I hear women say, “I had an emergency cesarean.” I have attended well over 500 births and I have to say there have only been three that were real emergencies. If you have time to discuss things with your care provider. Time to get your partner dressed for the birth, and time to have them pack up the room, time to make a phone call, etc… then it is not an emergency situation. Emergency cesareans happen quickly. The room fills up with staff- your bed is unhooked from the wall- they are shouting orders as they wheel you down to the OR… if your care provider is not there they will snag any doctor available… that is an emergency cesarean. If you don’t have an epidural then you are put under general anesthesia and your partner is not invited into the OR suite at all. So, unless that happened, note that you had an unplanned cesarean. And according to the statistics those will more likely occur between 8am and 5pm, next likely between 5pm and 11pm and rarely between 11pm and 7am… why? Because there is less “management” of your labor and your care provider is sleeping or may not even been at the hospital. Then you have to ask yourself was my unplanned cesarean really necessary at all?
After all as in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, you are probably not qualified to know how to birth!
Recently a doctor wrote an article Top Ten Signs Your Doctor Is Planning To Perform An Unnecessary Cesarean Section On You to forewarn parents of the signs that your doctor really does not like to wait for natural birth to occur. His honesty is profound. I consider this a must read!
