Cord Around Neck

Emilie May Bezanson

I was induced with my daughter at 41 weeks and 5 days. I was in labour for roughly 13 hours. When I was first induced they sent me home after they gave me the medication to wait for a  few hours and then to come back around 4pm. My labour didn't progress very quickly. At one point I felt like I needed to pee so I got up to go to the washroom and when I wiped there was a greenish color there that wasn't what I was used to. My nurses in labour and delivery assured me that it was just my mucus plug, (I learned afterwards it was not).

After a few hours I was taken into one of the birthing rooms and my contractions started to get really intense. They gave me the gas to try but I was having such a bad time with my anxiety that I couldn't inhale it properly for it to help at all. They also gave me fentanyl which didn't help at all. My contractions were coming literally every 30 seconds which I was not prepared for.  After I had my epidural everything sort of calmed down and I made it to around 8cm before my blood pressure started to get really high and my baby's heart rate started to drop. They told me at 5 in the morning that in half an hour I would be going in for an emergency c-section. At that point I was so exhausted I just started crying because I was not prepared to have surgery. I wanted to do everything by the book so to speak and I was disappointed that I had made it to eight centimeters and I had done all this work and then I stalled out and I felt like I had failed.

So they took me in, I don't really remember going into the operating room because at that point I was on so many pain drugs that everything was just kind of a blur. I do remember them strapping down my arms, which nobody had told me that that would happen when I spoke to any of my friends about their birthing stories. They strapped my arms down and put the sheet up so that I couldn't see what was going on except I could see them cutting me open in a reflection in one of the lights above me and my boyfriend at the time had to ask them to angle it away because I could see everything that they were doing. I don't remember any sensation of them tugging or pulling, I think probably because I was so out of it at that point, but I do remember them saying “wow” and then hearing the splash when they actually had me opened up because my water broke at that point and my daughter had had her first poop so she was sitting in the colony. That was what the green stuff was when I had gone to the bathroom to wipe hours earlier. She was so jammed down in my pelvis that my water actually couldn't come through after it had broken in the first place. So after she came out I didn't hear her cry and although I was still quite drugged I kept asking why I didn't hear her cry and they didn't tell me until afterwards that the cord had been wrapped around her throat twice and she wasn't breathing when she came out and they had to work on her for 7 minutes and intubate her.

Nobody told me how long I would have to wait alone in recovery.

Nobody told me that the effect from the drugs would be that my mouth felt so dry it felt like I drank a glass of cinnamon and sand at the same time.

Nobody told me that after my boyfriend at the time was asked to leave the recovery room to go sign paperwork that they wouldn't let him back in.

We ended up staying in the hospital for over a week due to complications with my daughter's heart rate and breathing and blood sugar levels and in that time I learned a lot of things about labor and about having a C-section.

Nobody told me that it was standard procedure to basically push/punch my stomach to stimulate my uterus to make sure everything was coming out the way it was supposed to come out.

Nobody told me that I would almost pass out in the shower after the first time I got to have a shower.

Nobody told me how excruciatingly painful and scary it would be to try to have a bowel movement 3 days later after eating only hospital food.

Oh and I forgot to mention the allergic reaction I had to the tape they used when they did my epidural, which left me drugged and super itchy to the point where I begged the nurse to scratch my back!

The best advice I can give to anyone who has to have a c-section, whether it be emergency or planned, would be to make sure that you walk afterwards as much as you can. If you're stuck in the hospital for a few days walk around the maternity wing, walk back and forth from the nursery to your room, take little stretch walks around the hospital. Ask the nurses to watch your baby for you for 15-20 minutes so that you can do that and take all of the help that you can. I'll also add that no one explained to me that I would have nerve damage still 3 years later, or the belly pooch that no matter what I do will never go away. But if I had to go through it all gain I think I would pick a planned c-section, which I will do for my next child because I don't like the uncertainty of not knowing when things are going to happen. Since I’ve done it once I'm more prepared for it then I was before because when I did my birth plan I didn't plan for any kind of surgery at all.