I am always curious to see what other women's ceserian scars look like. So here is mine.
It was an emergency c-section. It was a matter of life and death. They had to get her out of me so I could breathe. Poor little thing. Yanked out of there, 5 weeks before her scheduled arrival. Made to have a birthday close to Valentine's Day instead of Saint Patrick's Day. Lots of red hearts in her future, not green clovers.
The scar is about a centimeter above the hairline. Reaches almost from hipbone to hipbone. Is almost straight but not quite, kind of curves up on one end. Draw two eyes above my navel and you've got a face with a smirk on it.
That is where my daughter came out. Where they cut through seven layers of me to get to her. While I struggled for breath. While my body fought to keep going. How I wish I would have been able to give her that extra month inside of me. Time to plump up and get ready for the colder temperatures in the outside world. She was taken so early that I never felt her hiccup inside me. I experienced that with my son, and I miss that with my daughter.
I say 'taken' because that is what it feels like. I don't feel like I gave birth to her. It wasn't my doing. I didn't have contractions, I didn't feel any pain. Someone else was making decisions, granted, they were medical professionals, but still, someone else.
Even after I'd gotten home from hospital I'd still put my hand on my belly to feel the baby. The baby that was sleeping in the crib or feeding from a bottle, nestled in her grandmother's arms.
I don't mind the scar. It saved her. It saved me. And it's not too bad looking.
It wasn't until quite a few days after they woke me up, that I realized that I wasn't wearing my wedding ring.
I got upset, where was my ring? I couldn't remember. They took it off before the c-section, but I hadn't gotten that memory back yet.
My husband told me that is was OK, the ring was safe back home.
I was upset that I didn't have my ring. I know that we aren't just connected through our wedding bands, we are so much more. Still, my left hand just didn't look right to me.
I was angry at myself that it had taken me so many days to realize that my ring wasn't on my finger. My body was such a stranger to me that I hadn't noticed.
My husband soothed me and said that as soon as I'm back home, he'll place the ring back on my finger.
To be continued...
There wasn't any pain. Isn't that weird? I almost died, I was in a coma for 3 weeks, I had emergency c-section and ECMO, but I was never in any pain. Sure there was discomfort but nothing I can call painful at all. It wasn't until a couple of days after they woke me up that I figured out why, I had a fentanyl patch on my right arm.
A patch that got progressively smaller in order to wean me off the pain killers.
I had just had a baby, after which you can have vaginal discharge (bleeding) for up to six weeks. I was still bleeding when I woke up. They had me in one of those net/mesh panties so I could wear sanitary napkins. Someone had to change those for me while I was in the coma. To lift me up and pull them down and change the pads. That is such a weird feeling, knowing someone had to take care of me like that. My pubic hair was clotted from all the blood and after I woke up it took a very kind nurse to help me work out the knots with a sponge. Gives the word sponge bath another meaning to me anyway. After I woke up I couldn't sit up, let alone lift up my hips so they could change the pads for me. So two nurses would come in to help me and even though they were so professional and I am just in awe of everything that they do, it still felt like a funny moment so I would usually try and say something funny like 'yeah, these mesh panties are super sexy!'. My husband, bless his heart, would usually leave the room when the nurses had to do stuff like that. I wouldn't have minded if he stayed, he's definitely seen all of me, but I also didn't mind that he wanted to retreat to the waiting area.
Because I had a c-section and hadn't moved for over three weeks, I couldn't just sit up. That requires using your abdominal muscles and mine were just too weak and sore for that. Everyday I had a physical therapist visit me in my room, also an occupational therapist and the speech therapist. There is something called 'the log roll', and that's where you roll from your back onto your side, and from there you sort of prop yourself up on your elbow and use your hands to sit up in a sideways fashion. I was so weak that when I tried that for the first time I rolled on my right side, and I had to have help to bring my legs to the side of the bed and then I could put my right elbow under me, and that was it. I couldn't bring the rest of my body up. The physical therapist put a sort of belt around me to hoist me up. I would sit for as long as I could tolerate and do exercises with my arms and legs. Putting my hands in the air, moving my legs from side to side. All this is very challenging when you're covered in wires and leads and if you accidentally move something you shouldn't have, a machine beeps and a nurse comes in to check on you.
I was so anxious to get out of the hospital as soon as I could that I did everything the therapists told me to do. I did exercises in bed. I was so tired and so exhausted, and everything was monitored, my oxygen saturation, my breathing, my heart rate. It usually took only a few minutes for me to get winded and would have to stop to catch my breath. All I wanted to do was just lay down, on the soft pillows, pull the blanket up and fall asleep. But I knew that I had to move my body, I needed to be well to take care of my babies. I wanted rest but needed work.
My speech therapist was a wonderful woman with a thick German accent, how wonderful is that, I loved her. She made me eat ice cream, and I hated it, food had lost all taste to me, I didn't want it. She would make me sip water, teeny tiny sips and she would hold her fingers against my throat and feel how I swallowed. She said she had x-ray fingers and could tell if I was doing it right or not. I actually didn't like doing the exercises she told me to do, saying AAAAA and EEEEE, and sucking air through a device to see how I was progressing. My husband would tell me to do the exercises and I didn't want to, and I'd sort of growl at him because my voice was just so raw still and he'd smile and say ''good job, doing your speech therapy, except that's not exactly the sounds you're supposed to make...'' and I'd laugh and be all resentful and then I'd do the stupid exercises.
I don't know why I was so reluctant to do the speech therapy, I was fine with putting in work for the physical therapy. Maybe because I felt my voice really wasn't improving at all, and it was so frustrating.
To be continued...
I'm finding myself having difficulty writing here. But I'll keep going anyway.
The thing is there have been some big days now, my daughter turned one, a fact that is jarring for me because I had only known her for 11 months... I turned 32 yesterday, my 31st birthday I spent in a coma... Today it's been a year since they woke me up from the drug-induced coma...
I've been having flashbacks. Imagine if you will, that you're looking at your life, just turn your head right now to the right or to the left and look at what you see as a picture. Now imagine that you see something out of the corner of your eye, or you smell something different, which immediately propels your whole existence into question. The image that you are seeing is not certain in your brain anymore, you can't know if it's real or not, if you really are laying in a bed somewhere making this up in your head or not.
It's an awful awful feeling, and not much I can do when it overwhelms me. I just repeat to myself ''this is real life, this is real, you are not in the coma anymore''. I also have the need to inject humor into my situation and say ''if this were some fantasy concocted by your brain wouldn't the children always be perfectly well behaved, the house spotless and you'd cook gourmet dinners every night?'' Which is certainly not the case let me tell you ;)
But it is a panicky feeling and I just have to ride through it.
I'll write more frequently, it helps me.
To be continued...
