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3rd Trimester
Intrathecal Anesthesia
Has anyone heard of this? Are you going to try it? I want to go au naturel as long as I can. However, it's my first so I'm just trying to be prepared and not get disappointed if things don't go as planned.
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Re: Intrathecal Anesthesia
Intrathecal anesthesia refers to a spinal. ?(Intrathecal is one level deeper than epidural.) ?***Skip to the last paragraph if you want to skip the technical stuff!
In this case, you might have read something which was referring to a combined spinal-epidural, or a small spinal dose for pain relief. ?Some people refer to a combined spinal-epidural with very low dose local anesthetic medication as a "walking epidural" but very few practicitioners actually let their patients walk because of the risk of getting weakness in the legs. ?Nobody wants to see a pregnant person fall.
Basically, the difference between intrathecal anesthesia and epidural anesthesia is that the medicine is that much closer to the nerves coming out of the cord, and requires much smaller doses of medicine to get you numb. ?However, unless your anesthesiologist uses the smallest needle available, you run this risk of getting a "spinal headache." ?And the medicine will wear off, unless they put an epidural catheter in the intrathecal space to pump medicine in continuously like we would an epidural. ?And then you have a >50% chance of having a terrible headache. ?
The verdict? ?Yes to intrathecal (spinal) anesthesia for C-section, or as part of the combined spinal-epidural. ?No to a one-time or repeated shots for pain relief during labor, or worse yet, them putting in an intrathecal catheter for labor for vaginal delivery.?
?Hope that helps you.
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