Have you ever had surgery? What for?
This is my first time answering a daily prompt! So here goes everything, all sorts of TMI you probably want to be spared from. 😀
I hadn’t wanted any surgery at all, but my last two children (my sons) were both almost ten pounds and, being a hair’s breadth under five feet, I was just not equal to a normal delivery. They were too big for my birth canal. I had no other recourse but to have a C-section with both.
Not that I didn’t go through excruciating labor with the first one (and please note that my first child was a dainty 6.16-pound daughter whom I had managed to push out just fine), but I had meant to do things naturally, drug-free, etc. but the nurses looked dubiously at the weird shapes my belly was presenting during contractions and whispered not exactly soto voce to each other that there was no way I was going to deliver naturally.
I was slipping in and out of consciousness – the exhaustion knocking me out, only to be woken up by excruciating pain over and over again – and during one of my lucid moments, I did finally beg for a C-section. My baby was the toddler in the sea of newborn infants in the nursery.
With my third baby, I went through the delusion of having a VBAC, but by the third trimester, it became apparent that I was having another giant, so I reluctantly scheduled another C-section. No labor pains this time around. However, while this one wasn’t any heavier or longer than the first one, he was a lot rounder, so they had to snip a little bit more from the original incision.
With that last one, I also decided to have my tubes tied, something I do regret for a variety of reasons. In any case, those were thankfully the only surgeries I’ve had to deal with until we got our toms neutered a week ago. Here’s a touching photo from that episode:
I hope this didn’t come off as flippant. I know many others have had to go through surgeries that involved far more serious issues than childbirth, and I really hope that they successfully achieved their desired results.
Nonetheless, surgery, any kind and any degree of gravity, is invasive, and it does have a way of impacting our bodies, so we feel altered in some way, and, unfortunately, many of us go through them to later be surprised by side effects we hadn’t been advised about. Here’s hoping for the best for all of us!
This Small Life 