Читать книгу First-Time Parent: The honest guide to coping brilliantly and staying sane in your baby’s first year - Lucy Atkins - Страница 50

 Put bags of frozen peas in a sealed bag wrapped in a thin towel, and put them against your perineum.

 Try regular ‘sitz baths’–a shallow bath in which you bathe your parts (a plastic washing-up bowl of warm water will do). Into this, herbalists at Neal’s Yard Remedies recommend putting a few drops of hypericum and calendula tincture, and a few drops of lavender essential oil.

If you had a Caesarean birth, you’re likely to be feeling pretty wobbly too. Here are a few ways of dealing with this.

 Again, pain relief drugs. Maximum doses. Deny yourself none.

 Get the midwife to show you alternative breastfeeding positions that don’t press on your scar, which is going to be sore.

 Expect to feel weak and make sure someone is with you when you first try to get up.

 Try padding/supporting your scar by putting a sanitary towel between it and your knickers and wearing very high-waisted knickers that won’t rub.

 Move: follow all the instructions you are given about movement, and get up when the midwife says you can. This will help your recovery and reduce your chances of getting a blood clot.

 Remember you just had abdominal surgery. You’re bound to feel a bit dodgy.

However you gave birth, you will bleed for about seven days as if you’re having an excessively heavy period; you will then have normal period-type bleeding, that gets lighter and lighter, for about a month. This is your womb shedding its lining. You might pass some freakishly large blood clots at first–tell the midwife if you pass anything larger than an ordinary-sized plum (!), if it smells foul or if you come down with a fever.

As your womb starts to shrink, you’ll get bad period-like cramps, known as ‘afterpains’, in the first twenty-four to forty-eight hours. To cope with these, use painkillers, massage your lower abdomen and lie on your stomach with a firm pillow or hot-water bottle under it if your Jordan-sized breasts allow. If you hired a tens machine for pain relief in labour, it can help to put it back on.