"C-sections are the easy way out"...

Yeah. Try telling that to a woman who has just undergo major surgery which was possibly traumatic, a gaping hole in her stomach held together by stitches or staples, dosed up on ibuphroen and tramadol for the next week, unable to get up and see to her crying baby because she physically cant walk and has a catheter, exhausted and swelled up from the morphine, constipated for about 3 weeks due to the movement of the bowel during surgery and having to deal with the most horrendous after pains ever.

Before I had a c-section myself, I too presumed that having one would be 10x easier than giving birth naturally any day. After all, the excruciating pain of child birth is something which I will never forget so I couldn’t imagine anything to even come close to the pain I felt with my eldest. I used to actually envy women who had given birth via a c-section, I used to think to myself “no pain and a beautiful baby at the end of it”! It is actually laughable, but the truth of many people’s perceptions on caseareans if they haven’t experienced one themself.

I couldnt of been more wrong. Not only does it affect you physically it also affects you emotionally. When you give birth to your baby you have an instinct to take care of them. Your body is also made to deliver a baby vahinally, not have it manually removed. But for some people like me, they don’t have a choice and they have to do what is safest for their baby.

When you have has a c-section, you can’t care for your baby properly and how you want to. You can t get up and walk around to place your baby in his/her cot, you have to buzz for a midwife to do just that and it is the worst thing watching somebody else tend to your babies needs before you.

For some women, they are often dosed up on a drug called Tramadol because the regular doses of paracetamol and ibuphroen just does not cut it, therefore, they are often left feeling spaced out and out of it.

The surgery itself can be especially traumatic, especially if it is an emergency one. I had an elective caesarean which means planned, but it was still a traumatic experience in comparison to giving birth naturally. The theatre room is extremely busy, you have about 20 wires attached to you, you have to have a huge needle in the back of your spine, and loosing the sensation of the bottom half of your body can be frightening. Also the simple fact that your very aware that someone is cutting into you and practically exposing your insides whilst you are fully conscious is enough to make you pass out and cause other problems.

The after pains are the worst and they continue to hurt even when you get home. Your whole life is put on hold. You can hardly walk, sleep in bed properly, tend to your newborn, drive, do the house work, look after children you already have and so on. This can continue for weeks, often leaving a mother feeling low.

Your then left with the obvious thing that everyone associates with a c-section. The dreaded scar. Now we all know that they don’t look to appealing, but what they also don’t tell you is that even years after it can still hurt, feel sensitive and be numb. Having to deal with a post-natal body can be difficult enough, but having to also deal with a scar can also affect a woman’s confidence even though it’s what she had to go through in order to keep her baby safe.
I would rather give birth 100 times naturally than to ever have to go through a c-section ever again. It is not the easy way out and it actually amazes me how some people opt to have one out of choice when there are no health implications to mother or baby if she chooses to give birth naturally.