s going to be an uphill battle. On the whole I’m very grateful and I can’t believe I get to be the steward for this amazing new being in the world.