It was December 15th, 1957 when she went into labor at a hospital in Dublin, Ireland. As she floated in and out of consciousness, she remembers being taken into a room with a single bed.
“I was pulled to the bottom of the bed. My legs were strapped into stirrups. I was nine months pregnant, flat on my back,” she says. “I was helpless and I did not know what was going to happen.”
“[Then] I got a local anesthetic and the torture began.”
As a room full of medical students and doctors looked on, McCann says she could feel the pressure of a scalpel cutting into her. From then on, it was “just agony, literally agony,” she recalls. “I got a cramp down my left side and I could not move at all to get myself any relief.”
McCann, struggling against the searing pain, couldn’t see what the surgeon was doing to her. She assumed he was performing a Caesarian section, but he wasn’t. He was slicing into her pelvis to make way for her baby.
McCann, now 88, was undergoing a symphysiotomy — a procedure seldom used by other industrialized nations by the mid-20th century as Caesarian sections became safer.
Symphysiotomy is a surgical procedure whereby the pubic symphysis — the joint that holds the pelvis together — is cut in order to widen the birth canal during labor.
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As bad as the pain was, McCann claims that she wasn’t told about the procedure, and says that “secrecy” hurt even worse.
“He was obviously sawing me in half,” she says. “Why they couldn’t come and tell me?”
“It left me feeling guilt and it left me wondering on what effect it would have on my baby later in life. It was having a very bad effect on me so it was bound to have some effect on the baby.”
“It never dawned on me that there was an alternative,” she says. “But I think I would have taken the Caesarian.”
Before McCann lost consciousness on that terrifying night at the hospital more than 57 years ago, she recalled the surgeon telling a student, “When she has a fine baby boy or girl in the morning, she will forget all about it.”
But she says she can’t erase the devastating impact of her symphysiotomy. “It has been a lifetime,” she says. “It’s been a life sentence.”
