‘The Retrievals' is not meant to scare you
Hi Retrievals listeners,
Episode 2 drops today!
If you missed the Episode 1 newsletter, about what led me to report on the problem of severe pain during C-sections and the people trying to solve it, you can find it here.
Episode 2 takes up the question of 'why?' Why are patients feeling everything during C-sections? It's not an easy question to answer, and in this episode, we hear what happens when a doctor gets up onstage and asks a ballroom full of anesthesiologists to wrestle with it.
Last week, when we announced the new season on Instagram, hundreds of readers responded in the comments, often with personal stories of painful C-sections. Others questioned whether it was even a good idea to put this type of content out there on Instagram.
Personally what I find scary is that 100,000 U.S. patients a year are feeling significant pain during major abdominal surgery and that hardly anyone knows about it. Yes, it would be great if everyone could have a one-on-one consultation with an anesthesiologist before they even go into labor. It's not such a pie-in-the-sky idea: People are thinking about how to make this a reality. (Search this report for 'prenatal anesthesia consultations.') But right now that's not how our system works.
So now that you know that this can happen during a C-section, what do you do with that information?
Often the answer to this question is: Advocate for yourself! And, yes, but that should not be the only answer. The responsibility should not be on patients to fix this problem. Yesterday a listener sent me an email saying that when the doctors tested her spinal block before her C-section, she could tell the block wasn't working. Initially she was met with disbelief, and so, lying exposed on the operating table she had to, she wrote, 'project manage' the OR in order to get the care she needed. You should not have to project manage your own C-section.
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