Ectopic Pregnancy and Management: Top 5 Things Patients Must Know
March 12, 2025
Successful pregnancy and the delivery of a healthy child are the dreams of every parent. However, it is not so easy, given that the chances of pregnancy success depend on a lot of factors. A healthy body is a necessity and one or more health conditions can ruin the chances of having successful healthy childbirth. Feeling too much pain, as happens in the case of women with low pain threshold, can also have a negative impact. This is why an epidural during delivery is given. This involves administering a steroid or an anesthetic into the epidural space, or the area around the spinal nerves. It can work as an anesthetic or for pain relieving. Generally, there are 3 main ways how this is done. Find out how an epidural is administered during delivery.
In this kind of epidural, the physician uses one injection of medication into your epidural space. The medication is likely to be a steroid or an anesthetic. When you get one shot of this medication, the space gets numb for a few hours. After this duration, you can get back feeling in the affected spot.
Most epidural steroid injections happen to be single injections. Generally, this type of injection is used for short-term pain relief.
Epidural with a catheter
A flexible, small-sized tube, catheter is introduced into a body cavity through a narrow opening. A catheter is used in the epidural space during most epidural procedures. Through this, you can get a constant anesthetic medication flow into the space in many separate doses or even both.
Generally, healthcare providers recommend catheter-aided epidurals for operations of extended durations. It can ensure pain relief for childbirth and for labor, over quite a few days. With the aid of a catheter, you can get multiple injections of a medication.
Epidural with patient-controlled analgesia (PCA)
This might be recommended for you to recover from some types of surgery. Your doctor may allow you to regulate the extent of pain-alleviating medication that you obtain through your epidural catheter. It is referred to as patient-controlled analgesia (PCA).
Controls can be set on your patient-controlled analgesia pump by your healthcare provider. He can program them for the analgesic administered by your provider, based on the kind of surgery that you underwent, your weight, your age, etc.
You can safely use the PCA pump, given that you obtain medication with a button press when you sense pain. However, unless it is time for you to get another dose, you will not get the medication from your PCA pump. Your healthcare provider can do this for you, making all the adjustments beforehand, so that you do not experience any problems.
As you can see, these are the 3 primary ways how analgesic is administered in the epidural space. You must get in touch with a knowledgeable doctor who can help you to know about all these methods and how to manage or avoid your pain sensations successfully so that you can get over your discomfort and ensure a successful pregnancy.