Member-only story
Recovering from a Traumatic Birth Experience the Easy Way
Maybe it’s not for everyone, but it worked for me.
My daughter made her entrance into this world fourteen days later than expected.
I worked so hard to push her out of me that I burst a bunch of blood vessels in my face. In all our early pictures together, I have the crimson eyeballs of a sci-fi vampire and the purple shiners of a prize fighter.
I worked so hard to push her out that my genitals were torn and shredded like raw hamburger meat.
I worked so hard, laboring for more than fifty hours in a tub, on a ball, on a stool and on the toilet, that once she was born, I needed to rest. Knowing she had entered the world as a perfect, ten-fingered, ten-toed specimen, I relaxed into a heavy, necessary sleep.
I woke in the morning to learn she had been taking to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit while I slept. My husband helped me gently guide my raw-meat bottom into paper underwear, and we waddled down the hall to find her.
In the night, the nurses had tried to feed her a sip of sugar water so she would wake up for a required hearing test. The water had traveled into her lungs and her subsequent coughing fit was cause for concern, hence her trip to the NICU.
