Bed Rest

by Sarah Bilston

  Weirdly enough, the nicest visit I had was from this funny little Greek lady who lives in one of the apartments downstairs. She knocked on the door Saturday afternoon and asked if she could take a look at our apartment; she’s involved in some kind of fight with our landlord about the services he provides, and she wanted to compare our apartment with hers. Anyway, half an hour after she’d examined the kitchen appliances and the state of the air-conditioning units she showed up again with a dish of homemade moussaka and a paper plate of sweetmeats made from semolina. Her English is far from perfect (her accent is heavy and thick as honey), but she was incredibly kind. She said she’d come again soon with homemade baklava, which is almost as good as a chocolate chip cookie.

  So here I am again, beginning of a new week, the end of my first on bed rest. I’m twenty-seven weeks’ pregnant. If the baby was born today he’d be thirteen weeks’ premature. I just Googled “twenty-seven weeks gestation survival” and found a Web site that claims his chances are already around 85 percent! Feel hugely cheered.

  11 A.M.

  I just Googled “oligohydramnios survival” and “low amniotic fluid prognosis.” Big mistake, Q. Big, gynormous mistake.

  I’ve been sucking at a paper bag for the last twenty minutes, but I still can’t stop crying. An average twenty-seven week baby may have an 85 percent chance of making it, but babies in low fluid may do a great deal worse. Second trimester oligohydramnios has “a poor prognosis,” apparently; lung development “may be fatally retarded.” Children who seem healthy in their mother’s wombs may die on delivery because of something called pulmonary hypoplasia.

  Once I discovered this, I felt compelled to find out more. And soon I found myself reading chat room posts from women across the country who were advised to terminate their pregnancies when oligohydramnios was diagnosed. Whose babies suffocated at birth because their lungs couldn’t function. Whose children were born with an appalling mix of physical and mental deformities.

  I threw up in the bathroom a few minutes ago; since then I’ve been shaking on the sofa. I’m trying to get control of myself by writing this. Why didn’t my doctor tell me about pulmonary hypoplasia? Did she think I wouldn’t be able to cope? Actually, I don’t know if I can cope. How am I going to get through the next five, ten weeks not knowing if this baby is going to live?

  12 P.M.

  In desperation, I called Dr. Weinberg’s office. The kindly receptionist brought my appointment forward from tomorrow afternoon to today, at four. I’ve told Tom he has to leave work to take me. He wasn’t pleased (“Christ, Q, I’m up to my eyeballs, hell I’m over them”), but then I started crying hysterically, telling him everything I’d just read, and he went very quiet. That made me even more terrified—I wanted him to tell me that I was being stupid, that you can’t believe everything you read on the Web. But he didn’t. He was just very, very quiet, and I could hear him breathing slowly and hard the way he does when he’s trying to stay calm. “Jesus,” he said at last, half under his breath.

  I can’t eat, but I’ve been drinking water feverishly these last few hours (“Keep hydrated,” Dr. Weinberg told me last week. Does that mean the water I drink will get to the baby somehow? How can that be? How does it get from my stomach to my womb?)

  3:30 P.M.

  Tom will be here any minute. But I’m calmer now.

  The little Greek lady came by with the plate of baklava. I was weeping miserably when she pushed the doorbell, and I wasn’t planning on answering it, but she must have heard me because she called urgently through the door to ask if anything was wrong. I thought about telling her to go away, and frankly I still don’t quite know why I didn’t. But, for whatever reason, I got up and opened the door. She took one look at me, led me back to the sofa, and told me to lie down again.

  She immediately saw I hadn’t eaten my lunch, so she broke off small pieces from my sandwich and fed them to me one at a time. I discovered I was extremely hungry and ate them obediently, like a small child. Afterward she gave me some of the baklava with a glass of milk. “This difficult time,” she said to me, at last, very seriously, “but you try to stay peaceful. No point thinking bad thoughts, you fight them, you know? Good girl, eh? Good girl.” Then, to my surprise, she dropped a maternal kiss on my cheek as she got up to leave. “See you soon, I come with more things, sweet wholesome things, you eat yourself to good health, yes?” She gurgled with sudden, irrepressible laughter. “I come back see you soon, I promise.”

  She mentioned in passing today that she doesn’t have kids; I wonder why not. She would have made a great mother.

  7 P.M.

  I’m back home after the appointment, ensconced on the yellow print sofa once more. Tom has had to go back to the office.

  I wish I felt completely better, I wish I felt 100 percent comforted after our meeting with Dr. Weinberg. I want to feel the way I did a week or two ago, like a simple healthy animal, a cow perhaps, giving birth without giving the matter a thought. Now everything seems so complicated, a matter of tests and diagnoses, of readings in centimeters (or is it millimeters?), of charts, diagrams, statistics.

  To be fair, things could’ve been worse.

  We got to Dr. Weinberg’s consulting rooms a few minutes early. The waiting room was filled with pregnant women, their hands resting lightly on their rounded bellies. Last week, I was one of the women with a beatific Madonna smile. This week, I slunk into the corner and hid my “small” abdomen behind a copy of the New York Times. I felt so inadequate.

  First I had another ultrasound. Cherise was waiting in her small shadowed room for me, probe in hand. “I remember you,” she said coolly when I walked in. “I suppose we’ll be seeing a lot of you from now on,” she added, cracking open her tube and slithering my belly with sickly warm goo. I shivered.

  And yet what a relief to see the baby once more on the screen, the four chambers of the heart clearly visible, each one tiny, distinct, perfect. And what a strange, mysterious delight to see his skeleton in motion. Delicately contoured tibia and fibula flashed left and right; the stacked column of his vertebrae undulated as he flipped up and down and around, twisting about his umbilical cord like a fairground gymnast around a rope. A face flashed into view for a second, and something about his cheeks, about the structure of bone around his eyes, reminded me of my father. How funny, I thought. All these years my dad has been dead, a part of him has been living inside of me waiting to be reborn.

  Cherise seemed to be in an uncharacteristically expansive mood today, because she told me at the end of the session that my fluid level was “stable; not much change here.” I still don’t have enough of the stuff, apparently, but at least I haven’t lost any since last week.

  Then we saw the doctor, who started out by scolding me for reading Web posts on my condition. What kind of mishegoss is this? She waggled her finger severely. I was quite glad to be scolded, actually—it had a ring of the “don’t believe everything you read” stump I wanted from Tom this morning. She then said that my oligohydramnios was not “severe,” and that pulmonary hypoplasia only develops when amniotic fluid levels are lower than mine. But she doesn’t rule it out entirely either. And if the baby does have it, there’s nothing whatsoever we can do. There’s no test they can administer to assess the baby’s lung development. It’s just a question of wait and see.

  I was staring miserably at the linoleum floor during all of this, and Tom was gazing with unfocused eyes out of the discreetly shaded windows. Dr. Weinberg must have seen how distressed we were because she picked up the pace of the conversation and said, “Listen, your baby’s anatomical growth appears to be on track, I haven’t seen signs of physical damage—babies who don’t have enough room often develop club feet, and that’s easy to spot—so there’s every reason to be optimistic. I can’t pretend we might not find something on delivery, something we haven’t seen on the ultrasound, but I think he’s going to come out of this well. Take it a week at a time,” she added, turning to look stra
ight at me. “And cut out the Web surfing, yes? After all, who posts a story to say, I had a scare, but everything turned out okay? Remember, if you have further questions ask me, not freakedoutmomma@yahoo.com.

  “And you,” she said, turning to Tom with a shade of reproof on her angular face, “keep her calm, yes? Your job is to keep her going, keep her comfortable. Lots of foot rubs and treats, yes?” Tom gave her a brief, pained smile and muttered something about the pressures of work.

  But I think he took her advice to heart because when we got home he dashed out and returned a quarter of an hour later with a huge vitamin-enriched milkshake (tons of protein, good for fetal development), a bag of chips, and a couple of DVDs. He’s had to go back to the office for a meeting with a client, but at least I have something to keep me occupied. I do miss him, though. I wish he was here to watch the movies with me. I’m starting to feel terribly lonely.

  7

  Tuesday 10 A.M.

  Tom’s been at work for over three hours already, but so far I’ve managed to avoid surfing the Web for more scare stories about my condition. Instead I have:

  eaten three pieces of baklava.

  That’s about it, actually. Other than that I’ve stared out the window at yet another gray, cool, slushy East Coast morning and watched an elderly gentleman in the apartment complex opposite bang on his TV to try and get it to work. Then I went through my address book to see if there’s anyone I’d like to talk to (there isn’t) and napped for twenty minutes. It feels like six weeks since I first went on bed rest. How can it be only eight days?

  10:45 A.M.

  Still can’t think of anything to do—except panic. I have to turn my thoughts in a new direction. I’m going to call my mother. This is almost certainly a mistake. I’m going to do it anyway.

  11:30 A.M.

  Well, that wasn’t too bad, all things considering. She was in a good mood because the yoga studio’s profits are up this quarter.

  To be fair, she has been a lot happier generally since she retired from her “proper” job as a bank manager and opened the studio. I wasn’t as supportive as I might have been when she first told me the plan; frankly I thought she was turning into a cliché of the single woman, complete with floaty kaftans, incense, and a slightly wild hairdo. Now I think she looks quite nice in the kaftans, she reserves the incense for special occasions, and crazy hairstyle notwithstanding, she’s making a good job of the business. In the space of a few years she’s turned it into a profit-making enterprise: all credit to her, she spotted a niche in the market—to wit, women over sixty with plenty of spare time who don’t want to creak their limbs in front of bendy twentysome-things. I’ve never been to one of her classes, but Jeanie says they’re a riot—a dozen-odd blue-rinses in deck shoes and sweatpants, giggling like mad when they can’t hold “the cat.” They love my mother, apparently—funny that she’s so tolerant and forgiving of other people’s shortcomings when mine assume the shape of heinous crimes.

  I often wonder what would have happened if my father hadn’t walked out when I was thirteen. Of course, she might have chucked him out herself, eventually. He was my dad, and I loved him, but he was one of the most ineffectual men to walk the face of the earth. He spent most of my childhood trying to be a songwriter—trying, and conspicuously failing. True, he played the piano beautifully, and he had a wonderful voice; I vividly recall him singing war songs (“If You Were the Only Girl in the World,” “Roses in Picardy,” “We’ll Meet Again”) to me and my sisters when we were in the bath. Not, I hasten to add, that he’d actually served in the army; he missed the Second World War by a few years, which was probably a good thing, because he couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag as my mother used to say. He spent half his life on the dole, the other half shuttling between low-level temporary jobs—gardener, substitute teacher, children’s entertainer (my bendy balloon dog collection was the envy of all my friends). And then, when I was about twelve, he started this desperate, pathetic affair with the next-door neighbor, a woman who’d spent her entire life in curlers and slippers, cleaning other people’s houses, but longing to be a classical guitar teacher of all things. They moved to Brighton, and I hardly saw him again. He died of a heart attack when I was in my first year at university.

  I’ve always suspected that if he’d stayed my mother would have had less energy to devote to scolding her three daughters. We certainly became conscious of the force of her will in the years after he left. She was determined we should take after her, not him—stability and security were to be our watchwords, she told us. She wanted us all to have a good university education, preferably at Oxford (she was the first in her family to go to university, but in her day the city of aquatint was out of reach for a workingman’s daughter, so she wound up at Southampton). After that she wanted to see us comfortably ensconced in one of “the professions,” the taint of the yeomanry finally erased from the family. I was right on target, an A-plus daughter, until I took a job in the States—that wasn’t part of Mummy’s plan. As far as my mother is concerned, America is a country of crooks and charlatans, shady types dressed in spats and low-brimmed fedoras. I keep inviting her to visit, but she always declines; I don’t think she’d know what to do if she discovered New Yorkers don’t actually congregate in speakeasies and plunge their enemies into concrete vats.

  And now she’s become a yoga guru for elderly ladies and a staunch advocate of the continental workday. It’s all about the “rhythms of life,” apparently. My mother’s theories of the rhythms of life are very attractive if you are over sixty; they don’t have a whole lot to do with earning a living. They involve sleeping as much as you want, going on beach trips to the south of France, and (this with a particularly unctuous expression) devoting Real Energy to Your Family. What this seems to mean, in practice, is reproaching your eldest daughter for living three and a half thousand miles away. Of course it also means adopting a particularly pained expression whenever said daughter talks about the pressures of work, the lack of time she gets to spend with her husband, the challenges of trying to combine office-and home-life. It’s really a great theory, because it means you don’t have to sympathize with your eldest daughter on any of these issues, you can just tell her that her life is ideologically flawed and honestly what does she expect? And when will she see sense and come back to the land of moderation and rationality, the land where (she insists) family still comes first? After all, look at Alison…

  Alison has become A-number-one daughter, her star in the ascendant as mine precipitously declined. She’s a wonderful disciple of the rhythms-of-life theory, a first-class sleeper and frequenter of beach resorts, and those bottomless pots don’t interfere much with life as a mummy. It turns out that my mother didn’t really want us to go into the professions after all, she wanted us to marry rich men and have them do all the work. Wish I’d cottoned onto that one years ago, it would have saved me a lot of bother.

  Anyway, today, for whatever reason, she limited the number of catty comments, and we chatted amicably about family politics. She doesn’t approve of Jeanie’s boyfriend, and neither do I, so this is a pretty safe topic. My horrible uncle Richard (Ma’s older brother) sold his pad in Malta at a loss last week; another safe topic, since we both experience an unseemly delight at anything that makes Richard unhappy. She also told me her plans to expand the yoga business over the next year—she wants to hire a second instructor, which seems like an excellent idea, if only to facilitate those beach trips and maybe, just maybe, so she can come out here and see the baby. It’s funny, in spite of her pro-family pitch, it doesn’t seem to have crossed her mind to keep me company for a week or two while I’m on bed rest. Can’t leave the yoga studio, she says. Now, isn’t that an example of work getting in the way of family? (But did I say that on the phone just now? No, of course not. We’re getting on for the moment, said the good daughter voice in my ear; don’t rock the boat. Maybe you can ask her the next time. Except I know I won’t. I won’t have the nerve.)<
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  1:30 P.M.

  I ate the prosciutto sandwich, chips, and banana Tom left me about an hour ago, and I’ve been waiting hopefully for Brianna for the last twenty minutes. But it looks like—

  2:45 P.M.

  Well, fortunately Brianna showed up just as I was about to commit hara-kiri from hunger and boredom. There’s a lot more to Brianna than I realized. Today she brought me a platter heaped with noodles and sugar snap peas from a gourmet buffet, followed by a Stollen, a bag of marzipan Kugeln from one of the German stores around the corner, and a selection of three excellent chocolate chip cookies (white, dark, and milk chocolate chips in crispy thin biscuit, delicately buttery with a light sugar snap).