Susan Burton

To know she's not alone.

To know she's not alone.

But on the other hand, Vanessa says it was infuriating that this happens more than most people know.

Vanessa, remember, she's a health care provider herself.

And now she's like, doctors should know about this.

There should be a protocol for this.

Something could have been done to address my pain.

Why wasn't anything done for me?

Yes.

So I talked to a lot of doctors trying to understand why this happens and also what it feels like for them when it does, right?

No doctor wants a patient to be in pain.

Most of them were not seeing extreme cases like Vanessa's in their operating rooms, but they'd all been in situations where a patient was feeling too much, especially early in their careers.

One thing we haven't talked about yet is that during a C-section, the kind of anesthesia you have, most likely you will feel sensation.

Most of the time that sensation is tolerable, but because doctors expect sensation, including the sensation of pressure, it can become this slippery slope.

And so as I got deeper into these conversations with these doctors, they helped me understand like the whole range of things that might be going on in the OR.

Some of the things are like systemic things in hospitals.

There's an anesthesiologist who's on call in the middle of the night.

There's an emergency on another floor.

They're stretched thin.

And they help me understand power dynamics within the OR.