But my red blood cells don’t pick up, and neither does my kidney function, as the Silver Fox had predicted. It creeps up to 2.2, which causes him to worry, so by that afternoon, a suited, cleanshaven nephrologist who seems more like a politician than a doctor looks over my complicated chart.
“I’m worried,” he says, looking up at me. And suddenly I am, too. “Your kidney is not coming back up to speed as quickly as we had hoped.” He suggests that I go back to the university hospital to get a biopsy done to see what’s happening with the kidney, since there are no doctors who specialize in transplants here, and they don’t really have the facilities to accommodate my complicated case. His plan seems prudent, but that would require my leaving Birdie at this hospital and getting admitted to the big one all the way downtown.
“It’s only for a little while,” the nephrologist says when he sees my pout.
“Trust me. You don’t want to get a kidney biopsy here.”
All the same, these first few days after she is born, I am so concerned with Birdie’s growth and making sure all her parts are there and working that I almost forget about my own health. I keep thinking that as long as she is healthy, despite being born premature, everything else will fall into place, that my health will follow.
I tell Charlie that I know the kidney will come back, and he agrees, but it’s being away from Birdie that hurts the most.
“Can we move her there with you?” he asks, which is an option, but she is getting such good care from the nurses at this smaller NICU. At the university hospital, she might get lost among all the special cases. Besides, I tell him, I’m afraid she is not yet ready to go out into the big world of roads, bikes, and trucks. “You’re right,” he says. “It’s scary out there.”
The night before I’m released, Charlie and I go up to the NICU to tell Birdie that I am leaving. Her tiny back is turned to us when we get there, as if she knows what is happening and is not pleased. Charlie and I watch as the nurses check on her, feeling through the armholes of the isolette to touch her. I wait patiently as they work on her.
Then I hold her on my lap as I sit in a rocking chair, her sweaty face stuck to my chest like a decal, and I tell Charlie that I don’t think I could bear the idea of not being able to hold her.
“Won’t she be looking for me?” I ask him.
“Yes,” he says, “she probably will. But I’ll tell her where you are. It’s only for a few days, until the kidney kicks back in. Think of it like you’re the mama bear and you’ve got to leave the cave and forage for food. It’s not just for your health; it’s for hers, too.”
“I don’t know,” I tell him. My heart feels like it’s being stretched.
“She’ll be waiting here after you take care of yourself. You don’t want her to have a sick mom.”
“What if she thinks someone else is her mother?” I tell him. I
don’t want anyone holding her but him and the nurses.
The next morning, as I say goodbye to her, a white note is taped to the cover of her isolette. “Only Mommy and Daddy can hold me. Thank you, Nico xoxo.” It’s written in black Sharpie. I notice the softly rounded o’s, and I think, yes, her handwriting would have softly rounded o’s. Just like her eyes and the tips of her tiny toes, and her mouth when she opens it. I concentrate on all these parts of her body and burn their images into my memory before I leave.
Chapter Fifteen
A Very Spedal Dramatic Performance: The Worst Mother’s Day in the History of the World
Birdie was born in the middle of April, two months before she was supposed to arrive. And though our time in the hospital together was brief, I insist on trying to connect with her. I sit in my hospital room at night and try to send my vibes to her from all the way across town. They snake past the ghetto that surrounds the hospital where I stay, up 83 North, slowly along North Charles Street, and up the serpentine hill to the hospital where she is, straight into her crib. I don’t know how much she senses these vibes, but I send them as best I can, at night, alone.
Charlie insists on keeping us connected, too. He videotapes her every night so I can see how she has grown. He records my voice on a small tape recorder and plays it to her as she sleeps. He tells me he has taken one of my shirts from home and has stuffed it around the edges of her crib so she can smell me there with her, so she knows who I am again. How sad, I think, for a child to need such tactics to recognize her mother. How sad for Charlie, too, whose schedule has been complicated by my unfortunate separation from Birdie. He is still working full-time amid all this, walking the dog in the mornings before riding to work downtown. Then he comes to see me at lunchtime with a new video of Birdie, goes back to work, walks the dog, then spends the evening holding Birdie against his chest and filming more footage of her. I live for those videos. I lift myself upright in bed and beg him for details about the girl on those days when he pops in to see me with sandwiches or with some lunch—what is she wearing? How much did she eat? How much does she weigh today?
Our visits are usually interrupted by one of the nurses checking in. “How would you rate your pain today?” she asks. With a quick survey of my body, I tell her, “A one.”
“So nothing for pain?”
“Not right now.”
“Use the call button if you need me.”
“What is wrong with you?” Charlie whispers to me just as she closes the door behind her.
“What?”
“You should never refuse pain meds.” Charlie and I have been known to enjoy the occasional pain medications, but only after medical procedures. Sometimes, we try to space out the prescriptions for days so that we can have a few to relax even after there is no pain. Innocent outlaws, we are. Or not even.
“I’m trying to get out of here. They’re not going to let me out of here if they still think I’m in pain.”
The biopsy shows that my kidney is suffering from an acute rejection, most likely caused by the pregnancy. “This is a good thing!” the attending doctor, a tall and imposing figure with dark hair and smart-looking neckties, says as he makes rounds one morning, bringing a whole class of young students with him. They circle my bed and nod in agreement. “That means it’s reversible!” They want to start me on a course of Thymoglobulin, a drug to help fight the rejection.
“How long will it take?” I ask them.
“At least a week, maybe two,” the attending doctor says.
“I have a baby to go home to,” I remind them.
I pull him aside and make a plea after the students leave: I can’t lose this kidney.
“It’s special, you know,” I tell him. “It’s from my husband.”
“You won’t,” he says. I don’t really feel like I will, especially after they find that the rejection is acute. But I feel like I should tell them that I won’t give it up. Just so they know.
It’s the day before Mother’s Day. My mother, who has been here since the day after Birdie was born, cannot stand the idea of my being away from my girl. She approaches one of my doctors and asks if she could kindly sneak me out of the hospital for a few hours on Sunday. “She needs to see her baby,” she pleads in the hallway while doctors make their rounds. A short Asian resident with a slight lisp tells her he’ll grant me a pass for a few hours to spend with her on Mother’s Day. But just a few hours.
I was so afraid for Birdie when she was born. What could she do at two pounds? Did I bring her into this world at a disadvantage? I was afraid she wouldn’t be healthy enough to make her milestones, that she would lag behind because of her prematurity. I never thought that I would be the one missing out on her important moments. Or mine. Or ours together. As selfish as it sounds, I just didn’t think that they would go on without me: her first bottle feeding, her first time taking a bath. I didn’t want to think about her first Mother’s Day without my being there.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” I tell Charlie. “Because I am really afraid of missing everything. All of it. Her life.”
&
nbsp; “Don’t worry,” he says. “You’ll see her tomorrow. The two of you can catch up then.”
On Sunday morning, my mother arrives early and washes my hair. She brings me a fresh shirt and pants that are easy to slip into. I’m just about ready when a nurse comes in to take my vitals. She looks at the thermometer and shakes her head, and I know immediately that my temperature is high and that I’m not going anywhere. I feel terrible for that small Asian doctor with a lisp, for he is the one who comes in to tell me the news. And he is the one who gets the evil looks from my mother and me—the ones that must bore into his soul like railroad spikes.
“Permission denied!” I tell Charlie over the phone, trying to sound authoritative and cruel, trying desperately to laugh through it. But Charlie knows.
“Oh, baby,” he says, and when he does, the tears come flooding out, and I can barely respond to him on the phone. I can only eke out frustrating grunts and deep inhalations. “I’ll be there as soon as I can,” he says.
I beg my mother to leave so she can be with birdie since I can’t. But I just want to be by myself. A heavyset nurse hears me sobbing from the hall and stands silently in the doorway. She comes into my room smelling like she’s just come back from a smoke break and pretends to be checking the monitors above my bed.
“Are you in a lot of pain?” she asks.
I nod. “It’s my baby,” I tell her. “She’s so far away.” Inhaling deeply, I hoist myself upright and try to find my composure.
“How would you rate your pain on a scale of one to ten?”
“Ten,” I say, my nose runny and snotty. I pull the sheet up from my chest.
“Okay,” she says, “let’s see if the doctors have ordered anything for the pain.”
It is the worst pain I have ever felt. It hurts. It hurts all over. It hurts to breathe, like someone is constricting my throat. What is this pain and where does it come from? It feels like someone has taken away part of me or taken away my skin so that everything I touch—the bed, the pillow, even the air—makes my body hurt.
When the nurse comes back, she has an order of Dilaudid in a syringe.
“Just relax,” she says, pushing the needle through my IV. Instantly, I feel the medicine rush over my shoulders, making them relax and fall. The calm radiates through my body. It is relief, like I have entered a different world, a different day than this one.
“Were you crying?” Charlie says when he comes in. I don’t even know he’s there until he speaks.
I lift up slowly to see him and think I am slurring my speech when I say, “Yeah, but I feel better. The nurse gave me a shot.”
“Was your stomach hurting?”
“Yeah, duuuude,” I say. I think I am smiling.
Charlie laughs. “All right, girl,” he says, realizing the state I’m in. “Take it easy. I’ll be right here.” He sits back and eases into the chair.
Chapter Sixteen
Moonface Exhibits her Death-Defying Tolerance for Pain while in the Company of a Tail-Chasing Dog
Birdie keeps getting better. My parents, in-laws, and Charlie all report that our little bird continues to grow, giving the doctors nothing remarkable to discuss. Her isolette is slowly being stripped of the various apparatuses that once crowded it: the glaring bilirubin lights, the mask that covered her face and helped her breathe, and a feed tube, which stayed in surprisingly long despite her many attempts to tear it out. She is free of all of them.
“You just ought to see her, Moonface. She is a feisty one,” Charlie says, his whole body abuzz as he speaks. He shows me a video of a NICU nurse getting her ready for a bath. Birdie has a petite frame and scrawny arms, but she doesn’t seem to know it. She hangs on with her little monkey hands to the top lip of the isolette as the nurse tries to take her out. She cries like a hungry cat as she feels the cold air outside her protective synthetic womb.
“She is three pounds now!” Charlie says, pointing to her wriggly body on the screen. “An ounce since last week!”
As the Little Bird is gaining her strength, I seem to be losing mine.
I am putting on weight, too, but not the good kind. i am already twenty pounds heavier from the pregnancy, but since my kidney isn’t functioning and can’t filter out the wastes normally, I am holding fluid under my skin. It feels like an inner tube full of water hangs around my hips. My legs are heavy, making it difficult to swing them over the side of the bed and go for a walk. The poor phlebotomists who have to draw my blood every day spend most of the morning pushing the thick skin around my arms, looking for a vein.
The doctors—all of those who have been following my case— decide that they will put me on dialysis, hoping that getting some fluid off my body will jumpstart the kidney. But I resist the notion every time they bring it up because dialysis has always been an end point for me, and I interpret starting dialysis as pronouncing Charlie’s kidney dead.
“No, it’s only temporary. It’s not forever, just for now, or for a while, you know,” says one of the doctors. He is a short, pudgy guy with caramel skin and bushy hair, who seems smart enough, but when he speaks, his voice is breathy and light, and his sentences remind me of a dog chasing his own tail—a lot of energy spent but only wearing away the same spot in the ground. “The blood results show that your creatinine is decreasing to 2.5,” he says, “which is better than what it was, whereas it was 2.8 earlier. So it’s good that it’s 2.5, but it could be better. But it’s definitely better than 2.8, so we’ll keep watching it.”
After he leaves the room, I always have to ask Charlie to clarify what he said. My father says that part of my confusion is probably because of the fluid I am carrying around. “There is waste in your blood, so it’s clouding your brain. You need dialysis to clean up your whole system,” he says.
Here we go again, I think. Dialysis is one of the reasons I wanted to get a kidney transplant in the first place. It all comes back now, those mindless hours spent tied to a machine. And that catheter!
Charlie says that I should just do it, that it might help the kidney come back. “And besides,” he says, poking at my puffy hips, “it will help you get rid of this weight. I know somewhere in there, my Moonface is still around.”
As they wheel me into the procedure room, I tell the anesthesiologist, “Just put me out. I don’t want to feel a thing.”
I don”t know which is more lonely here-the early mornings or the late nights. Nights are maybe easier because, after my parents and Charlie leave, if I’m lucky, I have sleep ahead of me. If I’m lucky, I don’t have to be awake for hours. Not until someone wakes me up to draw my blood or take my vitals.
In the morning, I wake up to a gray room and to the sounds of carts, machines, and wheelchairs moving up and down the hall. My father has taped pictures of the Little Bird on the cabinets under the TV to remind me what she looks like, and why I need to get out of here. Mornings are harder maybe because I have to last the whole day long in this place. I’ve got a whole day of nothing ahead of me.
I am a greedy girl. I should have been thankful enough not just for one transplant but for two. But no, I wanted more. I don’t know how I thought I could give birth and get to walk away without a scratch, without putting Birdie, me, or Charlie’s kidney in danger. I was living in a fantasyland. It hurts my head to think about that now. The tightness crawls down my neck and over my chest.
“How would you rate your pain?” a nurse, who seems hurried, says late in the morning. I’ve been up for hours waiting for her. She checks my IV to make sure the anti-rejection medicine is still flowing from the pole.
“Ten,” I tell her. “Eleven,” I say, just to be sure.
“Let me see what they’ve ordered for you,” she says. She comes back with the syringe and pushes the drug into my IV, and I wait for my shoulders to relax. I let out a groan as the medicine travels through the veins all over my body.
By the time Charlie comes, I am numb to everything—the sounds outside, the smell in the room, the light coming through
the blinds. I am so tired that I can barely open my eyes.
“Are you there?” he asks.
“I’m sleepy,” I whisper.
“I brought you pho.” He holds a clear cylinder steaming with my favorite Vietnamese soup.
“Mmm,” I say, slurring, barely moving. “You know it feels good.”
“I’ve brought video of Birdie,” Charlie says. “Mm?” I say before closing my eyes and drifting off, leaving Charlie to spend his entire lunch break with his sleeping wife.
The tail-chasing doctor comes in and updates me. I think. “Your creatinine has not decreased much from the range it’s been holding, and the fevers haven’t stopped. We could biopsy you, or give you an ultrasound, or chest x-rays, but a biopsy will tell us what’s going on with your kidney. An ultrasound, not so much.
But maybe that would help us determine the origin of the fever. I think a chest x-ray might be good.”
“So, is the medicine working or not?” I ask. I just want to understand what the hell he is saying.
“We don’t know yet.”
“Do you think the kidney is coming back?”
“We’ll probably have to do a biopsy eventually to know for sure,” he says, though he sounds very unsure. “So, am I getting a biopsy?”
“Not right now,” he says.
“Ultrasound?” I ask. I don’t have the energy to fight with him over the tests.
“Yes,” he says. “Today.”
The next thing I know, I am sitting in a wheelchair in nothing but a ghostly hospital gown. They perform ultrasounds in the basement of the hospital, and the waiting room is a weird hallway that seems to exist outside the world, as people, not just patients or hospital staff, cruise past on their way to the cafeteria. Construction crews, bus drivers on breaks, schoolchildren. I watch the waves of people move past me. I wait. And I wait.
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