Epidural didn’t work on back ?

[Happynappy1]

Had a birth on Saturday night/sunday always knew I wanted an epidural at first it worked really well felt hardly anything just enough that I could feel when I was contracting enough to push. Eventually the cramps/ contractions in my back where being felt 10/10 pain but my legs and rest of the body where numb it just wouldn’t work In my back. I ended up topping up the epidural loads and all that happened is my legs and stomach went extra numb and my back stayed in pain. I then was whisked off and had to have a spinal block which worked while they stitched etc. has anyone else had an epidural work but not on there back im scared to have another one in the future Incase it happens again. Midwife was baffled about me still feeling it in my back. The pain has traumatised me a little.

Exact same happened to me. Really awful and traumatic. Happened twice sadly. Never really got an adequate explanation for it. Ended up with a spinal first time round.

It could be that the catheter wasn’t in quite the right place or had moved, in which case the anaesthetist should have checked it. Sometimes it needs adjusting or sometimes moving your body position can help. I’m not a midwife but look after epidural patients after surgery and if the epidural isn’t in the place we’re told it should be covering there are a few things we try such as position change and increasing the rate before getting the anaesthetist to fiddle with it.

Was your baby OP? Babies pointing the wrong way tend to cause more back pain and may be harder to get comfortable even with a decent epidural.

Unfortunately 1:8 epidurals just don’t give adequate pain relief to be the sole analgesia in labour. There are some tricks we can try (different drugs) to get the pain relief better, but if you’ve got a pretty dense block everywhere else then using these tricks will probably just increase the chance of complications due to to dense/high a block.

To have got numb legs and abdomen the catheter was in the epidural space and jiggling about with the catheter might have meant that the block stopped working so well for the ‘abdominal side’ of things. Even when it is in the right place though there’s no absolute guarantee it’ll give perfect analgesia. This doesn’t mean that the same thing would necessarily happen again if you have another pregnancy and decide to have an epidural. HTH.