Lessons Learned in the Hospital Part One: Take Your Pain Meds!

After the c-section, I received pain medication through an IV for the first night in the hospital. The next morning they got rid of the IV and gave me two percocet and a motrin. For some unfortunate reason that I will never understand, no one explained to me how often I was supposed to be receiving more doses of these drugs. I think the nurse who gave them to me was expecting my pain management team to come by, but they never did.

In any case, I assumed that they expected me to tell them when I was in pain so they could give me more drugs. After all, the nurses were asking me to rate my pain every few hours when they came to check my vitals. And that's what I did for one or two doses. I waited for the nurse to ask about my pain level and then I asked for more drugs and she brought them.

Well that system quickly failed. After a particularly long feeding and pumping session, my stomach was hurting quite bad. I attributed it mostly to the uterine contractions that naturally occur with nursing and pumping. But then I stood up and tried to walk to the bathroom, and the pain hit me like a tidal wave. BAM! The color left my cheeks, my whole body started to shake violently, and my poor, terrified husband called the nurse.

She quickly gave me more drugs and fussed at me for not already having a pain management schedule established. How was I supposed to know? I’ve never done this before! Plus, I have two babies, and one of them is so little and fragile and needy. We mothers tend to give everything we have to our children before we give ourselves the scraps, don’t we? Well lesson learned; take your pain medicine so that you can take care of your babies.

You would think that after that terrible episode I never forgot to take my pain medicine again, right? Wrong. I did forget again, during the transition home from the hospital. But that is a story for another day!