C-section mamas, please help.
My son was born via emergency c-section on 8/28, he was 34 weeks exactly when my water broke and was full footling breech. They had to T-cut my uterus to get him out because he had sunk down too deep during the very short labor, but my outside scar is small simple and has healed very nicely. Overall it wasn’t a bad recovery, I didn’t lift anything or strain myself while healing, baby was in the NICU for 5 weeks so I was able to recover at home without the stress of a newborn overnight.
The skin around my incision has been numb since delivery day, which I know is totally normal and I know it can take forever to regain feeling there. I’ve been lightly scratching the skin around the incision to see when sensation might start coming back but haven’t felt anything yet. A couple of days ago I started to notice that when I’m standing at the kitchen counter doing dishes or something like that and my stomach is pressing up against the counter, I would feel some discomfort. I figured that it was from the sensation starting to come back in the skin around the scar so I was pumped. But then it started to feel like the discomfort was deeper, so I pressed my fingertips into the skin around the incision and felt something hard. Not scar tissue hard, but like a golf ball sized lump below the incision. I thought maybe a strained muscle or something so I put a heating pad on it and took some Tylenol.
Yesterday I was laying in bed flat on my back, my kitten started nibbling my toes so I looked down to boot her off me and I saw that the lump was poking straight up. I contracted my abdominal muscles to sit up and that forced the lump up even higher. I pushed on it with my fingers again and it was noticeably bigger and it hurt when I pushed on it. When lightly scratching the skin around the incision I realized it’s still totally numb, so the pain I have been feeling when leaning or pushing against it must be from the lump. It’s hard as a rock and now almost baseball-sized. It does not feel attached to the incision site, I’ve been doing scar moving exercises so I know where my scar tissue is, how it feels and how it moves. This is a totally separate thing.
I called my midwife and am waiting for her to get back to me. I had a Paragard IUD put in on 10/23 then went back on 10/30 to have some stuff checked out (I was literally discharging watery fluid and chunks of tissue... I can’t even) and this lump wasn’t noticeable at either appointment. She didn’t palpate my abdomen because I wasn’t complaining of any pain despite the weird discharge, so I’m wondering if she had done that would she have noticed the lump then or did it just appear out of nowhere?
I have not been straining or lifting anything too heavy, just laundry and groceries and baby (now 9lbs). I’ve had sex a few times the past week or so but nothing that I’d think would cause any kind of injury. I did what you’re not supposed to do and googled it after calling my midwife and keep seeing “incisional hernia” or “incisional endometriosis” as likely culprits, but it looks like both are relatively uncommon. Great. Endometriosis doesn’t sound likely since it just kind of appeared out of nowhere, I’d think it would take time for those cells to build up enough to form a palpable mass. Ugh I don’t know.
Pictures for your entertainment. You’ll notice that in some of the pictures the lump is visible above the incision scar, and in others it’s below. It depends on my position so I’m pretty sure it’s not attached to the incision itself. And it’s noticeable even when I’m not pulling my skin taut over it, I just wanted to make it easier for others to see




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