My son was born via emergency C-Section at almost midnight on a Tuesday in August, after 48 hours of induction nonsense, not a single push or any sleep.
Sounds dramatic doesn't it EMERGENCY CESAREAN? It really wasn't, it was all pretty calm and chilled and I had plenty of time to internalise and ask questions about what was about to happen. Thank god because I had not prepared for this eventuality in the slightest.
When I was first pregnant the idea of a Cesarean terrified me, actually terrified me, I would lie awake at night worrying that I would be the 1 in 4 who would have one. I thought it would kill me, I thought it would kill my baby. I thought the anesthetic wouldn't work and I would feel them cutting into me. I thought I'd bleed to death, I thought they'd cut through my baby, I thought I'd die on the table before I got to see him.
It worried me so much that in the end I blocked it out. I mentally removed it from my brain, I didn't even consider it, for me it was not a possibility. So much so that I didn't plan for it, I didn't educate myself about it. So naive was I in fact, that I couldn't bring myself to look at my C-Section scar for a whole week afterwards because I thought it was going to be this great massive hip to hip - stapled together flesh scar that I would never quite get over.
It wasn't so much that I desperately wanted the natural birth experience, it was just my negative view of C-Sections clouding my rational thought process. I didn't know anyone who had a cesarean, I had only ever heard negative things about them, I had only ever been told 'we hope that doesn't happen' or 'but don't worry that is very unlikely'.
It is not something that was ever discussed with me with my midwife and it was only briefly touched upon in the NHS antenatal classes. Sure we all spent an hour on floor doing a giant 'natural birth' process diagram/ jigsaw thing giving me all the information I already knew from basic GCSE biology and BabyCentre.com. But what about the other stuff? What about the less common and the less ideal? I'm not saying they should scare expectant mothers with horror birth stories but lets get real here, C-Sections are a reasonably common occurrence and they should try to prepare us for that eventuality.
I, myself with no birthing experience had a negative and prejudice opinion of C-sections - how did I get that opinion? I think from the media and sadly also from my peers.
