No sex is worth this risk

I saw this arti­cle, via Glenn, and I was sim­ply in dis­be­lief.

Appar­ently there are cou­ples who have sex dur­ing labor and deliv­ery. Did you hear me? Let me phrase it another way just to be sure I got the point across. There are actu­ally women who have sex with their hus­bands in the hos­pi­tal either while they’re in the midst of labor — or shortly after giv­ing birth to their babies.

Not being a med­ical per­son my objec­tions were purely in the ICK cat­e­gory and I was going to write a piece along those lines, then I spoke to my wife who has been a reg­is­tered Nurse for 27 years.

While shar­ing the ICK fac­tor “Don’t tell me a woman wants to get back in the sad­dle imme­di­ately after birth!. the first words out of her mouth when I men­tioned the arti­cle were: Air Embo­lis

Here is what med­ical news today says about Embolism

An embolism in a med­ical con­text refers to any large mov­ing mass or defect in the blood stream. An air embolism is an air bub­ble trapped in a blood vessel.

Why is that a dan­ger? read on.

When an air bub­ble trav­els along an artery, it moves through a sys­tem of blood ves­sels that grad­u­ally become nar­rower. At some point, the embo­lus will block a small artery and cut off the blood sup­ply to a par­tic­u­lar area of the body.

and this can be fatal:

For venous air embolisms, death may occur if a large bub­ble of gas becomes lodged in the heart, stop­ping blood from flow­ing from the right ven­tri­cle to the lungs

And there are spe­cific exam­ples of this as can be found in Post­grad­u­ate Med­ical Jour­nal.

We describe the cases of two young women who died due to air embolism dur­ing sex­ual inter­course early in the puerperium.

Puer­perium meaning…

: the period between child­birth and the return of the uterus to its nor­mal size

Lis­ten I’m an old mar­ried man, it will be 25 years in April and I’m a big fan of sex in mar­riage, but even the best sex in the world is not worth risk­ing the mother of your chil­dren par­tic­u­larly at the very start of one of their lives. To do so is the def­i­n­i­tion of self­ish­ness and narcissism.

Take a deep breath, a cold shower and just walk away.