They were for our er.. enjoyment isn’t really the word, although the pictures were of my son emerging from a mostly bloodless incision and immediately after NOT the earlier parts of the surgery. My wife kept being injected with so much fentynal she was afraid of missing it and wanted me to take the pics in case she passed out.
There is no visible nudity or blood and intestines flailing everywhere. 
Maybe we might show it to our son someday.
My first daughter was born via emergency c-section after she went into distress during labor. I am not squeamish at all so I wanted to watch everything. I was too excited about being a first-time father to really pay attention to what they were doing but it is fairly gory. It has to be because the doctor has to cut a hole in the abdominal wall large enough to pull a baby through and there is other stuff in the way.
The thing I found most surprising was just how fast an emergency c-section is. I barely had enough time to get my surgical scrubs on before they started cutting and my daughter was out just a very few minutes after that. I am not sure exactly how many but it seemed like less than 5 minutes. It is kind of good if you are the father though. You get to hold the baby first because the mother is still being stitched up while the nurses are cleaning up the baby and checking the weight.
Most husbands don’t watch BTW. They have vertical sheets that block your view. I had to ask specifically to watch and promise that I could handle it. They don’t need another patient if the father faints.
I was there, and taped, my wife’s three c-section and it was nothing gross even remotely. It helps that my wife is a doctor, that I teach science, and that the 2 doctors dpoing the c-s were friends.
What most surprised me was how matter-of-factly everything was,; they docswerejokingthe whole time. My wife could not see it becuase there was a screen, but since she had them performed a couple it was not like she was missing anything.
It depends. Mine right now is in front of the TV watching the news.
Just reading this thread is making me queasy and I’m a woman. I could never watch someone in childbirth. I just could not!
The Museum of Science here in Boston has an exhibit on “The Miracle of Birth” that includes a set of birth videos that are more explicit than the ones they showed us in the hospital birthing class we attended before having MilliCal. One of the videos is a C-section, and it looks nothing like the OP’s description.
Of course, if you want operations in which internal organs are piled on top of the body, there ARE plenty of those. Just ask Pepper Mill about her eye operation sometime…
So C-sections are performed while the woman is “awake”? I assume that this is due to some sort of numbing technique that is preferable to traditional general anesthesia.
See, Leo, when I hang out at the dog park, which I do often, I just confine myself to playing with all the dogs there, which is what I go there for in the first place.
ETA: Saves me the trauma of hearing stories like that.
Do any of the doctors or medical people on the board know if the patient would ever be allowed to watch the proceedings herself (presumably via mirror) if she wanted to?
I would expect that general anesthesia would be dangerous for the baby. It’s tricky enough getting the dosage right for one patient at a time, let alone for two different patients of vastly different weight.
I happily watched my daughter being born by C-section 15 plus years ago. There’s no need to be queasy about it at all. They have to cut through stomach muscle and a few other things, but it was a miraculous experience to see the doctors go in for my daughter, and pull out a perfectly healthy, crying, bloody, peeing little girl!
I loved it, and I got to hold her within seconds.
Yep. It’s either an epidural or a spinal block, depending on the doctor’s preference, the medical condition of the mother and if there’s already an epidural in place (like if the mom’s been laboring with an epidural for a while; they generally won’t take out the epidural and place a spinal, they’ll just use the epidural.) But unless there’s a lot of bleeding or other complications, mom is generally awake and alert.
Depends entirely on the doctor and how many people are in the room. I was at a teaching hospital with a lot of students, and I was not averse to having them in the OR. There was simply no room for a mirror with all those med students shoulder to shoulder. Most US doctors are a little hesitant to allow moms to watch their own c-sections, but if you have a friendly one, you can talk her into it.
There’s a newer c-section technique being used in the UK that’s meant to mimic more of the aspects of natural childbirth, and includes stopping after the incision and delivery of the head to remove the drapes so mom can see. "Natural" cesarean mimics vaginal birth experience | Reuters
While I am sure the anesthesia has some effect, the baby is not anesthesized: I had general anesthesia (because things looked a little potentially dicey and a general is much faster), and everyone told me that he came out screaming. This is apparently normal. (My husband, for what it’s worth, was standing in a room waiting for them to come get him: they took him away to change his clothes for an urgent C-section, and while he was gone it turned into an emergency, no waiting C-section.)
Where I work, we use generals for emergencies only- such as a cord prolapse, a placental abruption or other prolonged deceleration of the fetal heart rate. I can think of a single case of a general as a patient request. The woman has a serious anxiety disorder. Our policy is ‘From decision to incision, 20 minutes or less.’ It is usually much less, and those can be a scary few minutes!
Ask for an OB-GYN that also offers one hour simonizing.
“Abruption.” New one for me. Good word.
Of course a mother would do anything for her child, but aren’t spinals painful?
They’re less painful than a doc slicing open your abdomen and uterus without anaesthesia! 
Let’s put it this way.
An epidural involves inserting a needle into the spinal cavity: there is a prick, a sense of ‘something’ moving down the spinal column, then blessed nothingness. Shit, you can have your belly slit with a SCALPEL, cut through a few layers of abdominal musculature, have a baby pulled out and apart from some sense of tugs and pressure, feel no pain.
Unmedicated childbirth on the other hand…
Oh, and placental abruption is when the placenta detaches from the uterine wall prematurely (either prior to or during the birth of a baby) causing massive haemorrhaging and probable death both for mother and child.
JFYI
At least with my wife there was an initial injection with a insulin size syringe of some topical anesthetic over her spine, then out came the epidural syringe. :eek:
This is not the usual insulin syringe you’re used to seeing your whole life, the needle alone is large. They also had a hard time getting it into her spine with much wrenching like jamming a screwdriver.
She saw none of this it was occurring behind her back, and said she only felt the initial small syringe prick, when they inject the epidural she said it felt like it instantly dropped down her body and feeling was gone below it… Good thing because the spinal epidural injection freaked me out more than the surgery, it looked like jamming a screwdriver into someone’s spinal column.