“Let your body heal,” the ob-gyn told me.
I was in his office for my follow-up appointment, six weeks after my procedure.
“Tell me the truth,” I asked him, “what is the minimum amount of time I need to wait?”
He helped me down from the table. “I would say three to six months.”
His advice fell on deaf ears. I had a case of selective hearing. Yeah right, three months, I told myself. Let’s start trying now. It should be fine since it certainly would take more than three months. I was tuning out all reasonable feedback while filling up my mind with online advice. The women on these message boards hadn’t waited! They had perfectly healthy babies! Why not me? I knew I was beyond the point of baby fever. I had baby delirium.
My fiancé was willing to participate in anything that would get me to stop sitting around in the dark in my pajamas. During the “fertile window” of five to eight days, it was required that we have as much sex as humanly possible to catch the egg as it made the journey to my tired old uterus. There was lingerie and porn and lube of all kinds to get the motivation going for the two to three sex sessions per day required for this endeavor. By the end of the fertile window, we were sore and tired. Then, we had to wait ten days for the pregnancy tests.
Our impending marriage was completely overshadowed by my obsessions. I was willing to go through with the wedding, but I can’t say I was particularly excited about it. Deep down, I felt as if the only reason my fiancé had agreed to marry me was gone. I forced myself to push through my doubts. I got a light purple dress, he got a matching shirt and suit. The idea of wearing white was simply too ironic for me. I felt as if the Christian God, if there is one, would certainly strike me down on the spot. I was fucking with all his traditions. A whore like me didn’t need to wear white at my wedding. I certainly was no virgin. I was pure as the snow on the highway. I was pissed at God anyway. This God let my baby die. Fuck him.
I was trying on my off-the-rack dress at home after the alterations when I caught a glimpse of my fiancé in the next room. Why does he put up with me? I wondered to myself. This man—I had this man. He loved me. I snapped out of my baby haze to look at this beautiful man. He accepted me for all my crazy. I was trying to squish my size 18 ass into a taffeta dress while he patiently waited for me to come back and watch TV. He thought I was beautiful, and smart, and special. How did I ever manage to get so lucky?
I took another look at myself in the bathroom mirror. I didn’t recognize the person I saw there. Here was a woman who was radiant. She was glowing from the inside. Was that me? Was I this person? For a split second, I felt my happiness. It was overwhelming me. It wasn’t the marriage or the dress. It was the love we had for each other. WE had been through this horrible thing—together. Every man I had ever cared about had hurt me in some way. Not him, not ever. I got out of my dress and gave Christian a kiss. He deserved much more attention than what I had been giving him the past few weeks. I was going to make a commitment to myself to try harder to be good to him. Within a few days, we were married.
We exchanged vows at City Hall in front of a few friends. It was small and special. I stayed in my dress as we went out for oysters. I exchanged my heels for flip-flops. The first time I wore platform heels in the fifth grade, I had broken my leg. This had been one of a handful of times since then that I had put on heels. It is well documented that I’ve always had horrible luck with shoes. At least that hadn’t changed when everything else in my world was topsy-turvy.
Our honeymoon was an exhausting four days. It certainly was not some wild festival of sexual adventure. We had worn that out in the fertile window. It was exhausting because my young, incredibly fit husband dragged me on hikes from hell around the coast of Kauai. I have never been so tired or sunburned in all my life. Sticking a needle in my neck was as close as I had ever come to testing my adventurous side. Now, I was out inching along the side of wet cliffs while the sun toasted my shoulders well past a crispy red. The next day, to cool off we went swimming on a reef. I got sandwiched between some coral and a hungry sea turtle. My legs got battered by the tide trying to swim away. By the last night, I had collapsed on the couch of our condo. This was just the trip I needed. My husband and I held hands, the only part that was not stinging, as we realized we were in this life together.
A few months later, we found out I was pregnant. I peed on a stick in the bathroom of a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. I was still pissed off at God, but I was trying to get back in to the swing of meetings. I needed the support of my friends there. When I saw that my test was positive, I prepared myself for nine long months of hypervigilance. I would have spent nine months lying on my side on the couch if I knew that would make this happen. Every single cramp or creak sent me into a panic. I ate my way through my anxiety, gaining well over fifty pounds. When I heard that I was eating for two, I took this completely to heart. I think I was actually eating for three or four adults.
Every time I would see the doctor, the result would be the same: high blood pressure. Of course, I was a nervous freaking wreck. I had done all the tests, made every appointment. I would see the doctor and panic would set in. Was something wrong with the baby? Was I ever going to stop gaining weight? Would I ever see my ankles again? So many questions before each visit. I would pull out my What to Expect When You’re Expecting book to make notes, my tired, swollen legs propped up on the ottoman after a long day at the hospital. The baby swirled around in my belly as she pushed the book up and down. A girl—we were having a girl. The amnio had confirmed it. With the cat on one side and the dog on the other, I would fall into a nap as I daydreamed about what would happen when she was finally here.
I was so worried about the pregnancy, I never gave much thought about the birth. As it got closer to the event, I turned to my mom for advice.
“What happened when you had me?” I asked her. “What was it like?”
I could hear her take a sip of her Diet Pepsi. This was part of her routine since she had quit smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. At night, she would drink diet soda, watch the home shopping network, and hope for the phone to ring.
“Welllllllll.” She paused. “I don’t remember much.”
This puzzled me. I thought this was one of the most important days of her life, the birth of her third baby, the last one. My mother had told me on a few different occasions that she had wanted to have five children. My father was from a large family and my mother was always lonely as an only child. She had some type of bleeding incident after my older brother was born where they advised her not to have any more children. I was born five years later. The day I was born was the day the cicadas started emerging from hibernation, a once-every-seventeen-years event. My mother would joke that my birth was an event of biblical proportions.
“What?” I asked. “You don’t remember much?”
She continued, “They knocked me out, Trace. I woke up and they handed me the baby all cleaned up.”
I laughed to myself. My mother had presented herself all my life as this super-straitlaced person. However, it seemed like a wide variety of her parenting stories from the ’60s and ’70s had involved drugs. She had diet pills to lose the baby weight (stimulants), nerve pills to “deal with the stress of my brother” (benzos), and now I found out she was knocked out during my birth. I guess she didn’t see them as being drugs since the doctor had given them to her. It’s no wonder I got hooked! I laughed to myself. Okay, maybe there was my whole picking-up-a-needle thing, too. It was a passing thought.
Her top-notch childbirth advice: Take the drugs. Birth was this natural thing involving some mild sedation. A few pushes—voila! They hand you a baby, you put it in cute clothes, and you live happily ever after with your child. That was the way my mother made it sound. Between her advice and a few episodes of those daytime television shows about childbirth, I felt somewhat prepared. It wasn’t until my friend took me to see the movie Knocked Up that the reality crept in: One, I was actually goin
g to be having a baby, and two, I had no idea what the fuck I was doing. Mild panic set in.
By thirty-nine weeks, I had really gained way too much weight. Apparently, cookies are not a cure for morning sickness, especially when ingested at 2:00 AM when you can’t sleep because your stomach feels ripped apart. When you are a fatty and of advanced maternal age, a.k.a. old, every doctor’s visit feels like it’s about creating fear in the heart of the crazy old lady who dared to fight biology and get pregnant rather than read an article on hot flashes from AARP and enjoy her plight as a crone. See? We told you, fatty. You are too friggin’ old. Now you have to come in for regular monitoring. Every time without fail, the thought of going to the doctor would send my blood pressure through the roof. Between the morning sickness and prenatal testing blues, I couldn’t control it.
The doctor shook his head in disapproval.
“Your blood pressure is too high,” he told me.
“I hate coming here,” I explained. “It makes me nervous.”
He pulled the cuff off my arm.
He told me, “If your blood pressure doesn’t come down in an hour, we are going to have to induce your labor today.”
“Today?!” I choked.
TODAY as in now as in today. What the fuck was happening?!
There would be no laboring at home, no late-night water breaking in my flannel nightgown as I had pictured it. Today was the day! That alone sent my pressure to the ceiling. I was to waddle over to Labor and Delivery immediately.
At this point, I had trouble believing they were going to let me leave the hospital with a baby. The main reason was that every person there seemed to know that I used to be a junkie. And I felt them judging me. I wasn’t the mom from the baby catalogue. I was the one with track marks. I was flabbergasted to discover that the process of inducing labor starts with a vein. Oh LORD, I thought to myself. Here we fucking go again. Every single staff person in Labor and Delivery that night seemed to find out about me because they could not find a vein.
“Excuse me. Those veins are gone,” I told them. “I used to be a drug user.”
“Here,” they would tell me as they pointed to the next nurse. “Let her try.”
This same process was repeated for nearly two hours. Search, poke, quit. Search, poke quit. NEXT! Search, poke, quit. There were people constantly coming in and out of the room. Trying to hide my body during this already mortifying ordeal was impossible. The gown they gave me was open in both the front and the back. I could not tell if the staff here were simply inexperienced or just determined not to listen to me. My frustration was growing with each passing moment.
“It isn’t just that we need to get blood out of your veins,” they explained. “We need to be able to get fluids into them.”
That was a new one for me. Of course, I knew absolutely nothing about sticking things into my veins. Should I laugh or cry here? I thought to myself. I could hear some whispering just beyond my line of sight. It was a discussion about putting a central line in my neck. I blew a mental fuse. How am I supposed to push out a baby with a line in my neck? At this point, I was in angry tears.
GET SOMEONE ELSE IN HERE, I thought. Now, stat, code blue, or whatever the fuck the term is for it.
There was a general feeling of concern building among my group at the hospital—my friends, my husband, and of course, myself. This was my first time having a baby. This trip to the hospital was supposed to be the exact opposite of the miscarriage. I was going to be experiencing life. I was getting more and more restless. I felt as if everything was spinning out of control.
Finally, the anesthesiologist came in with an infectious swagger. He tapped me gently on the shoulder as if to say, “I got this.” He had that same bravado as the guy in the porn flick who talks about cleaning pipes.
“I heard you were having a few issues, Ms. Helton,” he said as he sat down.
I perked up at his confidence. “Yes,” I told him, “that is an understatement.”
He pulled my left arm toward him. “Just hold still,” he asked gently.
In less than five minutes, he had a working line in me. Here we go.
The pain started as the Pitocin flowed. I could feel my labor starting. It reminded me of when I had impacted bowel movements while I was on heroin. There was this uncomfortable feeling as if my body was trying to push a boulder out of my lower regions. Soon, there was the offering of refreshments. I would have killed for this easy access to my veins in my prior life. Fentanyl: yes please. My pain score was around a “Fuck yes I would like some more medicine.” The epidural going in was as I had expected. Having a needle shoved in my spine was as frightening as anything I had ever experienced up until that point. It made me question my decision not to have natural labor. I couldn’t feel the contractions, I couldn’t feel the pushing, and I could not feel anything below my chest. Why didn’t I go to the childbirth classes? Why did I take the drugs? Why didn’t I walk around more? Why did I spend so much time watching A Baby Story on television? I believed all the hype. I thought that nature would take some beautiful path and my vagina was a garden that would produce a beautiful flower.
After twenty-five or twenty-six hours, they turned off my epidural.
“We need you to be able to feel when you push,” said one perky doctor. Then she ran out of the room.
I hadn’t realized so much of my time would be spent with nurses. It seemed as if they did most of the work. It was as if my labor was a television show, and the doctor just came in to do some cameo appearances while getting all the credit.
“FUUUUUUCCCCCCK!” I screamed at the top of my lungs.
My two friends who came for the birth were trying to hold my hand. They were tired and ready to go home. I didn’t know what to do except yell, at least partially in their faces. I hurt too much.
The attending nurse asked me, “Do you think you could keep it down?”
“What?!” I asked.
“What?!” my friends asked.
She patted me and told me, “You are frightening the other patients.”
After three and a half hours of pushing, I was begging for the C-section. I had heard that childbirth was the number one cause of death for women in the U.S. until fairly recently. I believed it. My baby was stuck. After the birth, a friend of mine told me that the midwives of the past would have had few choices in that circumstance: let me bleed to death or snap the baby’s neck. They would pull the baby out, then tell me I could have others. The C-section was actually a relief. The end of the long journey that had started on that vacation to Sonoma County. After thirty hours in labor, three hours of pushing, and one C-section, I was presented with one little screaming red-faced alien I was told was my daughter. The first thing I told my husband after I saw her was, “I want another one.” I was in love.
I had watched hours upon hours of shows on various cable channels to learn about what life would be like with an infant. I did not realize I was going to be doing all these things while recovering from major abdominal surgery.
The first thing that surprised me was all the screaming involved in the day-to-day handling of my daughter. I was told by everyone who cared to give me advice that babies have different personalities. I learned within the first few days that her personality involved hysterics—it seemed she cried over every single thing. It was clear by the fourth day that I was the lucky recipient of a pristine baby who would cry the second her diaper got wet or soiled in any way. The nurses tried to calm me down by informing me this would make potty training so much easier later on.
I guess I was having trouble understanding the whole process. I was under the assumption the nurses would whisk the baby away to some special room for a few hours so I could rest. Oh no; I was heartily mistaken. Within forty-five minutes of my surgery, I was being handed my child to feed despite the fact that I had not slept for a few days for more than a few minutes here and there. At one point, I looked over at the baby swaddled next to me.
“Katie,
” I whispered. “It’s your mommy.”
I tried to reach closer to the bassinet without pulling the tubes out of my arm.
“It is just me and you now, baby,” I told her. Her dad had been sent home by the hospital until they could switch my room.
Katie looked in my general direction with those “I can’t really see you” saucer-like newborn eyes. Then, she started to scream her head off. SCREAM.
She screamed bloody murder as I tried to scoot myself over to her.
It would be pretty typical of the first three months with her.
I was discharged from the hospital with a tiny baby, a bag full of painkillers, and a complimentary diaper bag full of paper underwear and pads the length of my arm. My instructions were to not lift anything heavier than the baby. I had been stepped down from one opiate to another, but I knew the pain that would be in store for me when the medicine ran out in a week or two. They explained to me in painstaking detail that I MUST take this medication. If I did not, the consequences could be serious as the pain could impact my healing. My plan was for my husband to manage my pills. I would taper myself off as my pain subsided. I could call if I needed more or dispose of what was left if I needed less.
Baby Kathryn was named after my mother. We called her Katie or Katie-bear. She was so incredibly tiny. They had estimated from her ultrasounds that she would be close to eight pounds when she was born. When we left the hospital, she was less than six. We didn’t realize that her weight would fluctuate. Because of the induced birth, my body was not catching up with milk. I felt weird when I was visited on my last day at the hospital by a male lactation specialist. When he grabbed my boob to show me how to feed the baby, I knew it was time to get the fuck out of the hospital. Things had been too stressful there.
The Big Fix Page 14