My Cesarean Birth

by Valerie Schuster

My husband and I had been married about 4 years when we or rather I decided it was time to start our family.  I had recently recovered from surgery for a removal of a cyst from my ovary. My ob who did the surgery said that I was good to go so we were excited at the prospect of getting pregnant and how long it might take and what it would be like. I made a romantic dinner and let nature take its course. A few weeks later when my period did not come I knew and the home test confirmed it. I went to see my doctor who had done the surgery and I was really excited. When I sat down in her office she said, “I hope you are not going to be one of these women that comes in here crying and whining every month.” I didn’t know what to say. I thought she would be happy for me. Suddenly I felt very uncomfortable with someone I thought I knew as I had been her patient for 4 years and she recently did surgery on me. I had heard about the Midwife Group at Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan and decided to check them out. I had been thinking I wanted to look into a midwife but I was nervous about having a home birth so the Certified Nurse Midwives in a hospital setting seemed the perfect choice. After visiting the hospital and meeting the midwives I made my decision to go with them. I thought they would listien to my concerns and take care of me. And they did for the most part  but….

Anyway, my pregnancy was great. I never had any morning sickness however I did suddenly in my second month have to have not one but 5 root canals which took 5 months of twice a week visits. I thought I don’t know if I can get pregnant again after this, I may not have enough teeth left to give for another baby. So other than the teeth I did not have any problems with my pregnancy.  I felt great most of the time and tried to walk as much as possible. I read few pregnancy books but the one that made the most impact on me was Spiritual Midwifery by Ina May Gaskin. I fell in love with this book, Ina May, the Farm and birth. I just knew that my birth would be kind of like this working with the midwives at the hospital. 

I was about 1 week past my due date when my labor started on Sunday evening of October 19, 1980 about 7: 30 pm. We had had a delicious curried mussel soup for dinner ( which I would later throw up). Yeah. I began timing my contractions and making sure I had everything ready to take to the hospital.  By midnight we left for the hospital and I was feeling more anxious than excited. Rolf drove too fast and went through all the red lights. I just knew we would get stopped and arrested before we got to the hospital. When we arrived at the hospital we were greeted by the one midwife I did not know very well. But I was ok with that, because she was a midwife, right, and she would care about my birth right? I was put in the L&D room and hooked up to the monitor. This machine right away made me more nervous because of the beeping sound and the heartbeat. I kept thinking if that sound were to stop then it must be something wrong with my baby. So  all night I kept turning the sound off. Anyway, I was doing ok for the first two hours and getting up to go pee and handling things well. I had just gone to the bathroom for the second time and they had a full length mirror in there and when I saw myself I just started to cry thinking how did I get so big and was a baby really going to come out of me tonight? Meanwhile the baby was kicking and doing a lot of moving around in that tight space. The midwife came back into check me again and she was having a bit of a hard time getting the baby’s heartbeat with the belt monitor. I think she tried for all of 1 minute. Then, said to me, “You are too fat! I’m putting you on the internal monitor.  I protested a lot as that was one of the things I knew I did not want. I told her that I had discussed this with the other midwives and they said that it was not necessary. I told her that the baby was fine because he was moving so much. She did not care. She wanted what was easy for her as she had another patient come in to deliver. I looked to my husband for support but he was at a loss. He did try to reassure me that everything was ok. I cried some more. ( A doula sure would have come in handy right then)

So the internal monitor was put into my baby’s head. They lied and tried to make me believe that it was just a small piece of metal like foil taped to the top of his head when it is actually a long thin piece of wire or needle that is inserted into the scalp of the baby. Now I was confined to the bed and had to pee in a bedpan. I was at about 5 cm and then my labor slowed down. (Gee, I wonder why) I was grateful for a little break as I was tired having been up and busy all day and I took a short nap. But then the midwife came in and said that if my labor did not start up again within 1 hour they would induce me with pitocin. Again I protested asking her to wait just a bit longer than 1 hour, but it was going to be her way or no way.  The pitocin turned my labor into a nightmare, except I was awake. My labor got worse and worse as the pain was all in my back and I could barely move because of the internal monitor, except to turn from one side to the other. I wanted my husband to rub my back but when he started to touch it I would scream don’t touch me there. I knew I was having back labor due to my baby’s head being posterior and it seemed he was stuck there. All I wanted to do was get up and walk around. Within a few hours I was heading into transition. My contractions felt like a freight train was running over me. The next thing I knew they were taking down to x-ray to check the baby’s position so I could push. I protested some more. If they could remove the monitor so I could go to x-ray, they could leave it out and let me get out of bed and walk around. But nooooooo I had to go to x-ray so they could check the baby’s position. I had to get on this hard cold x-ray table stark naked in the freezing x-ray room and so they could do the x-ray to see what I had already told them was happening while I was in transition that the back of the baby’s head was pressing on my coccyx bone.  I wanted to kill someone but I felt so humiliated and just cried some more.

Finally it was morning and the shift was changing and I got back to my room and Sandy the one midwife of the group I adored was there and she took over. I pushed for 3 hours until they told me the baby’s heartbeat was slowing down and he was not making any progress down the birth canal so they decided to do a section. That was about noon. But it could not have been an emergency since the OR had not been fully sterilized since the last delivery so I had to wait an hour for the Sterilization Team to come back from lunch and clean the OR. Finally the anesthesiologist came to start my epidural.  By the time I got into the OR it was about 1:00pm and Cameron Todd Schuster was born on Monday October 20, 1980 at 1:25 pm. He was covered with meconium and he cried a little. They did his Apgar, 9, then 10 and weighed and measured him. He was 8lbs and 10 oz. and 21 inches long. One good thing was that they let my husband stay in the OR with me the whole time and they gave him the baby to hold and after loosening my arm from being tied down I could touch him for a minute and I cried some more. My husband watched the whole operation and held our baby the whole time they were putting me back together. I just cried watching them stare into each other’s eyes. I felt so alone and cheated and like a failure. I just wanted to hold my baby and I couldn’t.  By the time my operation was finished I had to go to recovery and as they took my baby to the nursery I was yelling at baby nurse, “Don’t give him any formula!”(Which I am sure now they probably did).  I had to stay in recovery until I could feel my legs again, so I kept lying saying I had the feeling back so that I could get to my room but they made me stay there for 5 hours. I got to my room at about 6:30 pm and they brought me my baby right away and he was starving and nursed well immediately.

Now I had to figure out how to recover from major surgery and take care of a newborn.

 


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    About Me

    I was born in NYC and grew up in NYC, Philadelphia and New England. I moved back to NYC after studying art at the Philadelphia College of Art for 2 yrs. where I met my husband Rolf when I was 20. We have been married for 34 years.  We have 2 sons, Cameron 29, and Tyler 21.  I finished my Bachelor's Degree in 1990 in Hotel Restaurant Management and Food Journalism at the city University of NY. By the time I graduated I'd  had Tyler who had just turned 1 years old. My decision to become a Doula was prompted by my personal childbirth experiences, having had a C-Section due to hospital interventions and then a VBAC 8 years later. My passion is to serve as an inspiration and support to all women during pregnancy and labor and especially for those women who want to achieve a natural vaginal birth after cesarean. I love to travel, walks on the beach, lying on the beach, all kinds of music, good food, cooking, movies, reading, painting, knitting writing, creating, and developing myself to be the best I can be.