She looked at me blankly. David jumped in. “She doesn’t feel good. I already talked to her about it. I don’t think we need to make her talk about it again.”
I was sure when she’d woken up he’d had the perfect conversation with her where he articulated in a developmentally appropriate way what was going on and why she was in the hospital. I was equally certain he’d asked the right questions to get a response from her.
“Daddy, I’m tired.”
“Honey, do you think you could try to go potty before you go back to sleep? The doctors really need you to try to go potty,” David said.
“I don’t haffa go,” she said her lower lip sticking out, the beginnings of a pout.
“Can you just try?” I stood up and walked to her side of the bed. I took hold of her arm. “Mommy will walk with you. I’ll help you try.”
“No! I don’t haffa go!”
“Celeste, just let her be. I don’t think it’s a good idea to get her upset.”
I wasn’t trying to get her upset. The doctors said they needed to look at her urine. So far, she hadn’t gone to the bathroom since last night before she went to bed. In a few hours, it would be twenty-four hours since the last time she’d peed so there wasn’t a chance she didn’t have to go.
“I just–”
David shot me a look before the sentence was even out of my mouth. It was a look I knew well. His looks said more than his words ever could—let me take care of Rori because you don’t know what you’re doing. How was I ever going to learn how to take care of her if he didn’t give me a chance? I was on the other side of an impenetrable wall.
It wasn’t like I never spent any alone time with her because I did. David took Sunday mornings for himself to go running or do something with his friends. During our alone time, she watched the door longingly and looked over her shoulder every few minutes waiting for him to come back. When she was old enough to talk she didn’t only stare at the door, she also started asking me when her Daddy was coming home. I knew when I was gone she wasn’t questioning David about when I would come home, but she was always waiting for him to return when she was alone with me. I wasn’t her favorite and that was okay with me because I knew what she saw in David. I used to be the one he worshiped, and knew what it felt like to be the object of his affection.
It was like nothing else existed when he focused his attention on you. He had a way of staring at you in complete awe as if what you were talking about was the most profound thing he’d ever heard. As much as I heard women complain about men not listening and as many men who’d come before him who were incapable of knowing what it was like to listen to another person, David was the one man who listened better than any woman I knew.
“Don’t you have anything to say?” I’d asked numerous times when I was finished saying something.
He’d shake his head. “No, I’m just listening to you. Waiting to see if there’s anything else you have to say.”
His listening was an unbelievable skill. He made you feel special and cared for like what you had to say was important. The skill had translated well to parenting. His listening skills coupled with his unending patience were enough to earn him a Father of the Year award. I’d yet to meet anyone who was such an empathetic listener or demonstrated the amount of patience he did. It never fazed him that it took Rori twenty minutes to put her shoes on or how long she dawdled on a walk bending down to pick up every piece of grass or weed in her pathway.
I watched as she snuggled up next to him on his chest and he stroked her hair until her eyes grew heavy and she drifted back into sleep. His touch was soft and comforting. It was the same way he used to hold me when I was upset or felt bad. I didn’t crumble very often but when I did he was always there to support me through it. I’d never crumbled like I did when we were trying to get pregnant.
Trying to get pregnant had taken us over three years, and I got upset each time my period came because we’d done everything right. I charted my ovulation with the same amount of diligence and focus I put into all of my projects. I knew which days and what time I was the most fertile and likely to get pregnant. There’d been many instances where I called him from work and told him to come to my office or where we both rushed home from our jobs and had sex immediately before we missed the narrow window of opportunity. After we had sex, I’d lay with my legs up against the wall for at least twenty minutes, barely moving, hoping it was helping the sperm make their way up into my tubes and settle in one of my eggs. Each month we were met with failure, and there was nothing I hated more than failure.
I’d come out of the bathroom and collapse on the bed in tears. Starting a family was important to me and David wanted a child as much as I did. He was basically an only child since he was eighteen when his mother remarried, and he’d always talked about how much he wanted to have a big family. He’d grown up feeling alone and since both of his parents were already gone, it was even more important to him to feel like his family line was still alive and not going to end with him.
He’d curl up next to me on the bed, spooning me from behind and wrapping his strong arms around me. He’d stroke my hair tenderly in the same manner he stroked Rori’s.
“Shh…. shh, it’s okay, sweetie. It’s going to be okay. This just wasn’t the right time. The right time will come. It’s going to happen. I know it. We just have to be patient.”
His words had helped in the beginning when we first started trying, but as the months grew into a year, I started getting impatient and more desperate. We turned to IVF as a last resort. We’d sunk most of our savings into remodeling the house and had only begun to build it back up, but I convinced him we should use it to try to get pregnant. We’d gone to see a fertility specialist, mixed our insides together in a small Petri dish, and inserted the embryo inside me. We crossed our fingers and waited.
Our high carried us to the first positive pregnancy test, but our excitement was short-lived when I woke in the middle of the night with blood staining our sheets. David carried me into the bathroom as I sobbed. He undressed me and stepped into the shower alongside me, holding me tightly while my sobs reverberated off the tile walls.
“I understand,” he said over and over again.
Within a few short weeks, I was ready to go back to the fertility specialist.
“Maybe we should wait awhile,” he said.
David hadn’t been sleeping well since the miscarriage. He kept waking up in the middle of the night and couldn’t fall back asleep. The bags under his eyes were beginning to look as if they’d always been there.
“I don’t want to wait. There’s no reason to.”
“I just feel like we might want to give ourselves time to process what happened. A miscarriage is a big deal. I know it sounds silly, but I was kinda already attached to the baby.” His eyes filled with tears.
I threw my arms around him, pulling his head against my chest. “Me too. That’s why we have to do this. We were so happy and everything felt perfect. I want that feeling back. We can get it back. We can’t give up, David, please?”
It had taken a few more days of begging, but eventually, I convinced him to try again even though he was hesitant. We went back to the doctor and followed the same routine as the last. Our efforts were met with failure, but I was determined to be strong. We went back for two more rounds before we were successful again.
We were cautious. Unlike before, when we’d celebrated with dinner and cards throughout the week, we barely acknowledged it. Both of us were holding our breath until we passed the twelve-week mark. We didn’t let anyone know I was pregnant. I didn’t even tell Robin. Finally, we reached the twelve-week mark and the tension in the house evaporated. We stopped avoiding the topic and started planning again. I wanted to start decorating the nursery, but David wanted to hold off until we knew what we were having.
At my next doctor appointment, I knew something was wrong by the look on my doctor’s face. Her usual lit up face was blank as she moved the
fetal monitor across my abdomen.
“What?” I asked.
“I’m having a difficult time hearing the heartbeat.” She continued to listen, moving the fetal monitor slowly.
I looked up at David. He squeezed my hand tightly. It seemed like hours passed before she spoke again.
“I’m going to have to do an ultrasound. Sometimes it’s difficult to hear the heartbeat when they’re this little. The ultrasound will help me locate it.” She pulled over the ultrasound machine squirting my abdomen with the cold liquid. I held my breath, searching the screen as if I knew how to decode the images. David did the same, peering close to it. I wanted to ask if everything was okay, but I already knew the answer to the question. I braced myself as she turned back to me. “I’m sorry, but there isn’t a heartbeat.”
All the energy got sucked out of the room. The only heartbeat I could hear was my own pounding in my head. The room spun quickly before it stilled again leaving me nauseous.
“What happens now?” David asked.
“I’m going to measure the baby to see how small the baby is. If the baby is small enough, we can give you a few days to see if your body spontaneously miscarries. The other option is to perform a D and C. However, depending on when the baby passed, it might be too large for a D and C or spontaneous miscarriage. If that’s the case, we have to induce labor.”
I was going to have to deliver a dead baby? I couldn’t handle that. There was no way.
“When will we know?” David asked.
“I’m completing the measurements right now.”
Our baby was small enough so I didn’t have to deliver. It’d stopped growing a few weeks before our appointment. We’d been rejoicing about passing the miscarriage mark, but really I’d been carrying around a dead baby for two weeks. I refused to go home and wait to see if I started bleeding. Instead, I chose to have the D and C done that day even though it meant having to sit in the office for three hours until an appointment canceled and we could get squeezed in. David supported my choice and held my hand throughout the entire procedure. I didn’t feel any pain while it was happening but started getting bad cramps on the drive home.
I spent the next four days in bed with the covers pulled over my head, the shades drawn, and a heating pad. Both of us were heartbroken. He tried to be strong for me and pretend as if it wasn’t affecting him, but I heard him crying at night when he thought I’d fallen asleep. I was determined not to give up. The doctors had said we needed to wait six weeks until after the procedure and I was counting them down. I was eager to try again, but David wasn’t.
“I can’t go through this again. I’m not ready. I can’t believe you are.”
“I know, but I was thinking I would take the first trimester off from work or at least work from home this time. It could help. I don’t want to quit trying. I really want a baby.”
David put his arm around me. “I want a baby, too. You know that honey, but we just lost two babies. Do you think it’s possible you’re not allowing yourself enough time to grieve?”
I didn’t want to grieve. I wanted a baby.
“Please, honey? Can you at least take a few days to think about it?
“I’m not changing my mind. Not right now. It’s all we think about and all we talk about. It’s completely taken over our lives. Let’s just relax and give it some time. Can we be normal for a while again?”
“But I’m not getting any younger. I don’t have much time.”
I was thirty-seven and being childless at thirty-seven was never part of my plan. We’d gotten married in our late twenties and our plan was to wait three years before we started creating our family so we could solidify our relationship with each other and enjoy being married. We’d have a baby when I was thirty and although David had wanted four children, I’d comprised on having three. We’d have them each spaced evenly two years apart and be done having children by the time I was thirty-six. Instead, we hadn’t even had our first one.
David pulled me close to him. “Look, it’s not like I’m saying I’m done forever. But honestly, hon, I really need a break. I can’t take the emotional rollercoaster of it. I need to get off of it for a while. I’m not saying I won’t get back on it again, but I need a break.”
“How long?”
“A year.”
“A year?” I pulled away from him. “David, I can’t wait a year!”
“How about six months?”
I still wasn’t convinced.
“We’ll just take a six-month vacation from trying to get pregnant. I’ll be ready by then and even though you don’t agree, I think it’d be really good for you too.”
“So, we aren’t going to try at all?” I asked.
“I don’t mean we won’t have sex. Of course, we’ll have sex.” He grinned at me. “It’s not like I’ll start using protection or you’ll go on the pill or anything like that. We’ll just have sex like normal people. We’ll have it when we want to have it because we’re horny and not because we’re trying to make a baby. If we happen to make a baby, that’s great. If not, no worries.”
I’d agreed to the six-month time off period, but I still followed my cycle. It was partly out of habit because I’d been doing it for so long, but also because I hadn’t given up on making it happen. I tried to have sex around the time I was ovulating, but it was tough because David’s sex drive took a nose dive. We’d taken all the fun and spontaneity out of sex when it became focused on getting pregnant. It was a common thing that happened to couples in our situation, but I’d never expected it to happen to us. Our sex life had been great even after having been together for over ten years. We still had sex multiple times a week and both enjoyed it. But during our pregnancy vacation, David took a sex vacation as well.
David was as familiar with my cycles as I was and it wasn’t lost on him that I suddenly wanted to have sex at the same time every month even though he never brought it up. He quit touching me or responding to any of my advances. I missed the way he touched me. The way he would make love to me slowly, savoring each part of my body as if it was the first time he’d experienced it. Much like everything else he did, he was a completely unselfish lover as well. He always took care of my own needs before taking care of his.
Our six-month vacation kept extending and before long we were one of those couples who went months without having sex. It grew strange and awkward when we were close together, and he quit cuddling next to me while we slept. I craved his attention and his touch. It was why when Phil looked at me during the office party as our hands glazed each other at the refreshment table that rather than look away like I would’ve done in the past, I returned his stare. I never should’ve returned the stare. If I’d only looked away. Any other time I would have looked away but not That Night.
Chapter Six
Our hospital room was small and the nurses needed easy access to Rori all night so only one cot was allowed in the room. David offered me the cot and he pulled the two chairs together so he could rest his head on one and his feet on the other. Rori wasn’t getting better despite all the fluids they were pumping into her. She’d only woken up one other time and the nurses and doctors were getting worried because she still hadn’t gone to the bathroom. Her stomach was beginning to distend. The last round of blood work showed her electrolytes were back to normal but her bicarbonate level still hadn’t moved. It was stuck at seven. In addition, the level of ketones in her blood was increasing rather than decreasing. They didn’t need to tell us that it wasn’t a good sign.
They were close to ruling out diabetes because her blood and glucose levels were normal. The additional lab tests they’d run also didn’t point toward a diabetes diagnosis. The only thing they needed to rule it out with one hundred percent certainty was a measure of the amount of ketones in her urine, but she still wasn’t going to the bathroom.
They’d taken another blood draw in the evening, but it had to be sent out to special labs outside the hospital so the results wouldn’t be
read by the doctors until the morning. We were left with no choice except to try to get some sleep in our uncomfortable and cramped quarters, but it was impossible. Every few hours a nurse came into the room and checked on Rori and took her vital signs. Whenever I finally nodded off, the door opened and was quickly followed by beeping. David popped open his eyes even though I knew he wasn’t sleeping either.
“How’s she doing?”
“She’s hanging in there.”
The night was excruciating. The mattress on the cot was so thin I could feel the coils underneath me each time I moved. David’s chair screeched along the linoleum constantly because each time he fell asleep, his legs fell off the chair, pushing its legs across the floor. At six, I gave up on the idea of sleep.
“I’m going to the cafeteria to get coffee. Do you want any?” I whispered to David even though I didn’t need to because no amount of noise woke Rori.
“Sure. Thanks.”
I wound my way through the maze of hallways until I found the cafeteria. To my disappointment, it didn’t open until seven. I couldn’t make it until then without a cup of coffee. I found a vending machine with coffee I knew would taste terrible, but it was better than none at all.
“Thanks,” David said as I handed him his cup with his two sugars and one creamer stirred in. He slid the chair he’d been resting his legs on all night next to him and motioned for me to sit down. “Look, I’m sorry I was so pissed at you yesterday. I’m just scared. Really scared. And I feel so powerless to help her.” His big blue eyes filled with tears.
I took his hand. “It’s okay. I get it.” I rubbed my fingers back and forth across his and felt some of the tension leave his body. “We’re going to get through this. No matter what happens, we’ll make it through it.”
We had to get through it. There wasn’t any other option.
David turned the TV on for the first time since we’d gotten into our room and we watched the early morning news beginning with the traffic reports. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d watched the news together. Neither of us spoke as we stared at the screen. Occasionally, one of us would turn to look at Rori whose color got more yellow with each passing hour. We’d gone through two series of morning shows before Dr. Koven walked into the room. Unlike us, she looked rested. Her face was flushed with the glow of pregnancy and her dark hair was pulled tightly back into a ponytail. She carried a cup of coffee from Starbucks and an IPad cradled in her arms. David rose from his spot to offer his seat.
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