Delivering Karen

by Kathy Sierra

It was a perfectly normal day. I swung by the grocery store for milk and toilet paper; bought a newspaper and shook my head over the state of the world; admired some cute legwarmers in the department store window (it was 1982). And then, since I was 9 months pregnant, I dropped by my doctor's office for my checkup. It was my actual due date, but nothing was going on, and I thought I was in for another week or two of every mother's least favorite time, the last few weeks of pregnancy.

I stretched out resignedly on the examining table. Dr. Nelson started examining me and, as I always did when someone's hand was up places that I didn't really feel enthusiastic about, I started planning all my next vacation. "Ah, yes...Fiji. Fiji would be fabulous." I fantasized about seeing myself, in a sexy swimsuit, totally recovered from the pregnancy, cavorting with the cabana boy." (My pregnancy was the one thing I had gotten from a quick, fun, but short-lived marriage I had just ended.)

"My God, we've got to get you to the delivery room!" Dr. Nelson spun me around, flipped me up, and said "Get dressed! Did you know you're in labor?" I was so confused. Frightened. Very startled. And confused, because, though it was my first birth and I was still inexperienced, the one thing I thought I could depend on was knowing whether I was in labor. "I'm in labor? Are you sure?" The doctor glared at me. "Yes, I'm sure, and your daughter is still breech. So that means in about 20 minutes, you're going to be having a Caesarean."

I was in shock, and let them whisk me over to the hospital-side medical complex. A Cesarean! It's the kind of thing you figure will happen to somebody else. I was totally unprepared. I had towed my neighbor along to help me with Lamaze. I had worked hard with abdominal muscles and cocoa butter to keep my stomach in shape for a post pregnancy bikini. I did NOT want to be cut open. I didn't even have my hospital bag with. But in 20 minutes flat, I was checked in, and in the OR.

The second thing to go wrong was the spinal block. I flinched and moved a bit when they gave me the first injection, and only my right side went numb. I can't describe how odd that felt. They gave me a second injection, and finally my whole body seemed like it could survive being cut open.

The surgery started immediately. Here's another thing they never tell you: what a Cesarean is actually like. They cut you open, yes. And you can feel it, feel yourself being cut open and various organs moved about. It doesn't hurt, but you can feel it. And the extra fun (not) part was that, since I was awake, I could feel them taking my organs out of my body and LAYING them on my chest while they dug away. Worst of all, even though they'd put up a screen so I couldn't see them, I caught a glimpse of what was going on in the reflection from the metallic light fixtures above my head.

The surgery was fast, but not fast enough to finish before the anesthetic started wearing off down one side of my body. "I can feel this!" I said, when I became convinced that yes, this was PAIN. They barely looked at me. "Yes, it's normal to feel some pressure," they mumbled, in the off the cuff way they do with fractious patients. I managed to convince them, finally, that I was in the kind of PAIN that merited something being done about it. But by then it was too late-- if they'd given me anything, I wouldn't be able to breastfeed.

They finally pulled Karen out of my uterus, bloody of course and bawling, but absolutely perfect. They let me touch her once, really just grazing her with my finger, and took her away. This was the OR, and there were no maternity recovery rooms available at this hospital. So they sewed me up and rolled me away to a normal OR, where babies weren't allowed, and I lay there flat on my back, dying to see my baby, and having no idea where she was or when I'd be able to see her. I thought if they made me wait too long, I wouldn't be able to breastfeed at all.

Finally, after four hours, they took me out of recovery and back to my room. Only THEN did they bring her in. I still couldn't sit up at all, because of the spinal. (They told me if I sat up, that within a day I would have such a headache as would put the pain of childbirth to shame.) But the nurse laid Karen on my chest, and after all that trouble, everything else went beautifully. My milk was in, Karen latched on like she'd been practicing for all that time, and she fed like she'd been doing it for years. My scars even heeled up about as well as can be expected.

And here's the best part. In 1982 when you had a c-section the standard phrase was "once a c-section always a c-section, and that you would never be able to deliver normally after that because of certain risks. So I was really sad about that. But then later when I had my second child, the whole attitude and changed around that and doctors were much more willing to let you try to have a normal delivery as long as the thing that made you have the c-section in the first place was not something that was likely to repeat itself. So since my second baby was not breech when I went into labor, I had a wonderful, completely natural childbirth!

I never did get to Fiji. But I did meet the love of my life and he beats any cabana boy.