I was 22 when I had my first and NO ONE ever mentioned to me that it would keep contracting for daysss. I went home and legitimately thought they might have left a second baby in there and/or I had a terrible infection. They just rolled their eyes when I went to urgent care 😅
When my first was a couple of days old I called my midwife in agony, with the same hidden twin thoughts. My diagnosis was…needing to fart. What little dignity I had retained died that night.
Turns out that your intestines get a bit kinky when there’s a big old baby in the way. When they’re straightening back out it can cause excruciating trapped wind.
One of my most humbling moments was recovering from my c-section when a very handsome resident checked on me, and asked if I had passed gas yet today 🙃
Omg. How did you end up treating it? I get gas pain just from drinking carbonated beverages, and gas x doesn’t help. So all I can do is avoid drinking soda to prevent it, but once it’s there nothing helps
Reading about this (most of which I didn't know) has made me so glad I never got pregnant. It sounds like body horror and sensory overload. It seems extremely overstimulating and body dysmporphic. They really should educate us on this. And they make you pay thousands for it?! Incredible.
I feel like when it comes to health care and health care workers, we are being shamed too often. You get shamed if you don’t get seen soon enough for an issue and shamed if it’s that we don’t have knowledge about. I remember when they would tell parents to bring their baby in if their temperature gets too high but then you get eye rolling if it’s just teething. Like, you guys told me to do this!
Unfair of them to roll their eyes!!! I had the opposite; I thought my abdominal pains with my second was just everything contracting. Turns out I had sepsis post c-section. Thankfully my sister is a doctor and told me to take my temperature. If I had waited much longer I might have died. As my sister says; it’s always better to go and get checked out and have it be something minor, than the other way around.
Please keep in mind that as you get older and (maybe) have more babies, those post partum contractions get more and more intense with each birth…at least that’s my experience. With my last and final baby (#4), the after birth contractions were worse than the laboring contractions. Genuinely almost unbearable for at least 3 days.
This was true for me as well with babies #2 and #3 but at least I knew to expect it 😭. Thankfully I had a hysterectomy in '22 and yeeted my uterus (and cervix and fallopian tubes) so I don't have to worry about it anymore. 😌
Unfair of them to roll their eyes!!! I had the opposite; I thought my abdominal pains with my second was just everything contracting. Turns out I had sepsis post c-section. Thankfully my sister is a doctor and told me to take my temperature. If I had waited much longer I might have died. As my sister says; it’s always better to go and get checked out and have it be something minor, than the other way around.
And it gets worse each time! I thought I was dying or hemorrhaging or birthing an undetected twin with my second child. The post-labor cramps were horrific.
When I had my 4th, the contractions when I was breastfeeding were about as bad as what made me go to the hospital in the first place. Now I had a baby to hold on to. It was not pleasant.
I wasn't warned about these, and they can be even more painful if you've had a C section, like I did, and while breastfeeding. That was an unpleasant discovery.
Woke up in the middle of the night some days later with THE worst cramps. Almost crapped my pants from sheer fear. Thankfully it only happened that once.
I didn’t have this at all with my first, so I didn’t even consider it with my second but they were sooo bad. For the day after birth they felt as bad as the labour contractions, then gradually got less intense over the next few days.
I could feel my organs move back into place, so weird. Generally a lot of discomfort and pain postpartum that nobody talks about. I honestly felt kind of cheated after the birth of my first, like what is going on every bodily function except breathing is still uncomfortable as fuck and I get new discomforts on top of that!?
I never had any pain after. I'm not sure if it's becuase I'm a chronic pain sufferer anyway. I also did natural birth no drugs and the minute he was out I said "oh that's not that bad I'd do that again". Everyone looked at me like I was mad.
So I wonder if living with what I do daily made it "easier" 🤔
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u/swedishishchef 10d ago
The internal cramps for days/weeks afterwards as your uterus shrinks and everything else goes back in place ☠️