A small percent of the large population of women who give birth have difficulty with prolonged pain, opioid use and poor functional recovery. This may be the first opiate exposure and significant health challenge in a young woman's life.
In our previous work, we have identified 20% who are at highest risk for prolonged pain and delayed opioid cessation and functional recovery with usual care. Moderate to severe pain on postpartum day 1 is a significant predictor of being in the risk group. The optimal intervention to mitigate this risk is unknown.
We plan to test an intervention of low dose gabapentin or placebo to be escalated by a pain medicine doctor as needed. We hypothesize that additional care of women predicted to be higher need by virtue of their postoperative day one pain score (\> 6 x2) despite usual multimodal analgesic care will lead to reduced need for opioid, less pain and more rapid functional recovery.
