#caesarian

[erebusvincent]

My mom is a small woman. Without a Caesarian I would have killed her. People who criticize c-sections can take a long walk off a short pier.

[emilycollageart]

Scar: not a self-portrait in materials but one in spirit. A scar that was 29 years old on Sunday. It made me a mother. No regrets. #noregrets #noregretsjustlove #opencalltoartists #caesarian #scar #art #londonartist #kolaj #collagist #collagenottinghill #contemporarycollagemagazine#contemporarycollage #dailycollage #collageoftheday #edinburghcollagecollective#collagecollective #collagecommunity #collageclub #analogcollage #kunst #art #londonartist #kolaj #collagist #collagenottinghill #contemporarycollagemagazine#contemporarycollage #dailycollage #collageoftheday #edinburghcollagecollective#collagecollective #collagecommunity #collageclub #analogcollage #kunst #collagewave #cutandpaste #moderncollage #collagecollectiveco #collagecreatives #collageartwork #theideafoundation #loveanalogcollage #FindYourInnerFinn #Visitfinland https://www.instagram.com/p/CqFqe8KqB5g/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[ugandantales]

A gratifying wrench~ Sammi's writing challenge on 'Stitch'

Itching to scratchStitch on my paunchA gratifying wrench © Asiimire Patricia

[dollsahoy]

Looking for information about menstrual headaches--this paper uses very gendered language, but the information is useful.

If I'm reading this right, the prevailing theory about menstrual headaches is that they're due to a sudden decrease in estrogen during that phase of the menstrual cycle, which causes problems because of a combination of withdrawal symptoms and because estrogen may be involved in natural pain reduction ("At a central level, estrogens can activate the endogenous opioid system that controls pain sensations")

Furthermore, this paper indicates that I may be heading for a few years of extra horrible menstrual headaches (like I had yesterday) as I amble my way into perimenopause, because estrogen levels are all over the place as the body starts shutting that stuff down. Yay.

(I am uninsured and so manage the pain with diphenhydramine--generic Benedryl--originally because I thought they were sinus headaches, and you know the joke about Benedryl working because your sinuses can't hurt when your whole head is numb...that applies with this, for me, too)

[agena87]

Contrary to her two first pregnancies, Estela chose to give birth at the hospital this time (while she preferred a home birth before). Good choice, since she had to get a caesarian as the baby was not situated right. Contrary to her two first pregnancies, Estela chose to give birth at the hospital this time (while she preferred a home birth before). Good choice, since she had to get a caesarian as the baby was not situated right.

Welcome to the world, Deianira Specter!

[duxfemina]

Julia Caesaris is so overlooked it makes me wanna scream. She managed to have a happy marriage in a time when that just wasn't much of a thing. Given Cleopatra spent 3 years as a tween in her house we can only assume she mentored the future Pharaoh or at the very least provided tons of information on the Caesars given that's her gens and Julius is her dad so you just know Cleopatra sponged up all this info and used it a few years later when she went to Caesar for help. She was a patroness of the arts and got her husband into them and her death changes the entire course of western history.

Like her death has a greater impact on our world today than Cleopatra's did but absolutely no one talks about her

[randoimago]

So, I'm watching Gravity Falls for the first time. And I just got to say, more shows need hidden codes and secrets because I am unbelievably invested. I'm only on season 1 (episode 7), and some of the codes are a bit more jokes than secrets, but I still think it's such a freaking cool idea.

I am honestly upset that I didn't become obsessed with this when it came out. It would've been my whole personality ngl

[catoswound]

Can you offer some reasoning behind why you think Sallust is the most breedable historian

(1) i have consistently bad opinions (2) i dont know who the most breedable is because i dont actually know a lot of ancient historians <- the hobbyer (3) i think writing about lucius sergius CATILINA 💜 automatically makes you a haremist. which makes you breedable. etc

[attila-werther]

and suddenly, a naked mark antony appears

[coochiequeens]

“So women with access to emergency care are the ones that live,” she said. “Women that don’t, die.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/01/21/gaza-childbirth/

JERUSALEM — Walaa didn’t expect the birth of her fourth child to spark abject fear. But by the time her contractions started, the whole family was frantic.

There were no ambulances to be seen in the streets of Gaza’s Rafah City, she said, now so crammed with displaced families that there was barely any food left available for the 27-year-old.

When her uncle Wissam, a doctor, reached the tent where she had lived for weeks in the cold, he said, he could see they had run out of time. “I’m having the baby now,” she kept telling him. It was dark, and she was scared.

His cellphone flashlight was all they had to see by.

The humanitarian catastrophe caused by Israel’s three-month military campaign against Hamas in Gaza counts some 52,000 pregnant women among its greatest victims. As airstrikes push 1.9 million people into an ever-smaller corner of the besieged enclave, disease is spreading, famine is looming and levels of anemia are so high that the risk of postpartum hemorrhage has soared and breastfeeding is often impossible. Forty percent of pregnancies are high-risk, CARE international estimates.

Prenatal care is almost nonexistent — what remains of Gaza’s hospital network is on its knees, at 250 percent capacity and consumed with treating mass casualties from Israeli bombing. Far more women are giving birth outside of medical facilities — in displacement camps, even in the street — than inside them.

Damage to facilities and communications blackouts — the strip lost cellphone service for a week this month — have left Gaza’s health ministry unable to compilereliable data for infant or maternal mortality during the conflict. But doctors and aid groups say miscarriage and stillbirths have spiked.

“What we know about pregnancy-related complications is that it’s hard to prevent them in any setting, but the way that we save a woman and newborn’s life is we treat the complication quickly,” said Rondi Anderson, a midwifery specialist for the Project HOPE aid group.

“So women with access to emergency care are the ones that live,” she said. “Women that don’t, die.”

The only place that Wissam could find to deliver his terrified niece’s baby was a spot of cold earth between the tents. Aid workers hung bedsheets to give the woman a modicum of privacy. No one had been able to contact Walaa’s husband, and her mother was so scared that at times she had to look away. They cut the boy’s umbilical cord with an unsterilized scalpel and they filled tin cans with hot water to keep him warm. He weighed 7 pounds and Walaa named him Ramzy.

The family spoke on the condition that only their first names be used because they feared for their safety in the event that Israeli troops entered the town.

Baby Ramzy is 5 days old. (Loay Ayyoub for The Washington Post)

They fled their home in northern Gaza so abruptly that no one thought to grab clothes for the baby. This week, Ramzy was swaddled in a onesie outgrown by another child in the camp. He wailed as Walaa, still in pain from tearing during the birth, gingerly pulled herself upright.

The 16-year blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt after Hamas won control of Gaza had already made pregnancy and childbirth more difficult for expecting mothers. Before the current conflict, hospitals often lacked adequate equipment and training for neonatal staff, according to Medical Aid for Palestinians, and more than half of pregnant women were anemic.

Hamas fighters streamed out of the enclave on Oct. 7 to kill around 1,200 people in Israel and take another 240 hostage. Israel responded with a bombing campaign and ground war to eradicate Hamas, killing almost 25,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians, to date.

The South African legal team that accused Israel before the International Court of Justice this month of committing genocide during the conflict argued that the obstruction of lifesaving treatment since Oct. 7 amounts to preventing births.

A lawyer for Israel called allegations that it is obstructing the delivery of food, water, fuel and other supplies critical for Gaza “tendentious and partial,” and said it was working “around-the-clock” to help scale up the volume of aid making it into the enclave.

Hanaa al-Shawa, 23, gave birth to her first child, Ayla, during the coronavirus pandemic, and the little girl, she said, brought her family a “glimmer of hope.” Shawa and her husband Mustafa, 25, were ecstatic when they learned in July that another child was on the way. The war began in October, and the future they dreamed of fell apart. “I had felt overwhelming joy,” Shawa recalled. “I did not realize that this joy would turn into great suffering.”

Nearly 20,000 babies were born in Gaza during the first 105 days of the war, UNICEF reported Friday. Delays in the delivery of lifesaving supplies, the U.N. children’s agency said, have left some hospitals performing Caesarean sections without anesthetic. Spokeswoman Tess Ingram said she met a nurse at Gaza’s Emirati maternity hospital who had helped with postmortem caesarians on six dead women.

“Seeing newborn babies suffer while some mothers bleed to death should keep us all awake at night,” Ingram told reporters Friday. “In the time it has taken to present this to you, another baby was likely born, but into what?”

“Becoming a mother should be a time of celebration,” she said. “But in Gaza it’s another child delivered into hell.”

For the five pregnant women interviewed by Washington Post reporters, fear that mother or baby might not survive suffused their waking thoughts — and made appearances in nightmares, too.

Shawa and Mustafa left their home in Gaza City’s Yarmouk Street in the second week of October. The Israel Defense Forces had ordered 1.1 million people in northern Gaza to move south for what it described as their own safety.

“I was afraid that I would miscarry because of the power of the rockets,” she said.

Displaced Palestinian families from the northern and central Gaza Strip evacuate toward southern Gaza on Oct. 13. (Loay Ayyoub for The Washington Post)

Many pregnant women made the 20-mile journey from north to south on foot, their legs swollen and joints heavy as they carried their luggage, three women who made the journey told The Post.

When Ayla was born, her family had a room full of toys ready for her. The room in which Shawa’s second child, a girl, will spend her first weeks, in a friend’s home in the Tel al-Sultan area, is tainted with asbestos, she said.

“We carried Ayla here in just the clothes she was wearing, and we don’t even have anything warm for her,” Shawa said. “If I’m unable to provide for her, what will I do for my next child?”

Rising food scarcity and malnutrition can cause potentially life-threatening complications during childbirth and lead to low birth weight, wasting, failure to thrive and developmental delays.

Shawa said she had only eaten tinned food, with no access to fruit or vegetables, since she left her home three months ago. Doctors have said her iron levels are low and her blood pressure is high. Mustafa searches daily but has found no suitable medication to control it.

Saja Al-Shaer, 19, started to feel like she was too young to become a mother. Her weight had dropped below 110 pounds, she was anemic, and her husband had not managed to get her medication, either. “He spent three days knocking on the doors of pharmacies,” she said. “I do not know if I will see this child or not.”

In late December, doctors at the al-Aqsa Hospital, 11 miles to the north, received a pregnant woman whose high blood pressure caused eclampsia and bleeding to her brain, according to Deborah Harrington, a British obstetrician who volunteered at the hospital with a Medical Aid for Palestinians team.

The baby was delivered by a C-section, Harrington said. The mother was still on life support when the physician left two weeks later.

“These women are presenting it in much more extreme condition,” Harrington said. “They’re just not getting hypertensive treatment. They’re not being screened for diabetes. If they’re diabetic, they’re not getting treatment for their diabetes.

“They know that actually accessing care, as it often is for women in conflict, is really difficult and fraught with danger. At night, there is often no light, so moving around is really difficult. You can’t call an ambulance because there’s no signal. The women I saw were really frightened.”

Walaa with her uncle Wissam, who helped deliver her newborn son. (Loay Ayyoub for The Washington Post)

From the corner of the damp room where Walaa was tending to Ramzy on Friday, she worried about where they would find clean water or baby formula. Her family had looked everywhere for diapers, but come up empty. In Tel al-Sultan, Shawa was fixating on rumors that Israel’s army would direct them to evacuate again. The walking, the carrying, the sense that nothing around her was hygienic — it all frightened her.

But she had made one decision that no shortage or military orders could change. She would name her daughter after her sister-in-law, killed in an Israeli airstrike weeks earlier while trying to find shelter for her own children.

The girl, she said, would be called Heba. In Arabic, it means blessing from God.

Mahfouz reported from Cairo and Harb reported from London. Loay Ayyoub in Rafah contributed to this report.

[catilinas]

that barbie mugshot meme is like the inverse of every letter where cicero is like our dear brutus 💖🥰🌸🔪💕 oh yeah. and cassius 🙄

[girlcaelius]

i want to make a fucked up roman guy...........

[cithaerons]

i can’t even judge the tumblr bad history caesarians because i would do the same for my boys, i can’t lie.

[jamesgraybooksellerworld]

Suetonius ILLUSTRATED: Ok I missed the IDES of March, This book, with the first Image of a Caesarian Section arrived yesterday, I had no time to catalogue or picture it.

OK AGAIN, Currently there is no reliable evidence that Roman dictator Julius Caesar was born by the method now known as C-section.  At the time of Julius’s birth, there was an prohibition to burring a dead pregnant woman with the fetus intact, this the c-section process was practiced, There is no classical source records a mother surviving such a delivery.  As late as the 12th century, scholar…

[dinovia-grant]

Two things about caesarians:

First, in the US, it may depend on the hospital whether they offer elective caesarians. Also, some insurance companies may not cover an elective caesarian, which may make you liable for the full $50k+ bill. Check with your OB early on.

Second, caesarians are still major surgeries and have their own complications. Wound infection, incision dehiscence (where your stitches tear and the incision reopens), and post-surgical pneumonia are not uncommon for mothers. Surgical injuries (i.e. the surgeon accidentally cuts baby or supporting organs during the operation) and increased trauma response are not uncommon for babies.

Plus, caesarians do not mitigate the changes to the mother's brain or bone density, but they do interfere with the usual hormonal cascade of natural birth, which promotes, among other things, mother-baby bonding, baby's temperature regulation, and lactation. Higher incidences of a complete lack of mother-baby bonding are reported after caesarians, and a lack of mother-baby bonding increases the risk for post-partum depression and post-partum psychosis.

The bottom line is pregnancy and birth are major events in any woman's life and can result in major medical issues and outcomes. The legal option to opt out of an unwanted or non-viable pregnancy should be every woman's right. Period.

In addition, in the US, the risk of maternal death during delivery for Black women is four to five times higher than for white women, and the reason for that is systemic racism and misogyny in (US) medicine.

giving birth sucks tbh. not only do you and the baby you’re birthing almost die, usually you shit yourself and often you tear your taint. then you have to push an organ out of your body (placenta) and if even a little of that remains in your body, you can hemorrhage to death or develop an infection that essentially rots your body from the inside out. even if you had a relatively “easy birth”, you bleed for weeks on end. even after that stops, your body and brain is changed for the rest of your life, the pregnancy leeched minerals from your bones, that can cause osteoporosis later. minor urinary incontinence is not uncommon, brain scans of people who gave birth show permanent changes in their brain, you’re never quite the same.

I say all of this not to say giving birth is disgusting but it is a harrowing and visceral experience. society downplays how fucking awful it is and makes it out to be a ~magical~ experience but it isn’t a magical transformative experience for everyone. it can be an extremely traumatic experience for someone who wanted to carry a pregnancy to term, much more so for someone who did not want to be pregnant in the first place or someone who knows their baby won’t survive the birth. anyway, abortion is a right. pregnancy and birth aren’t just inconvenient, it’s fucking awful.

[remembering-the-future]

Futuristic News Digest: "Gauze Ban Sparks Caesarian Crisis, Hirelings Emerge as New Healthcare Workforce"

By Nova Vance | October 17, 2074

In a landmark move, the Global Health Consortium (GHC) has officially banned all use of traditional gauze in medical procedures, citing concerns about its environmental impact and long-term unsustainability. The shift, which was initially celebrated for its forward-thinking approach to medical waste, has now triggered a crisis in obstetrics, with cesarean sections at the heart of the debate. Medical professionals have struggled to adapt to the new, bio-degradable polymer-based alternatives, which, though environmentally friendly, have been found less effective in critical surgeries such as C-sections. As hospitals rush to restock, a growing number of patients are being turned away or forced into risky, delayed procedures.

The unforeseen consequence of this gauze shortage has revealed cracks in the global healthcare system, particularly in regions where cesarean births make up a significant percentage of deliveries. The introduction of under-trained hirelings—contract laborers with basic medical training—has become an increasingly common solution to the personnel shortage, especially in developing nations and overwhelmed urban centers. While hirelings offer temporary relief to understaffed hospitals, concerns about their efficacy and safety have mounted. Without extensive medical education or surgical experience, they are often assigned to assist in low-risk procedures or post-operative care, but as the shortage of licensed professionals intensifies, their roles have begun to expand dangerously close to operating rooms.

This convergence of crises—an ill-timed shift in medical material policy, a rise in undertrained healthcare workers, and the increasing need for C-sections due to the evolutionary changes in human childbirth—has spurred new discussions about the future of human evolution. Researchers are raising alarms that modern medicine, which has enabled the survival of more complicated births, is influencing human evolution in real-time. The growing reliance on cesareans and assisted births has led some scientists to suggest that future generations may become increasingly dependent on surgical intervention for childbirth, potentially making natural delivery a rarity. As these trends unfold, humanity faces profound questions about how technology and medical policy are shaping not just our present, but our biological future.