Australian mum Gerri Wolfe, 41, has hit the headlines for literally helping with her own caesarean.
We’re talking reaching inside her open stomach and pulling out not one, but two babies while on the delivery table.
Already a mum of nine, Wolfe decided she wanted to have what’s called a ‘maternal assisted caesarean section’ (apparently it’s a real thing) when delivering her 10th and 11th children, Matilda and Violet.
Unsurprisingly, her doctor was initially skeptical about the unconventional operation but Wolfe insisted, “It’s my body, it’s my birth, it’s my baby.” As Wolfe’s fifth caesarean she was adamant that she wanted to be more involved. “[The doctor] was quite willing once he realised the risk of infection wasn’t as high as he perhaps thought,” says Wolfe.
“I came to him and said: ‘This is what I need to reclaim my birth – to make it more personal for me, so I can be a good mother’.” Wolfe’s OB-GYN eventually came round to the idea and allowed her to lift her twins from her stomach during her scheduled C-section on December 22 at John Hunter Hospital in Newcastle, New South Wales.
Wolfe scrubbed in and wore two sets of elbow-length gloves for the procedure – one of which was removed just before her involvement – to make the birth as sterile as possible. “I wasn’t allowed to touch anything,” recalls Wolfe. “I wasn’t allowed to move. I wasn’t allowed to do anything until they had told me to. That way, I was completely sterile – I wasn’t supposed to touch anything.”
When instructed by her OB-GYN, Wolfe reached down and first pulled out Matilda, then Violet, who was breech (a bottom down position), which made lifting her out slightly harder. “I reached out with my right hand and someone helped me turn her around the right way and put her on my chest as well. And then I had both of them!”
Source; uk.lifestyle.yahoo.com