Cesarean Section Is “Up” Again

Cesarean Section is “up” again. Up in numbers, “up” in that it is an issue. Again. Wasn’t it just 1983 when “The Silent Knife” was published?

I’ve decided to share excerpts of a letter I wrote back to Anna Quindlen in 2006, who had just written an endorsement for my book (The Birth That’s Right For You), which I will always hold enormously dear.

This is my story of my first pregnancy and birth. What I experienced then informed an enormous shift not only in my work, my thinking around Cesarean Section, but also in my personhood; laying the foundation for what would evolve as “my dogma around no dogma”.

………I, too, was a “Natural Childbirth Nazi”. I was teaching Lamaze classes before I’d even had my own children. I fit the perfect prototype; grew up in the late 60’s (minus the drugs), vegetarian since sixteen, attended Hampshire College at the beginning in 1972, wore only sweaters that I myself knit (sick, really) and raised a black lab named River for practice before I became pregnant with my first.

I was hardwired for survival. My mother is a Holocaust survivor, fleeing Vienna on her own in 1938 at seventeen. I approached my first labor like I was in serious training. I had danced professionally for a living. I took ballet class every day and then swam a mile in the pool at the Y.

It was in the locker room after my swim, just at the end of my fifth month, during the daily ritual of applying cream and loving my new body, when I noticed the lump in my neck. Two weeks later, with a team of doctors at my belly for the baby and a team of doctors at my neck, I underwent a five-hour surgery for malignant thyroid cancer that had gone hog wild in pregnancy. I had biopsies, ultrasounds and even a CT scan. The technician took one look at me and asked, “Do they know you’re pregnant?” to which I replied, “It’s kind of hard to miss”. I lay in that chamber with three lead aprons “protecting” the baby and a very full bladder for an hour.

But I still held out, even after surgery, refusing post-op pain medication in the ICU, trying to hold on to some vestige of keeping the baby drug free where I could. Thank God for one ICU nurse who said to me in the middle of the night, ”I know what you’re trying to do…But you aren’t doing the baby any good when you’re fighting pain.” That somehow got through to me and I finally took something to help me sleep.

Three months later I labored for thirty-six hours, the last ten of which were driven by Pitocin. I made it through every contraction, fighting my way through the pain. This was familiar. Give me any physical challenge and I could and would make my way through it. But I was adamant that there would be no drugs. I ended up with a C Section. I never made it past three centimeters after all that work. I’ll never know if I had tried even a half dose of pain medication and/or an epidural as a last ditch effort to avoid a C Section, if I would have just slept and dilated. The irony is that I ended up with an epidural anyway for the surgery.

I was such a “breastfeeding fascist” that I put off the radiation treatment for my cancer, which should have been done right after surgery, but at the time, I was six months pregnant. I wanted to pump and store enough breast milk until I could go back to nursing. There wasn’t a whole lot of research on breastfeeding and nuclear medicine then. I had to give my daughter formula before I was irradiated to make sure she would take it in case I didn’t have enough stored “clean” breast milk to last until my irradiated breast milk came down to nearly the same measure of “rads” as before I was treated. That’s right. You’ve just read “rads” and “breast milk” in the same sentence.

I’m happy to report that despite the CT scans, anesthesia, surgeries, post-op pain medicine, radiation and formula, my eldest daughter, Indiana, has just turned twenty-one, finished up her junior year at Connecticut College, made Deans List and has a really great sense of humor!

Here’s what I know. Life is life-y. I learned that there is no one “right” way and, in your words, “one size doesn’t fit all”…….

(BLOG update – Indy is now 25 and in a doctoral program for psychology, at the end of which she will be able to fully document just how this experience is responsible for all of her issues.)