Right at the time that this new person is growing inside me, my mother is being treated for cancer. There is chemotherapy and surgery, and she is in and out of hospital. I long to tell her, but don’t want to worry her, or put her through disappointment if this does not work out.
Now that it seems to be happening, the urge to be a mother is insistent, and in those first few weeks, I’d do anything to guarantee it. Sell everything I own, make Beelzebubian pacts, donate an organ. And I know then that if the whole experience ended today, or next week, or before I get to thirty-nine weeks, I’d never be able to lose this urge. To go back to not wanting a child.
At seven weeks, my obstetrician insists on an early scan. This tiny thing – a clump of cells, a pink line on a test – is too small to show up on a pelvic ultrasound, so the scan is transvaginal and a wand – that’s the word used – is inserted inside my cervix. This is the part where I am meant to believe in magic, or invoke the occult. The screen is a blur of layers and shapes and it’s not until she smiles, and calls my husband in, that I notice I’m holding my breath. She points at something minute and says there is your baby. I allow myself to fully access the feeling. To fill myself up with it. It is utter joy, in its completeness.
The urge, with good news, is to share it, but we are too nervous, not wanting to tempt fate. Each day passes, a clash of savouring the feeling, of willing the weeks to clock up, knowing that the baby is getting stronger. After the tests comes the fear. Life is about to go off road, and nothing will be the same again. And what do you do with such a tiny being?
On the day of the scan, I enter one hospital and my mother is discharged from another. The last two months have been relentless and good news is sparse. It’s late November, and she is at home propped up in bed. We visit, saying we have an early Christmas present for her. Sitting on the bed, I hand over the blurry image, a thin square of shiny, photographic paper. She stares at it, trying to figure out what it means. Then there are smiles and tears. She berates herself for not guessing, but she has had a lot to deal with. At Christmas, it will be twelve weeks and we can start to tell friends.
The weeks progress and there is no sickness except for a diabolical nausea every morning unless I eat. Tiredness that hits like someone bashed me over the head with a brick. I crave sweet things and bake brownies, eating trays of them as quickly as I can make them. The early kicks, a fish bumping against the glass of its bowl. I appear on TV and a friend’s mother says, so casually, even your fingers looked fat. Strangers have an opinion on the pregnant body: whether the shape is huge or neat, if it’s a boy or a girl, if your breasts are more pendulous, if your hair is shinier, if you are – a saccharine state – ‘glowing’. Everyone says with a concerned head tilt that you’re overdoing it. People you would not share a spoon with place their hands on your stomach, oblivious to the intrusion. The pregnant body is not solely its owner’s domain. In gestating another person you become public property. The world – women in shop queues, neighbours, the internet – is full of unasked for comments and advice.
The months stack up without incident. The scans, which are regular to keep an eye on things, have nothing to report. A sonographer lets slip the sex at twenty-one weeks, but I already knew it was a boy. My body, which I have learnt not to rely on, does everything it’s supposed to do – until the very end. Three weeks before the scheduled C-section, I see my doctor, and, on the walk back across the car park, a strong pain creeps into my lower back. Instead of lying down, I drive to B&Q, and in a fit of nesting, buy shelves and paint. The pain lingers, a series of aftershocks. As the rumble in my spine persists, I remind myself this boy is not due for another twenty days. That night, my husband makes me laugh and it happens. Waters gush and I drip an amniotic trail up the stairs. We dash into the night, forgetting the hospital bag, knowing that he is on his way.
From laugh-leaking to birth, the whole experience takes less than three hours, and there he is. The cry as he emerges from the crescent of my body is the most real sound I’ve ever heard. A unique note, a song between us. There is surprise, gratitude, relief. In the hours after my son arrives I throw up all the opiates I’m given and cannot stop looking at this tiny boy. The pulse of his fontanelle, the pink of his perfectly formed limbs. His hands coiled like a secret. This is what every mother does, and has always done. Basked in the newness, this never-before. Of him, of the dawn, of the feeling of being someone’s mother now. The drugs pull me from nausea to exhaustion, but my eyes refuse to close, not wanting to miss a minute of him.
In those first days, someone comes to check his hips. The old unease, the wait for everything’s fine, takes even longer with him. I realise it will always be this way. My pelvis – over-operated, much drilled, bone-shaved – has pulled off a pregnancy. It holds fast until a year later. When my son is nine months old – the length of a baby’s gestation, crawling and grabbing and curious – I find myself in the same bathroom, with the same black-worded declaration in a small plastic window. This has not been planned. I am overcome with shock, and with sheer luck. It is hard to believe that my body has bounced back. After all that I have asked of it, it responded. In one afternoon I go from shocked tears to bliss to the same old fear. There will be two babies in two years. Please stay, please be OK, I say.
No two babies are the same. Pregnancies too. I am barely a year older, but the obstetrician suggests a nuchal fold test, which leads to another test. Fifteen weeks in and I am lying on a table as a man plunges a giant needle into my stomach. The procedure has a 1 per cent chance of causing miscarriage. It feels like a horror film, watching myself through my fingers, trying to disassociatively observe the scene from above. The results take two long weeks. The whole fortnight is anxious, even my son’s first birthday party. I smile and pass cake around. A phone call finally confirms that all is fine, and because this has been about chromosomes I ask what the sex is. A rustle of paper, the muffle of a phone held between chin and shoulder. It’s a girl. Being pregnant at all feels like a miracle. I have never had a preference about the baby’s sex. Two boys would be fine. But she will be a she. A girl. Our daughter.
Things go as they did in my first pregnancy, until pain starts in my pelvis and vertebrae, settling itself in, a squatter in my bones. After nearly two decades, I am reacquainted with crutches, shuffling back and forth to the maternity hospital for physiotherapy. The physio is sympathetic, but has to press harder, to dissipate the knots that spasm around my hip’s shattered hull. I go with it, and do that silent kind of weeping women do in hospitals, while she works deep into my muscle tissue, leaving dark, angry bruises for days afterwards.
In pregnancy the body is a vessel of cartilage and sinew, of uterine layers. The corpus (more religious connotations), the main body of the womb, carries its fragile cargo, a ship crossing new straits. Salt on the skin, saline in the veins. This pregnancy starts to resemble drowning. My lungs are bad sails, refusing to fill with air. They slump, not billow. Doctors conclude that the problem might be heart damage, caused by the earlier chemotherapy, but after tests – more wires and screens and measurements – nothing conclusive is found. The only evidence of this pregnancy is the weekly photos of my growing stomach that my husband takes. The thriving bump at odds with my disintegrating hip. If I recall this pregnancy at all now, there is not a moment devoid of pain, and of pounding physio. Of craving oranges and citrus, of flaming heartburn, of twisting pillows under my joints as I chase sleep. Those months were to be endured, not enjoyed. Never have I been more aware of the calendar, of days passing, of watching the clock.
The pains start on a Sunday and when they wouldn’t stop, we drove to the hospital. ‘You are not in labour,’ they said. I’d experienced contractions when pregnant with my son, enough to know differently. Briefly I am back on the usual merry-go-round of making representations on behalf of my own health. After eventual admission, I lie in a room with five other women. A young woman, late teens maybe, so thin all over, her belly a disproportionate cauldr
on. An older woman with multiple children; a young Latvian woman who talks non-stop on her phone, a flat-lined monologue, the sort New York cab drivers have via Bluetooth for an entire fare, to someone on the other side of the world.
Day turned to evening, and I roll in the bed, gripping the sheets like a life raft. My husband fetches a nurse who again insisted, ‘You are not in labour.’ I distract myself and think: What does your face look like?
I talk to our daughter between contractions: I’m here. You’ll be here soon. I can’t wait to meet you.
Later, in the dark, the six trace machines beeped, answering each other. One woman is wheeled away, wailing, and I know there will be no sleep. Nearer to midnight, the pains gear up. The only relief is to walk the corridors, clinging to the walls. Hospitals are lonely. Despite the bustle and noise and non-stopness, it’s not hard to feel alone. It is worse at night, when the day clinics are closed, all the visitors gone. No one passes me on these walks, soundtracked by shouts and moans, the click of monitors and drips, the lights from phone screens blinking behind curtains.
‘Are you OK?’
A young nurse notices the path I’ve worn out, the repetitive circles I’m moving in. My obstetrician, who is out of town, miles from Dublin, is phoned and says she will drive back through the night. The due date is still a month away. My daughter and my body are about to part ways. The bones have had enough, and I wonder if there were whispered negotiations. Could you leave early? This isn’t working out. What I know of my daughter now, with her kindness and empathy and ready-for-anythingness, is that she would have politely agreed. Maybe even smiled, before steeling herself and launching out into the world.
A nurse administers a steroid injection to help speed up the growth of her lungs. I phone my husband, who is sleeping, and tell him to come back to the hospital. Later, on a trolley outside the operating theatre, I call him again, suspecting (correctly) that he’d fallen back asleep. Please hurry. She is four weeks ahead of schedule. If something goes wrong, I don’t want to be on my own.
Spinal block, hospital gown, doctors working at the other end of me, over the fence of surgical sheets. The best sense to rely on here is aural. My body is half numbed, the lower half uncommunicative. I can’t see over the screen, or past the swarm of medical staff, so I listen, as though waiting for birds at dawn. Straining to hear her first cry, the indication that she is here, and she is OK. With C-section babies, you hear them before catching a glimpse. A pair of hands pushes down heavily on my stomach, a rolling sensation. Pressure, tugging, and then she is lifted up and out into the world. Crying into the surgical air. Her colour is worrying, and two nurses rush her to the other side of the room. They busy themselves with masks and tubes, and bring her back after what feels like days. I am allowed to hold her for less than a minute, and then she is gone. To the floor above, the sea of plastic boxes in the neonatal unit. I spend her first night in the world without her. A nurse takes a photo and brings it to my bed, and because I’m morphined up, I alternate between crying and vomiting. I nod off for only minutes at a time, to crazy, narcotic dreams. Later, my husband wheels me to the lift, an emergency plastic bowl on my lap in case of guerrilla vomiting. Under the lights, her colour shifts. Eyes closed, she looks as though she’s concentrating hard, working something out.
Microchimerism occurs in pregnancy when cells from a foetus move through the placenta, binding with those of the mother. Babies are born and leave a trace, a cellular contrail. They remain inside us for life, burrowing deep into marrow. I am moved to know I will always carry a part of my children inside me. I also know I will never do this again. My body is done. Stomach and womb stitched up, like the binding of a book. A new seal will show up soon. The joints have taken a battering, and somehow will have to be fixed. My body is further away from the pristine thing it was when I was an infant like her. It depletes and declines, and yet it gave me these children. Whenever an image of the difficult months ahead appears, of negotiating with orthopaedic doctors, I look at her face. The tiny pulse in her neck and the soft seams of her eyelids, shut tight against the world.
Panopticon: Hospital Visions
There is a chance that you entered the world in a hospital. First cries ringing out beneath stark lights. Emerging from under the blue sea of your mother’s surgical gown. At once subjected to the medical gaze. Weighed and watched, doctors listening for a sign that says I am here, I live, I breathe. The snail shells of bunched fists jabbing at air.
The hospital’s hulk squats over many hectares. Inside, the layout unnerves: white mazes, sharp right angles and endless corridors. The patient is a minnow, navigating streams between the X-ray lake and the reservoir of outpatients. Crossing the borders of cubicle, room, ward, corridor.
While working on this piece, a medical issue arose. Another one? I think, never surprised by the ease and regularity with which a body can falter. I stall and take painkillers, I stall when the swelling won’t abate; I stall until I know I cannot ignore it. The GP dispatches me to the ER of a women’s hospital, the one where my children were born. Admitted, cannulated in pink and purple (when did medical tubing get so girly?) and intravenously treated until surgery the next day. Is there a chance you could be pregnant? An obligatory question before treating any woman. The pain doesn’t stop, getting incrementally worse. Explaining the actual sensation is like attempting to describe an individual experience of having children, falling in love, or grief.
Trolley-trundle and siren-blare. I’m on lates this week. Whirr-blink of machines. Food trays rattling. Nuuu-rrsse! The three notes the blood pressure pump sings on completion. Pinging of patient call bells. Squeak of sensible footwear. The pneumatic door hinge opening and closing like bellows. The ghostly exhalations of those who took their last breath here. Hospitals are rarely silent. In 2013, Brian Eno composed ‘77 Million Paintings for Montefiore’, a piece composed for a hospital in Brighton. It was, perhaps, an attempt to combat the medical hum, to obliterate the cacophony of that space. A generative piece, it changed and evolved, playing in the hospital reception. On another floor, a longer work, ‘Quiet Room for Montefiore’, was also broadcast, intended to promote healing, or replace the standard hospital soundtrack: movement, vending machines, visitors, the sound of other people’s suffering.
In a top-floor room, there is a source of consistent, broken tapping. I assume it to be birds. That’s THE bird, a nurse explains. A fake bird on a string to scare off other birds. Eternally in flight, its carbon fibre wings bouncing off the flat roof. I try to find a rhythm in each landing every time the wind drops.
The air conditioning goes unnoticed by me for weeks. Until it appears like tinnitus, and the rattle becomes an anti-earworm. Nurses and cleaners tell me they can’t hear it, but it thunders through every night. The tell-tale heart beneath the floorboards, the woman inside the yellow wallpaper.
Do you hear that? The haematologist addresses the student doctors ringed around my bed, a white-coated picket fence. A clot sounds like a creaky door, he says.
When they leave, I listen for its hinges.
Hospitals are not unlike galleries. Interactive spaces; a large-scale installation of sound and colour, evoking emotion and working on the senses. The art on the walls here mixes modernity and old votives. State-funded canvases alongside Sacred Hearts and religious statues. On the longest corridor, the hospital’s spine, black paintings hang at clockwork intervals. Abstract, inked, their form and meaning unclear. I look down whenever I pass them. Bit depressing, aren’t they? says the porter pushing my wheelchair.
After her daughter spent time in an orthopaedic hospital in the 1940s, British artist Barbara Hepworth met the surgeon Norman Capener. Hepworth was better known as a sculptor, but Capener invited her to sketch and draw operations over a two-year period. In ink, chalk and pencil, Hepworth captured not the gore and invasiveness, but the work of fixing the body, of surgical intervention. Hepworth claimed that both careers had similarities:
There is, it seem
s to me, a very close affinity between the work and approach both of physicians and surgeons, and painters and sculptors. In both professions we have a vocation and we cannot escape the consequences of it. The medical profession, as a whole, seeks to restore and to maintain the beauty and grace of the human mind and body; and, it seems to me, whatever illness a doctor sees before him, he never loses sight of the ideal, or state of perfection, of the human mind and body and spirit towards which he is working.
New day, new cubicle: the woman in the next bed speaks conspiratorially into her phone. My urine was clean.
I TOLD YOU.
A curtain is not a door. Confidential consultations hang in the air, a murmuration of medical words. A swallow swoop of numbers and percentages. Someone on the other side speaks Russian – doctor or patient? Spasíbo, they whisper. Thank you.
An opinion piece by a doctor appears online, about the overcrowding problem in Irish emergency departments. Hospitals are over capacity because patients have been ‘decanted’ into emergency departments. It’s an unusual choice of word. Patients compared to fine wines, their bodies filtered into the cut-glass crystal of casualty.
In the women’s hospital, the nursing staff, mostly Filipino and Irish, are attentive and kind. They are paid considerably less than doctors. Why are there so many men in gynaecology? I ask one. It’s the highest paid field in medicine, so . . . money.
If, as Le Corbusier states, a ‘house is a machine for living’, what is a hospital? A machine of another kind, maybe, but one that contains nothing of the domestic. A warehouse sprawl of technology, temporarily housing people, but devoid of the familiarity of home. It is a panopticon, where there is little privacy, and the patient is always visible in some way, if not always actually seen. The hospital is a place of necessary quarantine where control must be abdicated. Inside, there are risks. Of not waking up post-anaesthetic, infections, encounters with MRSA, the hail of germs from sneezing, tissue-less visitors. The overly solicitous chats from the stranger in the next bed.
Constellations Page 8