Guest Post at Mothers of Change

I'd like to thank the great team at Mothers of Change for hosting my guest post on updating cesarean protocols. Please have a read and feel free to comment here, or there, especially if you have any suggestions for bettering the cesarean experiences

http://www.mothersofchange.com/2011/12/changing-cesarean-births.html

This post was not only a great oportunity to share information, it got me writing again, something I have been wanting to do for a while now!

Total Support Pillows

I totally love this idea.

Cesarean Support Pillows

From the ICAN blog http://blog.ican-online.org/2011/04/09/new-ican-support-pillows/

"ICAN debuted our newest support offering at our 2011 Conference in St. Louis. Designed by talented ICANer Mallory Brock from a concept by Education Director Krista Cornish Scott, this fabric can be ordered by the yard directly from www.spoonflower.com with a portion of the sales going to ICAN. One yard of fabric makes three support pillows. A caring and thoughtful gift for a mom recovering from a cesarean, it has both practical advice and emotional support that is the hallmark of ICAN."

I'm ordering two yards right now to make up pillows for cesarean moms in my community.

The words of the back are particularly wonderful... the one that is sticking in my mind is something like: It's normal to have more then one emotion about a single event"

How true, my littlest son's birth was both a amazing magical moment and a source of deep trauma.

These pillows will support in many ways. I believe that physical and emotional recovery needs to be active and almost violent, the same way an aggressive surgery is.

A wise friend of mine reminded me that

Sometimes you ave to meet the fire with your own heat.

The Faceless Caesarean

Above is a call to action to help better cesarean experience from:

The Faceless Caesarean by Caroline Oblasser.
"Caesarean mothers in words and photographs"

I found this book fascinating and I'm glad that it exists because more people need to know the truth about Cesareans. Women's own narrative accounts are so helpful in understanding what it's really like. Also by interviewing 162 women this book is one of the few firsthand authorities I've found on what women want when surgical birth IS necessary.

The photos are also very powerful.

Her book is available at www.caesareanbook.com

Natural Cesarean

I've got to say there are some things I just love about the web. Thanks to Karen, who left a comment on one of my posts I have been researching Prof. Fisk who is pioneering "Natural Cesareans". Yay! Now all we need to do is get this info out there.

The natural caesarean: a woman-centred technique

J Smith,^a F Plaat,^b and NM Fisk^a

"Although much effort has gone into promoting early skin-to-skin contact and parental involvement at vaginal birth, caesarean birth remains entrenched in surgical and resuscitative rituals, which delay parental contact, impair maternal satisfaction and reduce breastfeeding. We describe a ‘natural’ approach that mimics the situation at vaginal birth by allowing (i) the parents to watch the birth of their child as active participants (ii) slow delivery with physiological autoresuscitation and (iii) the baby to be transferred directly onto the mother's chest for early skin-to-skin. Studies are required into methods of reforming caesarean section, the most common operation worldwide."

Please cite this paper as: Smith J, Plaat F, Fisk N. The natural caesarean: a woman-centred technique. BJOG 2008;115:1037–1042.

Here is a link to an abstract of his article, and a chance to download to the whole thing:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2613254/


Here is a link to an magazine article about this new procedure.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article6028478.ece

Planning a Good Cesarean

Here is a link to a

UK Midwifery Archives page titled "Planning a Good Caesarean Section"

http://www.radmid.demon.co.uk/csgood.htm

It's amazing how much I can relate to the stories, particularly the first complaint of "Karen, 33"
Who writes:
"Things that didn't help:
Not being given the choice to see my daughter being born. I would have liked the screen to be down so I could see but this wasn't offered - and at the time I was too concerned for my daughter's welfare to even think of it but would have said yes if asked."

Also pretty amazing is the story by "Tikki" she sais:

"I read a magazine article about a woman in the UK who birthed her own baby with a C/S! The surgeon asked her to reach down to feel the baby's head, and she just started to pull, and he let her! There's active involvement."

I am starting to imagine a time when disconnected "sheet-up cesareans" are as passe as lifting the baby up by it's heels and smacking it's bottom!

Spiritual Cesareans

Here is another link I found.
It's about doula care for cesarean sections .
It's the reflections of a doula who took a day course with Lanell Coultas about attending cesareans.

http://doulaemily.blogspot.com/2008/12/experiencing-spiritual-cesarean.html

I wonder how many hospitals allow for doula care during cesareans?

Spiritual Cesareans

The term "spiritual cesarean" popped into my mind a few days ago, so this morning I searched the web. This link is to the Birthing From Within website and I thought it started to address the idea I feel forming. Definitely worth a read.

http://www.birthingfromwithin.com/cesarean_birth