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Complications include a slow heart rate, a mild low blood pressure that can be treated by an anesthesiologist giving you some medications. Some people, as I said, get nauseous. And usually that’s a side effect of the medication. And occasionally as mentioned before, you can get a post-spinal headache. Again, this is a positional headache associated with the size and type of the spinal needle that we used. Major complications include any nerve injury that’s to the lower back of your body. That’s called, in a very technical way, Cauda Equina syndrome. Occasionally you can get cardiac arrest or severe low blood pressure. Rarely you can have bleeding into the epidural space causing what is called an epidural hematoma. That epidural hematoma may cause some nerve damage. Also, you can have infection to the space, causing meningitis. Those complications are extremely uncommon, because we take all the precautions to provide a spinal and epidural anesthesia in a very safe way.
