Postpartum Healing

So real quick. Postpartum and healing. This is something that's been on my mind a lot lately since I just had a baby and quite a few of my friends have too or are about to.

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Recently we were home for Thanksgiving. A friend of mine just gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, her first. We had a wonderful visit with her sweet, new little family. When we got back to where we were staying that evening, someone asked me how she was doing and if she was all "healed".  I said she was doing really great, and really happy, but as to the second question I looked to the asker in confusion. What do you mean by "healed"? Physically. They wanted to know if physically she had made a complete recovery.

I'm pretty sure my face hid none of my unamused glare. First of all, 5 days postpartum you're still walking like you just had a baby... because you did. Second of all, that's no one's business.

I used this moment to educate the men in the room about what it really means to "heal" after giving birth to a baby.

Things don't just miraculously go back to being normal. You can tear inside and out.

Sometimes you don’t tear at all, but still your insides just went through quite a trauma and that alone takes 4-6 weeks or more to heal well. There are different degrees of tearing. They can be so slight you may not require stitches, or they can be so severe that it’s not only your skin but muscle as well that is torn through. The tears can be up, down, sideways, zig-zagged, and all over or just in one spot. You may require only 2 sutures or you may have so many that your care provider tells you you don’t really want to know.

My two birthing and healing experiences have been quite different from each other.

Currently I’m in my 12th week of postpartum, healing from my second son’s birth. Supposedly the wounds I received were not extensive. I had a few internal tears, and quite a few external in all different directions and in some spots it never occurred to me for tearing to be possible. To me that seemed like no big deal compared to the care I needed after my first birth, but it took a long time for the midwife to sew things up. It took me a few weeks to take a peek down there to see what was going on. I didn’t really want to, it was still sore and tender and I wasn’t sure if I was emotionally ready to see how such a delicate part of me looked.

 I looked, and I wasn’t happy. The stitches had mostly dissolved but i was left with healed wounds that looked as if they’d never been sewn together at all. After a quick google search (because we all need reassurance that we are not the only ones, right?) I discovered many forums with hundreds of comments from women who all had gone through the same recovery issue. A couple weeks later I had my check up with the midwife who had delivered my son and she said it all looked healed, healthy, and normal. But the reality is that it may be healed, and technically healthy, but it is not normal.  There will be no “Back to normal” this time, it will take having another vaginal delivery and someone competent enough to repair things better.

When I had my first son, the healing was different. In the end I was given an episiotomy due to his heart rate dropping drastically. His hand was up on his face and I had already started to tear a little in the 1st and 2nd degree, but he needed to come out a little faster. I hadn’t wanted an episiotomy but under the circumstances I wasn’t upset about it. Before the numbing agent had set in my OB made the first cut. That was the only time during that delivery that I yelled out in pain. I felt those scissors cut through my skin and muscle and it was not pleasant.

At this point my poor brother in law looked at me and asked, “Emily, what’s an episiotomy?” and I explained the basics of the procedure to him as his eyes got wide and a look of concern crossed his young face. He’s probably one of the only 17 year olds around who now knows some of the interventions of birth.

My husband told me later that the OB looked over at him with the most apologetic and horror filled face when that happened. I was sore for much longer with that cut than with just the tearing. I could not sit comfortably for almost a month. For months I would catch my breath every now and then if I squatted or stretched just right as the scar tissue would be tight and inflexible.

Women will tell you that the first few times you have sex after a baby can hurt, be uncomfortable, or not really enjoyable. But I had never been told that if you have an episiotomy it may last longer than “the first few times.” For roughly 9 months after the fact there were always varying degrees of uncomfortable and occasional wincing. Learning to be gentle with the scar tissue that needed to be softened and stretched was hard and many times brought tears to my eyes and much self consciousness along with it. At times I wondered if I had accidentally received what is known as the “husband stitch”. But in the end everything did go back to the “normal” I had been used to before baby came.

One delivery left me healed up and closed correctly, but with lasting pain. The other has left me open and upset with minimal nerve tenderness and a whole lot of self consciousness and emotional distress.

All this to say, don’t ask or assume that a woman is “healed” or “back to normal” or that they need to “lose the baby weight” (they already did, it’s called having a baby) immediately following delivery.  Women are superheros, but even superheros take time to heal from injuries...unless you’re wolverine of course. Instead, go the extra mile to make things a little easier for someone you know who has just delivered. That goes for both vaginal and C-section mamas. You never know if they’re still having a hard time months after the fact. Women are tough cookies, we grin and bear it, we stretch ourselves thin even when we know we shouldn’t for our own health reasons because that’s what we do. So lend a hand, remind us to slow down. Do some reading up on the process of what they go through and all that comes with it, birth education isn’t just for pregnant women and greatly benefits everyone.

Ok, off my soapbox now.