Speak Up!

 I have six children, and I had six C-Sections.  For the first four there was always some problem with my epidural.  Twice I was put to sleep and missed the birth.  Always it took twice as much time and medicine as the doctors expected before I was numb.  When I was awake I was groggy, and miserable.  I tried talking to anesthesiologists before they gave me epidurals, but they didn't seem to listen, and always felt the epidural would work just fine for them.

When I was expecting baby #5 I finally decided I'd had enough, so I found out who the anesthesiologist was going to be, got all of my previous records, and set up a visit.  This Dr. reviewed the records, listened to me, and told me what he thought had been happening.  He suggested an alternative method of performing the epidural and said that giving me less narcotics would make me less sleepy if that's what I wanted.  Hooray! What the Dr. did worked, and I recovered much easier, and even got to hold Jake not long after he was born.

For baby #6 I talked to the anesthesiologist the morning I was going to have surgery.  I had already requested that he do the epidural the way it had been done the time before.  He wanted to do the epidural the way it had been done the first four times.  He thought there would be no problem.  This time I insisted that he do it the other way, and with less narcotics.  Again, the results were what they should have been, and this birth was better than the first four, even though hospital policy kept Derek across the room instead of holding my hand, and Dan away from me for four hours.

The doctors were not bad.  They were doing what had worked for them many times before on other patients.  What I want to say is that nobody is as concerned about what happens to you, or as knowledgeable about how you feel, or have felt, as you are.  It helps to speak up.  Sometimes you even have to be a little forceful about it.
In the end, you will be glad that you did.