Five hours after a planned cesarean delivery, a 42-year-old woman noticed both sides of her face swelling near her jaw and ears. She had seen this before. After her previous C-section, also done under spinal anesthesia, the same puffy swelling had appeared and cleared up on its own after three days.
Her doctors concluded that the cause was not the mumps virus but anesthesia mumps, a rare and usually harmless swelling of the salivary glands that can follow surgery and anesthesia. The report, published August 31 in Clinical Medicine Insights: Case Reports, comes from researchers at Baxshin Research Center and Komar University of Science and Technology in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq, along with a co-author in Nepal. What the authors call novel is the repeat: the same reaction across two pregnancies, both delivered under spinal anesthesia.
