If you don`t love the gruesome details of surgery as much as I do, then don`t read this...

This is the best picture I could take of my haircut and I felt like a loser as I tried to get a good one. I really should be doing laundry right now!

Anyway, I loved the article in the New Yorker about "How Childbirth Went Industrial". Dr. Gawande is a great writer and the kind of surgeon who really thinks about all aspects of medicine. Its a fascinating and scary history of modern birth. As a former homebirther turned surgical birther I can truly see all sides of the issue. Here`s a link that you have to paste yourself since I can`t get blogger to get it to work:
www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/061009fa_fact

I`m pasting the description of the C/s birth because as much as it is not the best situation to have a surgical birth, it is still a birth & still very amazing.

"The Cesarean section is among the strangest operations I have seen. It is also one of the most straightforward. You press a No. 10 blade down through the flesh, along a side-to-side line low on the bulging abdomen. You divide the skin and golden fat with clean, broad strokes. Using a white gauze pad, you stanch the bleeding points, which appear like red blossoms. You slice through the fascia covering the abdominal muscle, a husk-like fibrous sheath, and lift it to reveal the beefy red muscle underneath. The rectus abdominis muscle lies in two vertical belts that you part in the middle like a curtain, metal retractors pulling left and right. You cut through the peritoneum, a thin, almost translucent membrane. Now the uterus—plum-colored, thick, and muscular—gapes into view. You make a small initial opening in the uterus with the scalpel, and then you switch to bandage scissors to open it more swiftly and easily. It’s as if you were cutting open a tough, leathery fruit.

Then comes what still seems surreal to me. You reach in, and, instead of finding a tumor or some other abnormality, as surgeons usually do when we go into someone’s belly, you find five tiny wiggling toes, a knee, a whole leg. And suddenly you realize that you have a new human being struggling in your hands. You almost forget the mother on the table. The infant can sometimes be hard to get out. If the head is deep in the birth canal, you have to grasp the baby’s waist, stand up straight, and pull. Sometimes you have to have someone push on the baby’s head from below. Then the umbilical cord is cut. The baby is swaddled. The nurse records the Apgar score.

After the next uterine contraction, you deliver the placenta through the wound. With a fresh gauze pad, you wipe the inside of the mother’s uterus clean of clots and debris. You sew it closed with two baseball-stitched layers of stout absorbable suture. You sew the muscle fascia back together with another suture, then sew the skin. And you are done."