27 hours of labor and 7 hours of pushing revealed something to me and my team of doctors and nurses that we had never considered: the scar tissue at the rectal site prevented the birth canal from stretching to the point it needed to in order for the baby to come out. We had all worked so hard to prevent a c-section in fear of dealing with scar tissue that we never considered the obvious.
Every time I would push the baby would come down just a hair and then go right back to where he had been. This went on for SEVEN hours. All of this after he spent the last four months of the pregnancy sitting on my cervix begging to come out. One of my two OBs in the room had spent part of the day searching for literature on post-protelectomy females and vaginal births and found absolutely nothing. That's not to say there aren't women out there that have had their rectum removed and had a vaginal delivery, but there is nothing in medical literature to guide an OB through the process.
You would think that after such a traumatic labor for both me and the baby, as well as after 3 months of strict bed rest, having another baby would be far from my mind. But a mere six hours after the baby came I said to my husband "next time we do this I'm going to have a GI surgeon identify where we can safely cut for a c-section". My husband was speechless.
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