As a little background, the women in my family have a history of prolonged bleeding after delivery. When I mentioned this to my doctor, she was especially alarmed because redheads apparently also have an increased risk of hemorrhaging (recessive genes strike again). So, she had taken all the precautions for the delivery, and I didn't have any excessive bleeding.
But, that afternoon I got the feeling that my water was breaking again, except this time it wasn't water but thick, dark blood. And concurrently, my epidural that they had left in for pain management was still not working. So, when I pushed the nurse button and showed her the blood, she called in more nurses who explained that I had a "boggy uterus," which means my uterus wasn't contracting down. The way to jump start that was to massage my uterus . . . that had just been cut open . . . without any working pain medicine. It was the most painful thing EVER, and it happened two more times during the next two days. During this whole time I was telling the nurses that my epidural wasn't working, and they were super condescending and asking me if I normally had such a low pain tolerance. Finally, one night I pushed the epidural button and felt liquid running down my back, and sure enough, the epidural hadn't been in for who knows how long. Weird, it seems like I had been saying that.
At that point they finally gave me pills for pain, and then I was fine for the rest of the stay. I didn't want to leave the hospital by the fourth day because I knew there wouldn't be any kind of nursery to take them at 2 am anymore, and I was going to miss that. Turns out I would miss it a lot more than I ever realized . . .
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