Jesus, you really said that? No wonder you capitalize “Wife.” It probably is a required part of your life probation.
Sure, baby is hopefully fit enough to scream after being extruded through the birth canal, so when baby is suddenly pulled out via the C section cut,
baby is quite a bit louder and clear about how he definitely wants to go back in straight away !.
I can say that, as an RN, I almost universally have to ask folks to clarify what they mean when they use the word “stomach”.
Most frequently they seem to mean “abdomen,” but that is still too vague for me. I usually ask them to either point to or place their hand on the area they are describing (and the places they pick run everywhere from actual stomach area to bladder, to liver, to belly button).
I think the thing your friend saw that he thought was stomach was probably uterus. Everyone knows the stomach is a big pink blob. So is the uterus, which is exposed during a C/S.
My point is that I was at the time under general anesthetic. The baby, apparently, was not.
OK, so my friend who had a c-section said they DID take out her intestine and check it to make sure they hadn’t nicked it. (She made sure her husband didn’t look because she knew he couldn’t take it.) My other friend who had a c-section concurred. I know they were drugged and all, but how would they be wrong about this?
They may not be wrong. Shit happens (pardon the pun), and if the doctor has reason to think she nicked the intestine, then yeah, she better check it really well, 'cause a nicked intestine can lead to Very Bad Things.
It’s just not a routine part of a regular c-section to need to do so is all we’re saying. Not that it’s never happened, but that it’s not routine.
What is routine is people mistaking the umbilical cordfor intestine. And they do routinely visually inspect the umbilical cord for how many vessels and arteries it has, it if has an knots or any areas missing the stuff called Wharton’s Jelly that should surround it. The condition and anatomy of the umbilical cord and placenta tells the doctor a lot about certain potential health conditions of the baby.
The thing is, people mistake the umbilical cord for intestines because it looks like what people *expect intestines to look like. When intestines are still inside you and functioning, they don’t really look like a long unlinked sausage. They’re bound together by tough membraneswhich also hold blood vessels and nerves. The doctor would have to cut this membrane for the intestines to look like a long sausage. In fact she’d need to cut the mesentery just to remove the intestine far enough for a person lying on her back to see it, now that I think about it. Intestines aren’t stretchy and they’re connected in lots of places.
So an umbilical cord looks more “intestiney” than an intestine does, and is definitely removed and inspected during a c-section. Intestines don’t look very intestiney and are not routinely (or easily) removed from the abdominal cavity during a c-section.
*These are not living tissues, this is a dead specimen on someone’s dissection table, probably a pig’s intestines. When it was alive, these tissues were pink and moist and larger with fluid, more like the first picture. But I include it because it’s a fantastic shot of the mesentery membranes with their blood supply.
They count and check visually the blood vessels–why? That the baby had been oxygenated (?) and “fed” correctly?
I need a fainting couch just reading this thread.
/shame
In my professional life I have delivered a baby. I have seen all manner of blood, death and destruction. During the birth of both my children (one vaginal one c-section) I stayed up by the ex-wife’s head. When its strangers it doesn’t bother me at all. When its someone I care about I prefer the view from the cheap seats.
Are you a LEO, by any chance?
His profile says Gemini.
Maybe. But he ain’t a liar.
WhyNot, that’s fascinating - I guess I’d never seen a picture of live in situ intestines. Zombie movies have been lying to me my whole life.
There are usually two arteries and one vein - the arteries carry blood from the baby to the placenta and dump waste products there, and the vein carries blood from the placenta to the baby, bringing nutrients and oxygen. (This blood is all the baby’s blood, by the way. Mother and baby blood do not mix in a normal pregnancy. The mom’s blood goes from her veins into capillaries in the placenta, and passes very close to, but does not mix with, the capillaries holding blood from the baby’s body. Nutrient and gas exchange can go through the capillary walls, but the blood doesn’t touch.)
Some babies - maybe as many as 1.5% - are born with an umbilical cord that has only one artery and one vein. Generally the single artery can handle the job, but yes, sometimes the baby may be a little underweight or underoxygenated.
But more importantly, the umbilical cord develops at the same time as the baby’s heart and kidneys, and it happens very early in pregnancy, before most women even know they are pregnant. If something went wrong at that time - say, mom accidentally took a medication that causes birth defects - and the umbilical cord is abnormal, then the heart and/or kidneys of the infant might also be abnormal.
Most moms who have gotten prenatal care with a second trimester ultrasound will already know if they have a Two Vessel Umbilical Cord before delivery. But it’s a good idea to check the cord itself, just in case the ultrasound missed it, or Mom didn’t have an ultrasound.
BTW, it used to be believed that a Two Vessel Cord was correlated with a higher risk of chromosomal abnormalities like the one that causes Down’s Syndrome. We now know that it is not, but there are still lots of books and websites which say it is. Just outdated information.
Well, I finally took some advice, and watched a vid, which a chose to get my money’s worth. The vid’s fresh; the kids were 10 days old when I started OP.
It was…something. As to Cal’s suggestion, I actually have watched more than a few videos of eye surgery, and find it fascinating. Which leads me to I think a reason why this procedure seems so weird to a non med: except for the babies, thank God, everything else is unrecognizable bloody stuff. All the other surgery vids I’ve seen, you can see the organ or bone to orient yourself and have something to root for: Yay kidney! Surgeon, you better handle that sucker gently! OK, we all see the bone, scrape or saw gentle now! Even the OK, stitch and close parts I am comfortable with, including layers of fat–fat’s fat, I’d be disappointed if it didn’t look a little gross.
But here, as I say, it’s terra incognita, no matter how many Sex-Ed classes I’ve taken. Only at the very end I was relieved to see that it was in fact a whole uterus-sack the doctor was working on. The baby release and cord snip was a piece of cake. But the excavation up to the wrist to find more treasure started getting to me; then the macramé of the umbilical cords, and, as the medical people upthread said, but I had no idea how long and thorough it is, the examination of the placenta. (The sighting of which was a visual first for **Leo].
What is that sausage-like tube with tight tie-offs every few centimeters? The doctor worked on that for a long time. Plus, when you first see it on the vid, its shown running up and down. When the view turns to horizontal, for a brief but truly scary moment it looked like teeth underneath some smooth forehead. So sue me.
The soundtrack of pleasant feel-good guitar tried hard, but maybe that’s just me. Chacune a son gout.
Any other comments?
For the record, the second sentence in my header still stands, in spades.
You do realize that’s not a standard US c-section, but a c-section of four quadruplets devilered in India, right? That wasn’t a placenta, it was four, with four umbilical cords and I think three sacs (meaning two of the babies are monozygotic twins who shared a sac), but I might have miscounted because the camera work is so awful.
The “sausage-like tube with tight tie-offs every few centimeters” in minutes 7-11(ish) is where the surgeon is sewing the incision in the uterus closed. At the end, you can see him replace the uterus (which is still massively swollen and stretched; in the next few days it will return to it’s normal size, which is about as big as a pear) and then the video ends. What happens after that is he puts in more sutures in the fascia and sutures or stapes in the skin to close the incisions he made through all those layers of tissue.
Here, try this video. It’s literally a “how-to” video with narration so you might get a better idea of what’s going on. - YouTube
Just watched it. Looks easy! And over in just 2 and 1/2 minutes!
So, question time:
I knew it was quads, hence the deep plunging-in to find the babies and the strange number of snaking umbilical cords (and my money joke). Does the fact that the doctors are (presumably) Indian mean a differently trained procedure. Not that that was a point, perhaps you mentioned it only for ID.
I was wondering about this gigantic bag, the uterus. Is it big because of the stretching only? It seemed puffed out hard, like it was full of air.
I didn’t get what you wrote about the tube with tie-offs in the first vid. I think I saw it here–is it like when you fold the matching edges of two layers you want to sew, and you roll them both up and stitch through the roll? So was the first surgeon ham-fisted, rolling up a whole lot? Or was that what was called for, given the situation? (I realize the vid may not allow a good look.)
Also, BTW, I noticed that the woman in the second vid had pubic hair. It used to be that everyone had it cut off, but that has changed. Right? But for expected pre-pkanned surgery I would’ve thought that she would’ve been shaved.
Also, what was that little white ear-shaped thing he was checking just at the end?