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The Montclair Times
Author of Essential C-Section Guide leads discussion June 3
Thursday, May 27, 2004
By ELIZABETH S. LUDAS
At 1:30 in the morning, about two and a half years ago, Maureen Connolly was trying with great difficulty to shift position in bed so she could feed her infant son, Sean.
It gave her a great idea for a book.
Though she had prepared for childbirth, reading up and taking a course in the Bradley Method, Connolly wasn't prepared for the cesarean section she ended up having with her first son, Jack, now 5.
Or for its miserable aftermath.
That night (or morning), still in bed, Connolly began making notes, listing the information she wished she'd had the first time around, about things like anesthesia and how it feels to come out of it, the kinds of incisions doctors do, how to prevent or relieve pain, how to hold a baby and how to breastfeed when you've just had major surgery, how to promote healing, and many other topics.
The book Connolly imagined, "The Essential C-Section Guide," has just been published by Broadway Books, a division of Random House.
Co-written by Dana Sullivan, the book's comprehensive subtitle is "Pain Control, Healing at Home, Getting Your Body Back — and Everything Else You Need to Know About a Cesarean Birth."
Connolly may have been in pain that night, but she was thinking clearly: "Everything in the table of contents was in those notes," she told The Times last week.
A longtime magazine writer and editor, Connolly has worked at Parenting, Woman"s Day, Self, and Family Circle, focusing mainly on health, which stood her in good stead when she began the book. Her co-author, who lives in Reno, Nev., is a contributing editor at Fit Pregnancy magazine. Between them, the two women have had five c-sections.
When Connolly told her childbirth instructor about Jack's birth, the response was, "I'm really sorry."
Even at the time, that struck her as wrongheaded, and looking back at her preparation for childbirth, Connolly realized how scanty the c-section information had been. She said childbirth educators are afraid that by talking about c-sections, they may be seen as somehow endorsing them, when the point is really to deliver a baby safely.
She likens the experience of a c-section after hours of labor and pushing as having run a marathon and being "denied the pleasure of running that last winning mile."
"I thought I was in full control," she said, "but the bottom line is, how your baby decides to be born is beyond your control."
Connolly wants mothers to know that giving birth by c-section is not a failure. But many new mothers are likely to feel the same mingled elation and disappointment that she felt, and Connolly thinks the chapter "Dealing with Mixed Emotions" may turn out to be among the best-read in the book.
Connolly said the authors had the help of dozens of experts in the field, including a maternal-fetal specialist at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, as well as the first-hand accounts of many mothers. The book is neither for nor against c-sections; with both humor and "heavy-duty health stuff," it provides the information a woman needs to prepare for a cesarean birth, and to recover from it.
"Let's take away the idealistic image about childbirth. It should be okay if it's not the Hallmark picture-perfect experience," Connolly said.
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