Post Op

ok so i've got an experiment going on right now: breastfeeding at the computer. seems to be going ok, but you'll have to make due with no caps. not that hard,eh? the other experiment is a reclinier chair, to take the pressure of sitting straight upright off my incision. on the whole, i'd say this is mildly successful!

How do i feel after surgery? Not like a truck hit me. i hurt my back really bad in january, and this was sorta the same. Difficult to move around, hard to manoeuvre in bed, painkillers every 4 hours, coughing and laughing verboten. As I had anticipated tho, peeing was so a joy. After Hayden's birth, I had a small tear they hadn't sewn up since it was so small, but it was EXCRUCIATING to pee for 2 weeks afterwards. The day after surgery, I was able to stand up and walk around the end of the bed. results were that I was covered in sweat, couldn't stand completely upright, and then had to make myself comfortable in bed again. not easy. (Sage fell asleep now so I can use both hands to type. Wow typing one-handed takes a long time!)

After they took out my catheter, I had to pee twice with the nurse before they would let me go on my own. The first time I went pee, it was a much better experience than walking around the bed. She asked me how I was doing when I returned to bed, and I pointed out that I wasn't sweating. Yahoo! Another great accomplishment by the makers of Hayden and Sage. Every time I got up it was easier and easier (relatively. Yahoo also for adjustable beds, for both height and to sit upright some, which makes getting out of bed so much easier) depending on when my last pain pill was, of course LOL I tried to time my pees to be 1-2 hours after the pills. Being at home, I try not to bend down and pick up stuff off the floor, which is my currently biggest painful movement. The incision itself feels like a very bad sunburn, yet oddly the skin is also numb. It's very weird. The inside stuff doesn't hurt too bad any more, if I take it easy. However, the latter half of last week and a couple times this week as my uterus was returning to more-normal shape/size/position, it totally killed like a son-of-a-bitch. It felt like labour contractions, and if I was caught off-guard, I would scream/yell/holler. The midwife said it was due to the incision line working it's way behind the pubic bone. "You may notice some discomfort". Yeh. I did notice. So did the neighbours. (Well, we don't have any neighbours, but if we did, they would've.) I've been off tylenol 3s since last Friday, when my public health nurse advised me that codeine is passed through to breastmilk, and makes for a difficult-to-nurse sleepy baby. !!!WHAT??!!! I was on aspirin with codeine in the hospital, and went home with a week and a half's worth of prescription for tylenol 3 with codeine! How come no-one in the hospital or my midwife didn't know to cut that out so my baby would feed better? They all knew about my breastfeeding inadequacy fears... anyway after I cut out the codeine, Sage has been feeding a lot more actively. The regular tylenol was ok for a few days, but wouldn't work on this killer headache and neck cramp that I had for 4 days in a row. I switched to ibuprofen but after the headache went away, I haven't been on anything.

As for the next baby, a) we don't want any more children; b) the midwife said after a c-section you should wait 2 years to become pregnant again; and c) if we did become pregnant, I could have a VBAC which stands for vaginal birth after caesarean. But I refer you back to point a). We don't want any more children! :o)