Bringing in Finn

by Sara Connell

  Bill shifted in his chair. I started to feel lightheaded. My stomach grumbled. I wished I’d brought a snack.

  “Do you want to know the sexes?” the technician asked. I stopped thinking about food.

  Bill leaned forward in his chair. “Yes!” he said.

  We held hands.

  “Baby A is a . . . ” She drew the words out slowly. I looked at Bill and then at the technician. “Boy!” she said. I nodded. I’d seen the confirmation already. “And Baby B . . . ” she said, angling the roller so we could see with her. I waited for her to say “girl”; Bill believed we were having a girl as well.

  “Another boy!” the technician said.

  Bill dropped my hand. “Are you sure?” he said.

  I looked at the screen and saw his little white member hanging between his legs. He put his thumb back in his mouth, and I melted into the table.

  The revelation that we were having two boys took a few days to sink in. It seemed we now knew so much more about our twins. By the weekend, we were on baby websites, looking at names. On Friday, September 1, we went to Carnival, a cavernous Latin restaurant in the West Loop, to celebrate a friend’s fortieth birthday. At dinner, she told me about a boy she’d dated in South Africa who came from a family of four boys. “Their mother was like you—creative and beautiful—and those boys adored her. I imagine that’s the way your boys will be: lovely, fun, rambunctious, and adoring.”

  On September 4, I met with two clients in the morning. I invited my eleven o’clock client to meet upstairs in our living room, thinking the light was particularly beautiful that day. The sun filtered through the large dome window, bathing the sofa and chairs in light. Toward the end of the session, I felt a small cramp. Throughout the pregnancy, I’d had no cramping or pain. I’d felt flutters in my belly recently, though, and Dr. Baker had said these were the first movements of the twins that I could feel.

  I walked my client to the door. Another cramp came, the kind that sometimes preceded an urgent need to go to the bathroom. I moved gingerly to the kitchen, taking my time and holding on to the railing of the short staircase that led up to the kitchen bathroom. I felt a slight rush of dizziness in my head, but it passed quickly. I switched on the light and pulled down my pants, getting ready to sit on the toilet. I felt another light cramp, and then I saw it: blood. A thick stand of it fell from between my legs. I braced myself between the two walls of the bathroom, praying that it was a trick of my eye. I looked down again and saw another streak running down the side of my right leg. More blood, coming faster now, falling into the basin of the toilet. A few drops splattered onto the blond boards of the hardwood floor. I bunched toilet paper between my legs and cupped my hand beneath me, trying desperately to think of anything I could do to stop it.

  Chapter 6

  I’ve heard people claim at dinner parties, or the occasional client intake session, that they are “good in a crisis.” They mention this the way one might share about other useful skills, like being able to tie nautical knots or start a fire in the wilderness with a piece of wood and some flint. I have never aspired to have this skill.

  I’m guessing, like intuition, the ability to be good in a crisis is something we all possess—perhaps a gift of Darwinian evolution. And I am sure we all benefit from this ability, yet I’ve also often heard it takes being in a crisis to know if one does indeed possess this skill.

  When the blood continued to flow between my legs as I stood in the bathroom, a few drops now spilling onto the floorboards, I became hyperconscious of my body and my feet on the floor. My thoughts narrowed to a single message: Get to the phone and call the doctor.

  Stuffing more toilet paper between my legs, I walked awkwardly across the kitchen to my cell phone, jeans still around my knees. My green maternity top stretched over my extended belly. I looked seven months pregnant because of the twins. I had to steady my hand on the kitchen island as I scrolled through my list of phone numbers and called the OB’s office. I kept my voice even as I provided details to the nurse.

  “Are you bleeding through more than a pad an hour?”

  “The bleeding just started.”

  “You’re how far along?”

  “Almost twenty-two weeks.”

  “Are you in any pain?”

  If terror is pain, then yes. Physical pain, no.

  The nurse sounded casual, unconcerned. I could picture the bustling office, always overflowing with patients, running thirty to forty minutes behind. At one point she asked me to hold the line while she answered a question for a patient who was in the office. Her demeanor both enraged me and gave me a shred of hope that perhaps what was happening was not, in fact, dire.

  The nurse finally gathered enough information to instruct me to come to the office. Bill, who had been in a meeting downtown, said he would meet me there. I called a taxi and walked out to the front steps to wait. Taxis could take up to twenty minutes, and I wondered if I should call an ambulance. I didn’t have any pads in the house, so I’d stuffed more toilet paper in my underwear. I brought nothing with me from the house aside from my wallet and a sandwich (a last desperate attempt at normalcy). The early September light blazed through the trees and onto the sidewalk. I could not comprehend the bleeding.

  Dr. Baker had told us to be prepared for the twins to come at about eight months. According to our recalibrated due date, we were entering our third trimester. Anything after twenty weeks was no longer considered a miscarriage. I was terrified to think what was happening. I put my hands to my stomach and tried to feel the babies move. Everything inside my body felt normal. The cramping was gone. Everything felt the same as it had the previous day. A woman walked by, pushing her child in a stroller. I felt one of the babies move, and I allowed myself to hope that everything would be okay. “Hang on, babies,” I said to the twins. “Hang on.”

  In the taxi I started to pray. I texted Amanda and Kaitlin.

  “Oh god,” Kaitlin texted back. “All prayers with you.”

  Within minutes of arriving at the office, I was in the examining room. Dr. Baker slapped on a latex glove and examined me internally with her fingers. “Your cervix is dilated,” she said. “Did anything happen? Have you been having any cramping? Did you have a hard bowel movement?”

  “Could a bowel movement cause a problem?” I asked.

  She said no. Then why did you ask? I thought, upset.

  “I just checked you last week,” she said. “Everything was fine.”

  Bill arrived and stood with his hand on my shoulder at the top of the exam table.

  Dr. Baker looked worried and sent us to the hospital where she delivered, just a few blocks away.

  “Go to the fourth floor,” she said. “I’ll meet you there in fifteen minutes.”

  The women’s ward of the hospital was contained in the larger hospital building and had not been touched since the ’70s, when it was built.

  “You want us to walk?” I asked, confounded. Were we having an emergency or not? Bill took my hand and walked me out of the office and down the street. Dr. Baker’s nurse had given me two pads, which I layered inside my thong. We tried not to imagine what might be happening. “Can you feel them?” Bill asked. I nodded and began to cry.

  “Let’s not panic yet,” he said. “It might be okay.” The hospital’s entrance was grimy, like an old subway station, having been subjected to decades of pollution and smog from the El train and traffic nearby. I balked at the entrance, my body bristling like a cat sensing something malicious.

  A nurse on the women’s floor asked the same questions I’d now answered two times that day. She told me to change into a gown and admitted us to a large, ugly private room. I fought memories of being admitted to the hospital for my cyst. I felt the same taste of bewilderment I had experienced that day as people calmly asked questions and gave me forms to fill out as if I were applying for a car loan instead of bleeding through my jeans and onto the floor.

  Dr. Baker arrived minutes later, wearin
g a lab coat and accompanied by a nurse with curly hair. Another doctor, an attending physician at the hospital who wore wire-rimmed glasses and had thick dark hair on his knuckles, joined her. They lifted my legs into stirrups, and Dr. Baker felt around inside me with her fingers. I winced as she pressed hard.

  “She’s dilated, probably three centimeters or so. I can feel the bag.”

  The other doctor checked to verify the dilation.

  “You’re in labor,” she said. “Your cervix has dilated prematurely and the babies have begun to descend.”

  The labor I’d expected involved water breaking, not blood.

  “It’s too soon,” she continued. “There’s not a good chance they’ll survive.”

  I twisted in the bed. I looked around for someone who could tell me this was a mistake. The doctors’ faces were grim.

  “Is there anything we can do?” I asked.

  “There is one procedure we can try. It’s called a cerclage.” The attending physician with the hairy knuckles was speaking. “It involves trying to stitch up your cervix and push the babies back up into the uterus.”

  “It’s a risk,” Dr. Baker said. “We’d have to have a large needle right up close to the sac. If we burst the bag, the twins have to be delivered. There’s a high risk of infection.”

  “If we don’t do it?” I asked.

  “You’ll probably go into full labor and deliver them anyway.”

  “When would that happen?” Bill asked.

  “Probably in the next forty-eight hours,” Dr. Baker said. She looked down at her clipboard, avoiding our eyes. “An emergency cerclage like this one has about a 6 to 8 percent chance of success.”

  I noticed the clock on the wall, a generic circle with a white face and brown rim, reminiscent of the ones that were mounted on the walls of my junior high school. I watched the red second hand glide around the face.

  “So, our only chance is the cerclage,” Bill said. His teeth were clenched and his voice came out in a strained tone.

  “I can give you a few moments,” Dr. Baker said, moving toward the door.

  Bill looked down at me on the bed. I couldn’t imagine what the doctor thought we would need to discuss. I experienced the same tunneling sensation I’d felt in my kitchen.

  “Order the cerclage,” I said.

  “Dr. Eagen is the best in the hospital,” Dr. Baker affirmed, as a surgical team prepared me for the procedure. We’d signed papers absolving the hospital of any responsibility if our twins did not survive. An anesthesiology team joined the growing party in the room. They told me that to protect the babies, I would not be able to have general anesthesia. Instead, they would administer a spinal tap to numb the area below my waist. I’d be strapped to a hospital table that they would maneuver to a steep incline, so that my legs would be up high in the air and my head would hang below.

  “You’ll have to lie very still,” the older of the two anesthesiologists said. She spoke in a soothing voice and looked like an old hippie, with long hair that was just starting to gray.

  “We’ll use gravity to help us out,” said a younger Asian anesthesiologist. He had a kind face, and I forced my mouth into a weak smile.

  I turned my face away from the doctors. I could see my reflection in a glass cabinet opposite the bed. My hair was covered with a blue surgical bonnet, and I was still bleeding between my legs into a pad. A nurse started an IV in my arm. Someone else drew blood.

  Sometime around 3:00 PM, Dr. Eagen’s team assembled and two orderlies wheeled me into the operating room. The anesthesiology team rolled me onto my side and inserted the spinal tap. I was afraid to move. I was afraid of the rotating table. I was terrified that Dr. Eagen would not be able to save our babies.

  Please let us be the 6 to 8 percent, I prayed silently as the table started to tilt.

  Dr. Baker came into the room for the procedure. All I could see of her were her brown eyes, looking attentive and concerned through her scrubs and face mask. The head anesthesiologist inserted the needle into my spine. I closed my eyes but then opened them. Whatever was going to happen here, with my babies, I was going to be present for it. The younger anesthesiologist rolled me onto my back and secured me to the table with straps around my arms and across my abdomen and chest. I couldn’t move my arms to my belly, so I said silently, over and over, I am with you, babies. I am your mama. I have loved every minute with you. See if you can go back up inside. I love you so much. I prayed that the highest good would unfold and then began to meditate. It was the only thing I could think to do.

  The operating table started to move. The head anesthesiologist reminded me again to remain still. As my legs rose, I counted my breaths. I remembered a meditation I’d learned, the one about appreciating people and wishing them well. Silently, I thanked the two anesthesiologists for being kind, I thanked Dr. Baker for coming into the OR with me, I thanked Dr. Eagen for doing the training he’d done to allow him to perform this procedure. I wished good to the nurses and the lab technicians and the spinal tap that was numbing me, sort of, from the waist down.

  Dr. Eagen centered a light between my legs, which were now high above me. I could see a large mirror on the ceiling. “It’s there so the doctors can see what they’re doing,” Dr. Baker whispered, following my gaze. I remembered stories from Catholic school of upside-down crucifixions for people who had committed the most unconscionable crimes. I focused my attention inward, on the babies, on my breath.

  I felt tugging and a light pulling sensation where Dr. Eagen worked. The energy in the room intensified. I thought the procedure might be working; the stitching had been going on a long time. Then I felt something gush and heard Dr. Eagen yell, “Shit!” I looked up into the mirror. Water and blood spilled onto the floor. I pulled at the straps at my arms. I wanted to push the babies back inside. I wanted to hold them there with my hands.

  I put my attention back on the twins, the way I had each day since I’d learned we were pregnant. I’d always felt the warmth of their life, even imagined them giggling and talking to me. Now my belly was cold and I felt a void. The babies weren’t inside me anymore. It felt as if they had fled, my womb had become an abandoned building in a state of emergency.

  I heard a rush of sound near my ears and felt a hovering sensation around the sides of my head. I wasn’t allowed to move and couldn’t see anything except the ceiling mirror, a narrow strip of my body, and the tops of the doctors’ heads. Dr. Eagen and his team were still active at the end of the table. I could feel fingers and metal instruments touching my thighs even through the gauze of numbness. The hovering continued for another few seconds, and then it was gone. Dr. Eagen pulled off the American-flag do-rag he’d been wearing and threw it onto the floor. He looked angry as he paced around the room. “Shit,” he said again.

  Dr. Baker approached the side of the bed, her palm outstretched like a marble statue of a saint. No one had to tell me what had happened. The sac had burst. The labor was irreversible now. I thanked Dr. Eagen and the anesthesiologists for trying. I started to thank the orderlies and the doctors for their attempt, but my words caught in my throat. I began to weep.

  Dr. Baker began to cry as well. I wondered if she did so every time someone lost a baby. Now I understood the grooves around her eyes that seemed premature for age forty. She told me later that she cried because I was thanking people, because she’d never seen anyone do such a thing. The thanking didn’t seem special to me, though. These people did their best to help us. Nothing I could say could change anything for the babies now. I felt as if their spirits were already gone.

  Bill ran to the door as two orderlies rolled me into the room we’d been admitted to earlier. The strong men lifted me from the gurney to the bed in the middle of the room.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “The cerclage didn’t work,” I said.

  “So now what?” Bill said. “Now what!”

  I stared at the wall clock, and then at the tubes and machines hooked up
to the bed. I felt numb and strangely dispassionate. I would later learn about a form of trauma in which a person often does not feel the full force of the emotion during the event; the feelings emerge sometime later, like the pain of a sunburn that is not felt until the next day. I heaved once, drawing a craggy breath, but no tears came out. Dr. Baker arrived and told Bill I had been amazing in the operating room.

  “The air was so still. I can’t explain it.”

  I didn’t bother mentioning that it was my meditation she had felt, a momentary balloon of some kind of grace hovering over the room.

  “Your wife is one strong woman,” Dr. Baker said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said, more to myself than to the doctor. “It didn’t save them.”

  Staring at Dr. Baker’s face, I began to feel the first physical sensations of devastation. It was as if the outer perimeter of my heart were being singed by a tiny flame, the center still numb and exposed from the smash, like the pulpy core of a peach.

  “We need to decide what to do now,” Dr. Baker said. “The best thing, I think, is to attempt a D&C” (dilation and curettage). It dawned on me that this was the procedure used after miscarriages and in abortions, to remove the fetus. “You’re pretty far along, but I think we can still accomplish this.” I watched Bill’s face crumple. His hand felt limp in mine.

  “Your only other option is to deliver the babies,” Dr. Baker said.

  “You mean as in, going through contractions and pushing?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine this scenario. Laboring for hours to deliver dead children. It sounded unendurable.

  A therapist told me later that delivering stillborn babies can be a powerful healing experience and that she wished I’d been more informed at the hospital. But both then and later, I was grateful for the lack of explanation. The trauma of delivering sounded worse.

  “I recommend the D&C,” Dr. Baker said. Bill and I gave our consent.