37 Seconds

by Stephanie Arnold

  It was as if I had known him my entire life. It’s hard to put it into words, but it was like an instant magnetic force drawing us to one another. Jonathan said later that he hung up and thought, I think I just spoke to the woman with whom I’ll spend the rest of my life. I felt the same way, but for me it would take a first date to make sure the energy I was feeling over the phone was real. When I saw him four days later, I was completely convinced and did a total 180. I wanted to marry him.

  We saw each other night after night for the next three days and spoke every chance we could. On day eight of this whirlwind courtship, he wrote me a love letter and posed a few questions:

  How can a man go from zero to love in three dates—even with one as spectacular as you?

  What gives me the ability to catch you—the girl who specializes [in] avoiding capture?

  I wished I could be as poetic, but the only thing I could think of to do in return was make him a mixtape. I felt like I was back in high school.

  We were both smitten. So much so that I couldn’t marry him quickly enough. A few months after that first phone call, we decided to elope. We wanted the special day to be just between us and Valentina. Everything happened so quickly, and Jonathan ordered $40 wedding bands on the Internet for next-day delivery. We then planned another wedding for our family and friends several weeks later, with a second set of “proper” wedding bands.

  I watched my career fade away in the rearview mirror as I moved to Chicago, and believe it or not, I didn’t take along one regret. I settled into my new “June Cleaver” life, and everything that I had once thought important became irrelevant instantly. I went from not wanting a family to wanting to bear his children. Zero to 100 in a matter of minutes.

  The love between us grew more intense by the day. He would frequently write me love letters, and his beautiful prose left me speechless:

  Victor Hugo once wrote, “Life is a flower for which love is the honey,” and David Viscott wrote, “To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides.”

  These words, beautiful and true, fail to begin to capture the overwhelming nature of my feelings for you . . . and for our love.

  You are pulchritude personified physically, emotionally and spiritually—and I am therefore envious of me.

  His words made me deliriously happy. I had found my soul mate, and I was looking forward to sharing a full life and growing old with him.

  BUT NOW, pregnant with our second child together, my fear and the baby were the only things growing. I thoroughly believed that I was going to die giving birth to our son and be taken away from my children and the man I loved so deeply. It was too agonizing to bear.

  The “premonitions,” as I began referring to them, kept coming. One showed me, as I watched my organs merge, that I would need a hysterectomy. I saw the uterus and the placenta melding into one another. It looked like two blobs in a red-hot lava lamp fusing together—the blood and cells and tissue and organs converging. It was terrifying. During all of these visions, I was sure that Jacob would be fine. I was also sure that I would not be.

  Jonathan, being the good loving husband, tried to calm me down, but for once his words had no impact on me. I spent hours on the Internet searching for any answers to what I was seeing. The “melding” condition I was visualizing—where the placenta merges with the uterus—is called placenta accreta. “Having an accreta that would lead to a hysterectomy is such a rare event, less than 1 percent. Try to put it out of your head,” he would say, trying to comfort me. Emotionally, I couldn’t calm down. Logically, I understood exactly where he was coming from.

  Jonathan finds comfort in numbers. As the child of a Foreign Service officer, he grew up moving from country to country. That made it difficult for him to make friends and have deep connections to people, so he turned to books.

  Math became his first love and would continue to be front and center as he got his undergraduate degree, MBA, and PhD in economics at the University of Chicago. Jonathan served in the Air Force as an officer flying supersonic military jets, and through emergency drills and mock disasters, he learned how to stay calm in a crisis.

  This was a crisis. He calculated the probable outcome and the worst-case scenario. While he was doing his best to calm me in his own way, his calculations gave me little comfort. Jonathan was using every tool in his toolbox to try to alleviate the anxiety I was feeling, and nothing was working. He was frustrated that nothing he did could comfort me and that nothing I said added up to anything I should worry about in his mathematical mind. He thought the hormones were getting the best of me. But I was sure that my premonitions couldn’t be chalked up to estrogen. I was experiencing a knowing—the same sort of knowing I’d had that Jonathan was my soul mate.

  The consistency of those images put me into full panic mode. Every time I looked at Adina, I would cry. I felt helpless and hopeless and found myself talking about my incredible fears with friends and even people I didn’t know well. My best friend, Rosalind, who was always the voice of reason and had a very strong sense of faith, said, “Don’t get crazy. It’s in G-d’s hands. You will be fine.” I told my cousin Sari, who reassured me that “nothing is going to happen. It will all be okay.” I told the wife of my husband’s friend that I was going to die. I just blurted it out. I can still remember her expression, as we didn’t know each other very well. She was a psychologist who specialized in pregnancy issues, couples therapy, and fertility. She was pregnant at the time too, and her eyes were wide open. She had told her husband, she told me later, that she had never heard a pregnant woman speak that way. She was scared for me, but could do little to help.

  I was desperately looking for someone to throw me a lifesaver, but it wasn’t happening. My trainer quickly changed the subject when I told him, and the woman next door explained how she had pregnancy nightmares with her second child and that was probably what was happening to me. Ahhhhhhhh! That was not it at all! I was beyond frustrated and scared out of my mind that either everything was going to come true or I was really losing it. I was hoping for the latter, but somehow I knew the former was in the cards for me. No one was taking me seriously. This wasn’t fear of delivering! This was fear of dying!

  I decided I needed divine intervention. I reached out to my rabbi, with whom I had grown close when I lived in Los Angeles. Rabbi Chaim Mentz is an Orthodox Jew, and when we met we became instant family. I met him through a mutual friend, and I immediately felt a lot of care and compassion from him and his family. He is my go-to guru on all things Judaic and, for that matter, on many life decisions. When you’re with him, he exudes an assurance that nothing bad will happen. I called him, and he knew immediately what I needed to do. He said, “You need to take Jonathan to the burial site of Rabbi Menachem Schneerson. It is the role of the husband and father to pray for the family.”

  Rabbi Schneerson, also known as “the Rebbe,” was considered one of the most influential Jewish leaders of the twentieth century. He was the head of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, and they say that everyone he met was always deeply changed by his presence. I had been lucky enough to meet him two years before he died. On certain days of the year, people would line up to meet him in Brooklyn. He would hand out a dollar to each person, and as you waited with bated breath, he would give you some profound insight. You could ask for a blessing and even tell him your worries, and he would always have something incredibly uplifting to say. I was there on one of those days, and he handed me a dollar. I was 21 years old, without a care in the world and no prayer. I didn’t even know why I was wasting his dollar, but he said to me, apropos of nothing, “You will have children someday, but it will be a difficult road.” That was it. I left his presence, and the next day, as an ignorant, naive teenager defiantly would do, I spent the dollar on a Coke and never thought about it again. That is, until after my son’s birth.

  Many Hasidic Jews believe that the Rebbe is the Messiah; even though he has passed away, they believe he still emanates a power that
will answer their prayers. I don’t know whether I believed all of that, but I was willing to try anything. Maybe Jonathan would experience some sort of energy at the burial site and come to realize that what I was feeling wasn’t hormonal. Maybe there would be a sign and I would get relief from knowing I would not die. At least, that was what I was hoping.

  I’d always had a blind faith in G-d, but not necessarily in the interpreters of religion. I went to a religious school when I was young and learned a great deal about Judaism. But instead of giving me answers, this religious education just prompted more questions. I guess I found it hard to accept some aspects of religion because they had to be accepted on faith, and it was hard for me to embrace things I couldn’t see with my own eyes. But I did believe in G-d, and I had, on occasion, asked for his help. This would be one of those times.

  Rabbi Mentz said he would fly to New York and take Jonathan and me to the Ohel—the building at Montefiore Cemetery in Queens where the Rebbe was buried. Some people call it the “American Western Wall.” There’s a place there to sit and write out your prayer. Jonathan and I sat separately to think about what we wanted to write. I knew that you weren’t supposed to say a prayer for yourself, for your own health, happiness, or well-being. I also knew, without thinking about it very long, exactly what I was going to write: that Jacob would be a happy, healthy boy. I was hoping, almost praying, that Jonathan would write a prayer for me, but I couldn’t tell him to do that. It had to come from his own spiritual place.

  When we were done with writing down our prayers, we walked through the cemetery to the smaller building, which consisted of only one room with two doors—one entrance for women, the other for men. A wall of candles and prayer books adorned the dim hall. We went through our respective doors and met up again on the other side.

  Rabbi Mentz told us to softly read our prayers out loud toward the Rebbe’s grave and then rip up the pieces of paper the prayers were written on and throw them on the grave. We didn’t hear what each other said, but I would learn later that our prayers were exactly the same: “That Jacob will be a happy, healthy boy.” I also learned there wasn’t a prayer for me. Jonathan would tell me that he never, ever thought that anything would happen to me and that he didn’t want a negative thought to pass over his lips for fear it would affect my outcome. Did that mean he was more spiritual than he cared to admit? We would discuss that later. But at the cemetery he had the passing thought that maybe the pregnancy was tumultuous because there was something wrong with the baby, so that was where he decided to put his energy.

  To tell you the truth, what I thought would be an incredibly inspirational moment for me turned out to be incredibly sad. I was devastated that the positive energy vibes were not being sent to me. We were at a holy burial ground where prayers are supposedly answered. If there was to be any divine intervention, this would be the place to get it. But with no prayer uttered in my name, it didn’t seem as though that would be happening.

  If my faith, family, and friends and the rabbis couldn’t help me, maybe doctors could. I told Jonathan that I wanted to make appointments with as many doctors as I could. He said he was concerned that if we went to see too many doctors, they would do tests that could harm the baby.

  It was a good point. G-d forbid that anything would happen to Jacob. We had worked so hard to have our children. We weren’t able to get pregnant the normal way, so I went through seven rounds of in vitro fertilization to get our babies. It was a painful process that took us through several failures and kept us on an emotional roller coaster.

  I most certainly didn’t want anything to happen to this precious cargo I was carrying, but I was at my wit’s end. I didn’t want my thoughts to propel me into any action that would harm the baby. I had gone on pregnancy message boards to learn about panic attacks and premonitions, thinking they were one and the same, but no one’s experience had come close to what was happening to me, so I stopped looking online. I decided to deal with my problem offline.

  I did only what the doctors would allow me to do at this late stage in the pregnancy. I did blood work to check all of my hormone levels. When I started lightly spotting at one point, I raced to the hospital to have an ultrasound. It all looked okay, but I still insisted on having ultrasounds as often as I could. I wanted to have that visual contact with the baby, but that wasn’t my main motivation for having them done. I was thinking that the ultrasounds might pick up the problem I was foreseeing, finally validating all of my fears, and that a plan of action would be put in place. Unfortunately for me—and fortunately for Jacob—the ultrasounds only saw what they were supposed to see: a healthy, growing boy.

  During one of my ultrasounds I thought back to when I had hemorrhaged at 10 weeks. They tell you not to worry if the blood is black. It’s probably just old blood being cleaned out after implantation. But at 10 weeks I had started to bleed bright red blood, not black. A lot of it. Interestingly enough, I didn’t think we were losing the baby. I felt I was losing something else inside of me. I know it doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it was a feeling that something was wrong, just not with the baby. The doctors told me at the time that I was probably bleeding because there had been a pocket of air or blood underneath when the placenta attached itself to the uterus and it had to be expelled. Sort of like when you put wallpaper on a wall. If there’s a pocket of air, the paper won’t lie flat until you smooth it out. The placenta needed a smooth surface. I wasn’t comfortable with that explanation, but the baby was fine so that was all that mattered back then.

  ONCE THE PREMONITIONS were in full swing, Jonathan and I decided we needed a distraction to get our minds off of everything. On March 30, when I was about two months away from my delivery date, we went to the opera. My husband was a regular. He knew all of the shows and who was starring in them, but I was a neophyte. I just wanted to be swept away by great music and amazing performances and enjoy a night out without being distracted by my fear. Placido Domingo was performing in Verdi’s La Traviata (The Fallen Woman) at the Met. A friend of Jonathan’s had given us her season tickets to that sold-out performance, and lucky us, the seats were front row, center. Crap. Great seats for a great performance, but not for a woman who was seven months pregnant with a baby bearing down on her bladder. I can tell you I was beyond nervous. As we walked down the aisle to our seats, I stopped and went back to the bathroom. I walked back down the aisle again, and before I got to our row I went back out to the bathroom. I needed my bladder to make it through to intermission.

  The opera began. Violetta is the main character of this three-act show. She’s a prostitute and in love with the royal Alfredo. Alfredo’s father, Giorgio, played by Placido Domingo, comes to her and tells her she needs to leave Alfredo because her reputation will disgrace his family if she continues their relationship. She reluctantly agrees, for the sake of her love. Alfredo is in love with her and will do anything for her. What neither man knows is that Violetta is dying. She forces Alfredo to leave her by telling him she is not in love with him when, in reality, she wants him to love her until her last breath. Giorgio finally confesses to Alfredo that he was the cause of their separation. Violetta and Alfredo reunite with great passion—and then she drops dead.

  It was then that I realized this was probably not a good show to see when you’re thinking about your own impending death.

  I started to cry, and not just watery eyes because of the moving performances. I sobbed with a sorrow-filled heartache. I was sniffing and shaking. As I got louder and louder, some of the orchestra members looked up at me, probably thinking they were getting a great reaction from a deeply moved audience member. But I was thinking about my own mortality. I was thinking that in a few short weeks my life would be over and my husband would be left with pain too severe to bear. I was thinking about my daughter and wondering if she would remember me. I was thinking about my stepdaughter Valentina—would she remember the amazing memories we had created? But mostly I was thinking about the love I had searched
for my entire life and only found a few years before. I was not ready to give it up. Jonathan looked at me and knew instantly what I was thinking.

  A couple of days later, on April 1, I was back in Chicago when I felt a cramp and started to bleed.

  Chapter 3

  ONLY GO UP AND DOWN one flight of stairs a day. No picking up Adina or lifting heavy things. And no driving,” ordered Dr. Julie Levitt, my Chicago obstetrician. Although she said everything looked okay, she wanted to cut down the chance that I would bleed again and need bed rest and hospitalization. I listened and obeyed, but it wasn’t easy. I was in Chicago with Adina, and Jonathan was working in New York, so when we got this news we decided to call for help. When Tessie agreed to move in through the birth of our son, that relieved a lot of the stress. Jonathan rearranged his schedule to be able to come to Chicago on the weekends, and we decided to put the sale of our home on hold until after the baby was born.

  I was taking life slowly, but my mind kept racing. I was still consumed by the premonitions. I couldn’t sleep. I would lie awake at night just ruminating. I felt like I was running out of time. My internal conflict between wanting to keep trying to find someone who could help and being paralyzed about what to do next was growing.

  I sucked up my fear and made a move. I contacted a friend of Jonathan’s who was a gynecologic oncologist and told him I was afraid of needing a hysterectomy. He told me that it wasn’t going to happen, but that if it did, I would want a gynecologic oncologist to do the procedure because that specialist focuses on highly complex female surgeries. A hysterectomy immediately following childbirth would be included in that category. He referred me to Dr. Julian Schink, the head of gynecologic oncology at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.