The California Coven Project

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The California Coven Project Page 5

by Bob Stickgold


  Turning off the hot water, Maggie stood in the freezing shower and slowly counted to ten. Jumping out, she toweled herself dry. Are those still the reasons women have trouble with childbirth? she wondered. The medical profession had dealt with the problem in its characteristic manner, provided symptomatic relief. But in the process they had taken the woman out of the childbirth. It all sounded like an aspirin commercial to her. Instead of helping people deal with their medical problems, doctors always tried to do it by themselves, and the results were often marginal. Childbirth, she was sure, was just one such example.

  Dressed now, she headed for the kitchen, peeking into Ann’s room to make sure that she was still asleep. Death, she thought, grimly. That was another example of where the medical profession had taken control, so that now people routinely died in sterile hospital wards, often without even family nearby. She was glad that Ann was home with her and Carol, in her old room. Perhaps she would die a week or a month earlier for lack of the sophisticated equipment that would be available up in Palo Alto or San Francisco, but Maggie felt that the extra time wouldn’t have been any better for Ann. Ann could never rest comfortably in a hospital. Maggie doubted that anyone really could since superstaph.

  “Hi, Mom.” Carol was eating busily at the table, the radio buzzing incoherently in the background.

  “You’re up early,” Maggie commented.

  Carol made a face. “I’ve got a biology exam first period, and I want to go over some of the stuff.”

  Maggie smiled. “Meaning you went over to Susan’s last night instead of studying as you should have. I thought you said you didn’t have any homework?”

  “I didn’t! For Pete’s sake, I can’t even study a little extra without getting complaints.”

  Maggie laughed and hugged Carol from behind. “Lecture over. Let me state that in reality I’m totally satisfied with your study habits, and their results, to wit, your rapid acquisition of knowledge, and good grades. So there. Now, how are you today?”

  Carol put an arm around her mother without getting up, and squeezed affectionately. “Well, to be honest, a little worried about this test. I went to Susan’s last night, and I probably should have stayed home and studied.”

  Maggie shrugged. “As ye sin, so shall ye weep.” Dodging a punch from Carol, she went to the stove. “Nothing for me?”

  “Uh uh. When I heard your phone ring I figured you’d be running off without any breakfast. I’m sorry.”

  “No problem. I’ll just scramble up a few eggs.”

  “What was the phone call, Mom?”

  “Oh. That was about Ellsie Gordon. Lisa thinks she’s running a little scared, so Kathy’s going to head right over to see what she can do. Hopefully she can talk her down. The Gordons seemed to be doing okay in the classes, and I had hoped that they would sail right through the delivery without any need for medication. Right now; I’m not so confident.”

  Carol looked up from her biology book. “You know, they say here that humans are the only species where childbirth is painful; that in other species it never is. Do you think that’s so?”

  Maggie shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m sure they never asked a dog if it hurt.”

  “But it says that they never make any noise. So they can’t be in a lot of pain.”

  “No, not necessarily. In the wild, giving birth is the most dangerous time in the life of an animal, because they’re so totally helpless. It would be really important that they not make any noises that would give their location away to any predators. You’ll notice that the young don’t make any noise, either.”

  “But a lot of times, don’t women make a whole lot of noise? And don’t their babies cry?”

  Maggie thought a minute. “I’m really not sure, I mean, what’s natural and what’s not. If you go into it expecting to make lots of noise, I suspect that more than likely you will. But I’ve been to lots of births where the women are really quite quiet. By the way, did you know that cats use the Lamaze method for bearing their young?”

  “Mother!”

  “No, it’s true. They use pant-breathing while they’re delivering, just as we have women do nowadays. I would assume that it’s for the same reason. They’ve shown that pant-breathing causes the release of endorphins in the brain, chemicals which act like morphine to kill the pain but don’t get out into the rest of the body, so the fetus isn’t affected.”

  “But that would mean that the cats do feel pain during labor.”

  Maggie thought a minute. “I guess so. Better write a letter to the biology-book publishers.”

  “But they never get so scared, like women, do they?”

  “No I doubt it. But I really don’t know enough anthropology to be able to say whether or not the way women react in our society today is a product of the society. All I know is that it’s a lot better for everyone if the woman can get through calmly and without medication.”

  Carol looked up from her book. “But are you really sure? I mean, in the end, doesn’t it all come out the same, whether the mother is knocked out right at the start, or does it all unmedicated?”

  Maggie looked at Carol, surprised.

  “Oh, I know,” Carol admitted. “But don’t you think that you’re actually overreacting a bit? Is there really any good reason to think that it’s that much better?”

  Maggie answered slowly. “Well, first of all, there are all kinds of studies that show that anesthesia is bad for the child, no matter how it’s administered. But there are also studies that show that the less traumatic the delivery is to the mother, the easier the establishment of infant-mother relationship. And there are many other little studies that show that this little, picky detail is better in an unmedicated birth than in a medicated birth, while I don’t know of anything that suggests that a good medicated birth has any advantages over a good unmedicated one.

  “But there’s another whole aspect of it, sort of a philosophical one, that I don’t quite know how to phrase.” She paused to think. “Evolution has given people biological mechanisms to deal with most medical situations. In the end, all physicians do is shift the balance in favor of an individual. Rarely can physicians really cure a disease. You cure it, doctors’ drugs just make it easier. If you didn’t have an immune system to attack infections, all the antibiotics in the world couldn’t keep you alive very long. And doctors can set broken bones, but that’s just to help keep them in place while your body patches them back together.

  “I think that the more doctors can leave you on your own, the better your own systems can work. I think that women are designed to bear children, and do it well. But I think the quality of that delivery depends on the avoidance of too much interference. Granted, sometimes there are going to be problems, and I think it’s important to have medical facilities available. But I think that the whole mind set of the woman, her emotional state, is important to the process, and that when the medical profession ignores that element, or removes it by anesthetizing the mother, it hinders the delivery in all sorts of ways.”

  She felt unsatisfied with her explanation. “Look, I’m making this all complicated. All I’m saying is that doctors should be working with their patients, and not on their patients. That’s all. And that it threatens the whole process when doctors try to take the healing process, or the delivery process, out of the hands of the patients.”

  Carol looked lost. “Oh.” She looked down at her book. “Well, if I’m going to study this stuff, this is the last chance I get.” She turned back to the book, and started leafing through the pages. Then, looking back up, she asked, “That’s what you’ve been fighting about, isn’t it?”

  It was Maggie’s turn to look lost. “What do you mean?”

  “At the Midwives Association. All the fights about using fetal monitors, and all the things that Glanvil woman was saying—that’s just a fight about who gets to deliver the baby, the mother or the doctor.” Then, unsure of Maggie’s reaction, she backpedaled. “I guess it’s more complicated th
an that.”

  “No!” Maggie exclaimed. “You’re absolutely right. That’s exactly what we were fighting about. I didn’t realize you were paying such close attention to our arguments.”

  Carol looked proud and embarrassed at once. “Well, now I really do have to study,” she muttered, and turned back to her book.

  Transferring her eggs to a plate, Maggie moved to the table and sat down across from Carol. For a minute, she just stared silently at her daughter, thinking over their conversation. It really seemed to her that medicine had, somewhere in the last few hundred years, shifted from a team effort, where doctor and patient worked together, almost to an adversary relationship, where the patient and doctor were as likely as not to work at cross-purposes. I wonder, she thought, whether sometimes that even blocks totally the ability of the two to work a cure.

  Carol looked up from her book. “You know you hate eggs when they get cold,” she reminded Maggie.

  Nodding, she turned her attention to her breakfast. Damn, she thought, they’re cold.

  * * *

  It was almost midnight when Maggie returned home, exhausted. Carol was reading in the living room.

  “Hi, darling, how was the exam?”

  Carol crossed the room to give Maggie a hug. “Hi. It was stupid. I think I did all right, but there was a stupid fill-in-the-blank section where she wanted to know all sorts of stupid picayune stuff, and a whole bunch of it I didn’t have any idea about.”

  “Doesn’t sound so great.”

  Carol shrugged. “It was only twenty percent of the test, and I knew at least half of them. But they were stupid things, like list four poisonous snakes that live in the U.S.”

  Maggie looked surprised. “You couldn’t think of them? I mean, even without taking a course you should at least know about rattlers, and water moccasins, and—”

  “No, Mom, not common names. You had to know their Latin names, like Crotalus, that’s the name for rattlesnakes.”

  “Oh.” Maggie made a face. “You mean taxonomy. Well, if it makes you feel any better, I couldn’t ever remember that stuff, either.”

  “Well, she always grades on a curve, so I don’t think I’ll have any trouble.”

  Maggie sat down in a rocking chair, and picked up a paper. “How was Gramma this evening?”

  “Pretty good. She didn’t take any pain pills during the afternoon, and finally took one around seven. I think she was hoping to wait until you got home. After that she was pretty dopey.”

  “I wish I had been able to get home earlier. We get so little time together when she’s feeling well.”

  “Well, I don’t know that I’d say she was feeling well. But better than usual, I guess.” After a moment she turned to Maggie, and asked, “Mom, is the reason that you want Gramma to be at home instead of at the hospital because you think she’s more likely to recover?”

  “No—what makes you ask that?”

  “Well, I was just thinking about what you said this morning, about how sometimes, maybe, people can’t get well as fast, or at all, unless they sort of get to help, and I was thinking that maybe you thought she’d have a better chance to, well, fight along with the medicine and all, if she was at home.” Carol looked down at the floor. “I guess it was a dumb idea, but I just thought that maybe . . .” She looked up at Maggie, tears gleaming in the corners of her eyes.

  Maggie got up and walked over to her daughter. Sitting down on the arm of her chair, she gave Carol a hug. “I don’t know, darling, that wasn’t in my mind when I brought her home. I just felt that, well, she’d rather be here at the end than in a hospital.”

  Carol’s eyes were pleading. “But don’t you think that maybe, if she could help, like you said, that then maybe the medicines would work better?”

  “No—not really. You see, those drugs were all evolved through elaborate tests, and clinical studies done in hospitals, so if anything, they’re probably optimized for your standard hospital setting.”

  They sat quietly for a few minutes, lost in their private thoughts. Finally, Maggie got up and looked at her watch.

  It was almost one. “Hey, it’s one, and I’m going to bed. You probably should, too.”

  Carol put down her book. “I know. Besides, it’s a dumb book.” Getting up out of the chair, she gave Maggie a kiss and headed down to her room.

  Maggie spent the next few minutes straightening up the kitchen, more out of nervous exhaustion than any real need, and then headed gratefully for her own room. It had been a hard day, and poor Ellsie Gordon had fought herself the whole way through the labor and delivery. In the end it had been a heavily medicated delivery, and Maggie had been forced to resort to forceps. At least she could look forward to a night of uninterrupted sleep.

  * * *

  She was wandering lost in the halls of a huge hospital, searching frantically for her mother. The halls were immense, resembling more a long ballroom than normal hospital corridors. On both sides, doors of heavy carved wood were set one beside another in ornate frames. Above each door was a plaque on which was drawn some ancient rune. She was looking for B416.

  Down the hall, a door opened, and a short, disfigured man came out. She immediately took him for a doctor. But as they closed the distance between them, she realized that, in fact, he was Death. As they passed, he smiled, and pointed back to the room he had just left. Hurrying on, she stopped outside the open door. Over the frame the number B416 was etched into a bronze plate.

  Hesitating, she peered into the room. It looked like a typical hospital room. At a card table, Ann and Carol were sitting, quietly playing dominos. “It’s so boring,” Ann was explaining to Carol, “to try to get better. They won’t let you do a single thing to help. Boredom’s bad enough with these modern medicines, but the old ones don’t even have a chance unless I get to help.”

  Carol nodded sympathetically. “Well, that’s Mother for you. Always telling everyone what to do. Why, she’s even trying to force all the midwives to do things her way. But I tell you what,” leaning closer to Ann, she whispered in a just audible voice, “you tell her to get off my back about my homework, and I’ll talk to her about letting you help.”

  Ann smiled and then shook hands with Carol. “It’s a deal.”

  Suddenly, Maggie realized that she was not alone in the doorway. Turning, she saw the disfigured doctor laughing to himself. “Too late,” he smiled, and drew a large chalk X on the door. Laughing again, he headed back into the hall. Terrified, Maggie turned back to the table, but it, Ann, and Carol, were gone. In their place was a large wicker basket full of flowers.

  * * *

  Maggie sat up suddenly, the nightmare still with her. The house was dark, and her alarm read three o’clock. Still bearing the face of the disfigured doctor in her mind, she shook herself, and turned on the light. The dream had an unpleasantly real air about it. Maggie got up and walked out into the hall. She could hear light snoring from Ann’s room, and she quietly opened the door to peek in.

  The finger of light from Maggie’s room crossed the foot of Ann’s bed, casting only the dimmest ray to her face. For an instant, she feared that Ann was dead, but in the next moment she beard another breath sigh out. The dream returned suddenly, but this time Maggie felt that there was something in it that she was not supposed to forget. She stopped and frowned, trying to recall the details of the dream, but as she did, it drifted from her memory.

  She closed the door, went back to her room, turned off the light, and got in bed. Most of her apprehension had disappeared with the details of the dream. I wonder what it was I was supposed to remember, she thought, and, searching for it, fell quickly back to sleep.

  * * *

  But in the morning, the dream was still bothering Maggie. She could remember the vague outlines of it, the rooms, the faces, the emotions, but not the dialogue, except for the comment, “Too late.” She was convinced that there was something important for her to remember. Creeping senility, she decided, worrying about my dreams
like this. Throwing off the idea, she began her day.

  As she headed for the clinic, the sky was overcast and dreary, promising a day of intermittent drizzle. She met Kathy in the parking lot, and as they walked into the clinic they bashed over the events surrounding Ellsie Gordon’s delivery. “I think that by the time I arrived, it was already too late,” Kathy explained. “In fact, I suspect that we lost the battle a month ago.”

  Maggie nodded in agreement. “But do you think there’s anything we can do once women like Ellsie go into labor, and it becomes clear that they are terrified of giving birth? Some way to break them out of it at that point?”

  “I don’t know,” Kathy replied, “I think it’s more than just a frame of mind. The whole purpose of the Lamaze process is not just to make a woman feel more calm while in labor, but to relax her body physically. Lamaze is not just a psychological process, it’s a complicated psychophysical interplay, and if it’s not working properly, then I don’t think the birth process works properly. To be honest, I don’t think the woman has a chance of delivering easily unless she gives her body a chance to help.”

  The phrase rang in Maggie’s mind, and for a minute she even forgot that she was with Kathy. It was from her dream. Somehow, mysteriously, the entire dream flashed back before her again, and this time she was hearing their conversation clearly.

 

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