When he is out on this side of my body, the doctors ask if I want to hold him first or have him examined. The examination should only take a few minutes, they say, and will happen right there in the room with me.
“Examine him,” I say instantly.
I didn’t trust my body during pregnancy because I have known its betrayal. My body had created its own death and, despite all the tests that proved otherwise, I still could not believe that it could create a perfect, untarnished life.
I couldn’t let myself fall in love with my baby before I knew it was safe.
On November 23, for the first time in seven weeks, I was allowed home. The nurses gave me a shot of morphine for the road and then we were there, home, all together, for a whole afternoon.
That day, my dad’s hand:
12:30pm, Harriet singing in the shower.
1:30pm, free! Home!
I had been feverless for long enough and had just been taken off the liquid IV food. The pain in my back for which I was taking morphine was, everyone hoped, manageable with Tylenol.
7:50pm, back to 8A. No need for Ivy until 9am for Caspofungin but best to hook it up early in case of need for morphine.
9:30, 37.4 C
10:50, Ivy hooked up again
11:30pm, morphine and Imovane
5:30am, morphine
9:30am, more morphine
The plan for the rest of the weekend was to get me ready for discharge on Monday. My mum noted that on Sunday we went to the mall together, had Swiss Chalet for dinner, then were back at the hospital “for the last night.”
Monday I was discharged. It felt very anticlimactic: I didn’t believe the cord had really been cut. Sure enough, Tuesday morning I had a fever, my dad called the doctors, and they told us to come in.
It was always my dad who drove me into Emergency, always late at night when the fevers spiked, always rolling down the winding highway that had been carved through the Don Valley, following the river. The dynamic felt Greek: my father and I heading to war, my mother, a Penelope, stoking the home fires.
H & D at emerg 2:10am, 38.9 C, 49.8kg
blood taken, urine sample, chest X-ray at 3:20am
4:45am Ivy hooked up.
Wednesday discharge, back home; Thursday a new fever, back to the hospital.
H & D at emerg 1:30am, 39.9 C, 48.5kg
10:05am ultrasound, cheerios.
Dr. G. 1pm, morphine. Antibiotics starting.
The nurses were trying to keep me off the IV food; if I became dependent on this it would be all the more difficult to leave. The things I ate over the next two days: popcorn, an apple, juice, pretzels, more popcorn, more juice, another apple. I didn’t keep much of it down. On the third day, the IV food was hooked up.
Monday was my mum’s birthday. My dad wrote:
9:30am, called Mary on her new cellphone to sing Happy Birthday.
My mum wrote:
1pm, walk, playing Scattergories, much laughter.
2:45pm, Dr. H examines H. Better than yesterday.
* Ask Drs tomorrow if magnesium thru IV at home.
Lots of techno features on new phone!
My parents went out for an hour and a half to have pizza by themselves, and I was with my nurses. I watched while Jenna made my mum a birthday hat out of a large plastic cup, using a rubber tourniquet for a chinstrap and some tape to make a bow on top. The nurses had planned a birthday surprise for her, all coming to sing “Happy Birthday” at the shift change at seven p.m. so both the morning and night nurses could be there.
There’s a photograph of my parents flanking me as I lie in my cot, my hair all fallen out but my head already fuzzy with new growth, all of us smiling so hugely, my mum holding the cup-hat to her head, and I think now: Isn’t it remarkable how and where we are able to find joy?
Safe. He’s safe.
I know it isn’t biologically true, but looking at my baby in the minutes, hours, days after he’s born, I feel as though I’m looking at a representation, or manifestation, of my own interiority. An emissary from the invisible.
The vernix, the ashy, waxy white coating he’s born with, is still on the insides of his butter-soft arms, behind his knees, in the folds of his neck and hips. That’s from inside of me. But then, so is all of him. And if he’s some kind of reflection of the state of myself, I feel a compound relief: we are both perfect. I feel a purity I’ve never felt before. In the rules that I’ve invented, Arlo is evidence that everything is just fine.
Did you know, actually, that growing a baby in your body can heal some of the small broken parts? Stem cells migrate across the blood barrier of the placenta and target sites of injury. The cells live in the mother’s body for decades.
After repeated ultrasounds and X-rays of my back, the doctors of the infectious diseases department determined that the pain I was feeling in my ribs, a pain so bad I needed regular morphine, even though I hated the feeling it gave me, was a pleural effusion, something that sounds not at all like what it is. I knew effusions to be some kind of unrestrained heartfelt outburst, but medically they are an escape of fluid into a body cavity—in this case, the lining of the lung.
There was a thought to intervene and drain it, my dad wrote, but it is best left alone—there is little to gain by draining it. This time, having seen what had happened before, the doctors decided that the intervention risked causing further damage, outweighing its possible benefits.
On December 6, there’s a photo of six of my nurses standing grinning around my bed, my dad standing behind them in the doorway. No bags are hanging from my IV, the grey cord and plug looped around its neck, ready to find a new owner; and a gift bag with yellow smiley faces and pink tissue paper is on the bed in front of me. A goodbye present from the nurses. I’m wearing my short wig and looking away from the camera, happy.
The doctors said I could continue medications at home, my dad newly trained by a home care nurse to give me my daily infusions of the Aspergillus medication I would need for up to six months. The plan was that I would come to clinic every week, then every month, then every three months, then six, then twelve. I would have been happy to go back every day forever, so long as it would mean I would be safe.
But after that, I never had another night in the hospital. There were no more fevers, no more complications, no more treatment, no relapses. At first things were tentative. The journal continued day by day, always written by my dad, as he performed my infusions every evening, and as he continued to bring me to my check-ups and medical procedures and blood tests.
For the first weeks, all my visitors were still noted—friends, family, the home care nurse—as well as the places I went. The mall, the movies, a friend’s house. He’d take my temperature every night and note whether I had nausea, but also, because it was a novelty, he would note if nothing happened. Quiet day, he’d write, I imagine with such pleasure, with a profound new enjoyment of quietness. When you’re living it, you never know when something will be the end. This could just as easily have been another one of the interludes, in between fevers or other complications.
I was like an astronaut who had become used to the rhythms and constraints of living in my little space station, and now I was cut loose in the darkness, the vastness, of eternity.
We bring Arlo home in the early morning. I say early, but it was really more like ten or eleven a.m. I hadn’t slept in three days, though, and because it was overcast—the sun hadn’t emerged that day from behind the duvet of clouds—time felt softer than ever. It was early in that it was a new beginning. The reason for our home had arrived.
We made this house for you, I think, as we carry our baby through to the kitchen.
The light is grey but bright, like day-old snow. I get the good camera from the back room and take a picture of Cal sitting at the table he built, holding A
rlo, so small, asleep, in a grey woollen jumpsuit that’s far too big for him because I just didn’t believe babies could be as small as everyone said they were. Arlo’s cheeks are round pink apples and his ears have been copy-pasted from my own. His eyes are still puffed closed from the labour of his journey here (they’ll only be open for a few minutes this whole week). And his mouth, his perfect raspberry-pink mouth, and those fingernails, so small and still so perfect.
With his right index finger, Cal is holding Arlo’s whole hand, and this meeting point is in the centre of the photograph. Even in sleep, Arlo’s grip is strong: you can see the creases in his tiny fingers as he holds on tight. The dogs are both looking intently at these hands, too: Disco’s black head is cocked to the side right beneath Cal, and Fox is keeping at a slight distance, by the window, but his head leans in, curious.
This, right here, has become the narrow and expansive focus of my whole world.
That night I have a bath by myself—my first time by myself, truly, in forty weeks. I think it will feel significant, but it doesn’t really. The baby isn’t something I’m desperate to be away from. In fact, I want to be near him always.
Getting out of the bath, I rub lotion onto my calves, my shoulders, my belly, holding for a moment there, feeling the stretch of skin. Candles in the bathroom light up the night, though I have no idea what kind of night it’s like out there, and won’t for days. What’s inside the house is all that matters to me right now. Absentmindedly rubbing my newly empty belly and looking out the window, thinking of my love and my baby sleeping in the bedroom, I say, very quietly, “Thank you, house.”
January 23, 11:50 p.m., 2003
It has been cold enough this winter (as usual) to make the outdoor skating rink in Tannery Park behind our house.
(I haven’t been out flooding yet this winter, other people have been looking after it so far this year.)
Anyway, Harriet and her friend P. decided to go out for a skate this evening, about 9:30 pm. Very clear and cold, about -15C maybe, and lots of stars out. Orion & the big dipper easily spotted, with Polaris. I went out with them, but not on skates this time.
It was deserted for some reason, and the ice was pretty good. So the girls had a good skate around for maybe 15 or 20 minutes, but we all came in again before frostbite set in. Harriet looked great.
That’s all.
Not much other news really.
David
This was the last post in the forum.
The three of us, our new family, on a drive together. Arlo is three days old. The leaves in the forest are pale yellow, pre-gold. Looking out the window I see two old men driving in a burgundy sedan and I burst into tears, my whole face instantly wet.
“What’s wrong?” Cal asks.
“One day, Arlo will be old and we’ll be dead and we won’t know how he’s doing,” I say, sobbing inconsolably, aware again of this asymmetry of the love of a child and the love of a parent, and it makes me sob even harder thinking that, once he’s an old man, though I trust he will mourn our loss, he will—I hope he will—reach a point where he won’t even mind that we’re not there to call him up and ask how he’s doing.
Cal laughs, reaches for my hand, and I look up from our baby. In this moment, I am alive, and he is alive, and Cal says “yes,” smiling at us both, “that’s the goal.”
THANKS TO: My family—the one I came from and the one I made. My friends—from then, now, and always. The nurses, doctors, and staff at The Hospital for Sick Children. For reading early drafts: Katharine Campbell, Laura Dawe, Michelle Engel, Caroline Schuurman, Lucy André, my dad. For believing in this book and giving it a place in the world: Stephanie Sinclair, Jared Bland. Melanie Little, for the important details. Editors at VICE and the Globe & Mail who published some of these stories in essays: Jennifer Schaffer, Arielle Pardes, Catherine Dawson March. The Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Canada Council for the Arts, who all supported this book, affording me more time to work and the confidence I often needed to continue. And thanks to you, for reading.
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