We shouldn?t have to live with ‘broken vaginas’
For such a sweet and gentle boy, my second son, Frank, came into this world with remarkable violence. He was wrenched out of me via forceps?essentially an enormous pair of stainless steel tongs. To this day, I can?t mix my salad with anything but a wooden spoon.
Forceps are not an unusual birth intervention, but in my particular case, they proved to be an unfortunately traumatic one. Frank was knocked cold and emerged unconscious, barely breathing, with an Apgar score of two. For 45 minutes, the doctors resuscitated him, placing a tiny gas mask over his heavily bruised little face.
?You should see the other guy,? the midwife in the neonatal intensive care unit joked after taking me in a wheelchair to meet him for the first time, a full 24 hours after his birth. ?You have,? I said grimly. ?The other guy is me.? The idea that Frank?s birth ?broke my vagina? became a bit of a joke around my house until I began to realize that it was probably true. ?It?s like a truck drove through your pelvic floor,? I recall the OB/GYN saying to me, rather regretfully, as I lay in my hospital bed receiving a blood transfusion in the days after the birth. What nobody told me in explicit terms until much later on was that I?d been seriously injured in the birth process, and the road to recovery would be a long and circuitous one.
Several months later, after I?d finished breastfeeding and emerged from the postnatal fog, I still didn?t feel quite right. I like to run, but even a short jog around t...
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