My Hospital Birth Experience: Part 4
August 15th, 2007 by MamaBearMy precious, perfect newborn daughter was immediately placed on my chest. My arms could barely hold her up. I was asked to hold my beautiful eight-pound daughter with shaky, spaghetti-weak arms while trying to push out the placenta, still in the lithotomy position.
My perineum had torn. It was reportedly a second-degree tear, so, pretty average, but still. It needed stitches. I still had to deliver the placenta, though. I thought the pain would stop at this point, but it did not. The BIG BAD PAIN had stopped, thankfully, but the postpartum pain would stay for at least a month. And at that moment, my uterus was still cramping up painfully to deliver the placenta. I didn’t know it would be that painful at the time. Nobody ever talks about the pain that happens after the baby is already born. I was thinking since the worst was over (it was) that it would be relatively pain-free from that moment on. (It wasn’t.)
Delivering the placenta was hurty. I know that’s not really a word, but that’s what it felt like. Like that, and like someone is pulling out your insides, because my OB pulled the umbilical cord to help deliver the placenta. If you do this, you have to be really careful not to pull too hard or too fast, but to pull firmly enough to try and detach the placenta. I hear it takes quite a bit of finesse. Thankfully my OB has decades of experience with this sort of thing, and nothing bad happened, except for more pain, which is, I guess, normal. I delivered the placenta intact, while I tried to convince my daughter to latch on to my breasts. She was more interested in learning how to process air with her lungs, which is pretty normal for just having come out of the womb, or so I’ve heard. The whole scenario felt very rushed. I wasn’t allowed to get in a good position to calm her down, so she kept crying inconsolably. Also, my noodle arms felt like they could barely lift their own weight, let alone hers.
Ideally, I would have been allowed to calm her down and then let her feed peacefully at my breast whenever she was ready. But, alas, it was not meant to be.
Someone took my baby and gave her to my husband so the suturing could get finished without distraction. He held her to his bare chest and someone draped a blanket over the both of them so she wouldn’t get cold. He was tickled pink with his brand-new baby girl! I was thrilled for us too, but at the moment all my body and mind wanted was to sleep for about two hundred years. I honestly would have been fine staying up longer, though, and had already made a mental note to myself that I’d stay up for as long as I needed to in order to bond with the baby and get breastfeeding started right.
At that point, I honestly believed that what would happen next was that as soon as the suturing was done, my husband would give the baby back to me and I’d hold her and initiate breastfeeding.
That’s not what happened, though.
