Mothers will often say that having a baby via Cesarean section is much easier than vaginal birth. Having a C-section means getting to skip out on painful labor, vaginal tearing, and bowel and urinary incontinence. But that’s just scratching the surface. A C-section is a barbaric surgery in which layers of skin, subcutaneous tissue, and muscle are sliced through before a large incision is made within the uterus to get to the baby. So, in reality, to call a C-section “easy” is unfair to the millions of mothers who’ve undergone the surgery. That’s why a Facebook post by Raye Lee of Springfield, Missouri has a lot of mothers cheering.
On August 19, Lee posted some dramatic photos of her body after having an emergency C-section. She dropped the bandages to reveal a scar from a surgery that was, in her words, “the most painful thing I have experienced in my life.” In her post, Lee detailed how her body was ripped into and she felt the “pain of a body cut apart and stitched back together.” After undergoing six long weeks of recovery time, Lee realized that having a C-section was far from taking the “easy way out.”
Here are photos that she posted after her surgery:
Here’s her full post that’s been shared over 21,000 times.
LONG DRAMATIC POST WARNING:
“Oh. A c-section? So you didn’t actually give birth. It must have been nice to take the easy way out like that.”
Ah, yes. My emergency c-section was absolutely a matter of convenience. It was really convenient to be in labor for 38 hours before my baby went into distress and then every contraction was literally STOPPING his HEART.
Being told at the beginning that I was displaying great progress and wouldn’t need a cesarean section… and then being told that I was being prepped for major abdominal surgery was not a shock at all. It had nothing to do with the fact that I physically couldn’t because I was given no other choice to save the life of my child. Oh, and that surgery is super easy peasy to recover from.
WRONG, That is all sarcasm.
This was the most painful thing I have experienced in my life.
I now belong to a badass tribe of mamas with the scar to prove that I had a baby cut out of me and lived to tell the tale.
( because you can die from this, you know. )Having a shrieking infant pulled out of an incision that is only 5 inches long, but is cut and shredded and pulled until it rips apart through all of your layers of fat, muscle, and organs (which they lay on the table next to your body, in order to continue to cut until they reach your child) is a completely different experience than I had imagined my sons birth to be.
This was not pleasant. It still isn’t.
You use your core muscles for literally everything… even sitting down, imagine not being able to use them because they have literally been shredded and mangled by a doctor and not being able to repair them for 6+ weeks because your body has to do it naturally.
When that first nurse asked you to try getting out of bed and the ripping pain of a body cut apart and stitched back together seared through you, you realized the irony of anybody who talks about it being the “easy way out”. So fuck you and fuck how you see what I did.
I am the strongest woman, that I know. Not only for myself, but for my beautiful son… and I would honestly go through this every single day just to make sure I am able to see his smiling face.
