Weekends at Bellevue

by Julie Holland

  When Jeremy and I arrive, Lucy is trying to corral her son Billy into a highchair so she can give him his lunch. I am mesmerized as I watch my pal with her boy, wearing an “I Love My Two Mommies” T-shirt. I can’t look at Billy’s T-shirt without thinking of Lucy’s cancer, and wondering how soon he’ll be down to one mommy.

  We are outside in the sunshine as we gape at Billy, who is a beautiful babbling boy. He crawls, he smiles, he is the star of the day, eclipsing all others around him. Lucy feeds Billy with a spoon, making hysterical faces to get him to open his mouth. She is wearing a plaid hat over her bald head instead of her usual scarf or wig. She seems more relaxed and happier than I’ve ever seen her.

  A new attending, Michelle, is just meeting us all. She is fresh out of a residency in Massachusetts, and seems very young; she’s wearing thick pancake makeup, and I wonder what she’s trying to cover up. I sneak a peek at her bedroom, downstairs from Lucy and Sadie’s. There is a stuffed animal on the pillow. Is this gal for real? She brought her teddy to the sleepover?

  Throughout the holiday weekend, we rotate in front of the television; JFK Jr.’s plane has gone down on its way to Martha’s Vineyard. I imagine most of America glued to their televisions instead of outside at their barbecues as the network tantalizingly teases and threatens to broadcast the recovery of the bodies.

  On Saturday night (I have asked someone to take my shift at CPEP), we eat outside in the backyard under the stars. Sadie has marinated huge porterhouse steaks in a balsamic vinaigrette.

  “You guys, there aren’t enough steaks for everyone to have their own,” says Lucy. “Some of you have to share.”

  “Daniel and I can share!” I volunteer. I turn to him. “Do you like it medium rare?”

  Daniel is not happy about this, but doesn’t come right out and say it. I’ve announced this, to the table full of physicians, to assert that we are friends, that we have a history together. I want Lucy to know that I am down with her right-hand man. Lucy, though bald and thin, still has a tremendous vitality and presence, but it’s becoming clear to most of us that Daniel will eventually succeed her and become the new director. He is being “groomed” and trained by Lucy as she prepares for her departure. He has already filled in for her whenever she is out sick, which is becoming more frequent. I’m trying to get used to the idea that he will eventually become my boss.

  By answering Lucy’s call and volunteering to share with Daniel, I’m trying to let the other doctors know that I’m in the upper echelon of the power structure at CPEP, that Lucy and Daniel, the director and assistant director, are my friends and colleagues, not my superiors. Here’s another thought: I am attempting to bond with Daniel on a masculine level. The steak, a symbol of manhood: We are sharing the kill, predators flush with the thrill of the hunt, putting down our weapons for the feast. Or maybe it has something to do with laying claim to Lucy? Maybe she is the prize, and I am offering to divide it. We are marking our territory over her, snarling animals fighting for our share of the prey, carving her up between us like divided turf.

  Whatever it may mean (sometimes being a shrink means you think too much about this stuff) Daniel wants his own steak, of course. What man wouldn’t? And we are not a couple. We are not even good friends, really. Why do I offer to share with him instead of with Jeremy? My brand-new husband is sitting a few seats down from Lucy, who is at the head of the table. I am sitting next to Daniel at the foot of the table. Daniel, trying to analyze my chumminess, I imagine, is not particularly interested in joining my newly created pecking order, but we share the steak nonetheless.

  After dinner we all walk down to the edge of the bay. Sadie and Lucy’s neighbors have graciously offered us the use of their lawn and chairs, and we have a fabulous view.

  And then come the fireworks.

  Tell Me Why

  I spend a slew of Mondays with Mary, my dutiful shrink, who, along with me, is getting used to the idea that Lucy will lose her drawn-out war, her body occupied by an unwanted enemy.

  I cannot get past how guilty I feel. I’m fine but my friend is sick. And it’s more complicated than that, because I am now four months pregnant. Lucy is dying and I am blooming with life. It is an ironic and painfully awkward juxtaposition. She is wasting away and losing hope, as I enlarge with the promise of the future looking the very picture of health. It makes me feel greedy, as if I’m taking more than my share from the dinner platter, and there really isn’t enough to go around.

  Mary points out that this is survivor guilt, plain and simple. She helps me to understand it more fully, how it resonates with my issues from childhood, beating out my sisters to get more than my share from our father. I have a similar discomfort being healthy and wealthy among the sick, poor, and homeless Bellevue patients. I won’t wear my diamond engagement ring to work, and I still feel guilty that I have my freedom while they stay locked up in the hospital.

  I hate feeling overstuffed among the hungry. I prefer things to be evenly divided. Gluttonous, I’m relishing eating for two, while Lucy can barely chew her cheese omelet because it hurts her head. We are at the Bellevue coffee shop one Monday morning after sign-out, old friends catching up on this and that. As usual, I cannot bring myself to discuss any of the really important matters with Lucy, but finally she breaks the ice.

  “Julie, you know, you and I are at radically different points in our lives,” she says to me. The imbalance has been impossible to ignore, of course, and I am grateful that she is bringing it up at last, tossing it across the table to me like a beach ball, breezily.

  “I’ve noticed it too, dude,” I answer back. “It is nothing if not completely fucked up.” We stare meaningfully at each other for a long moment, and then at last begin to have a real conversation, slowly working our way toward the meat of the matter. We both have a tendency to play up our macho butch angle with each other. It always worked on others, getting their attention and admiration, and we use it on each other to reinforce our bond. But now it feels like it’s time to get more girly. More real.

  Instead of talking about her cancer and failing health, how brave she is in the face of death, we begin to talk of children and motherhood. I tell her how I stare at the little girls in pink in their ballet class before I go into my Pilates class, wanting a little girl of my own, but afraid of how hard it will be: The mother-daughter dramas are inevitable, and if there’s anything to karma, my payback will be a bitch, just as I was to my mother in my teens. She tells me that Mary has a daughter, and I admit to Lucy that Mary and I have been spending countless hours talking about the what-ifs of raising a girl, but I do not tell her we spend the rest of the time discussing her cancer and my guilt.

  I tell her she’s lucky she has a son, that they are easier to handle, at least emotionally, and Lucy confides in me that lately she has been afraid to bond with Billy. She is pulling back from everyone now, resigning herself to her prognosis. It’s only a matter of time, in her eyes, before she checks out, so she’s starting to pack up early. She knows she’s doing it, and defends her behavior to me. Part of it is protecting herself, and part of it, she feels, is protecting Billy from loving her too much so it won’t hurt him quite as much when she abandons him.

  She’s wrong, of course. I want to tell her not to shortchange herself, or him, and that she should maximize whatever time she has left, to love and be loved. That’s all that life can really give us: time, joy, love. Being fully present is the best gift she can give him. But I don’t want to turn into that naive little Kansan Pollyanna with her again; I want to stay strong for her, to mirror her bravery, and so I mostly remain silent. The thing that binds us, the persona we share, is our macho exterior. If I shed it, I fear, we will have no special connection anymore, and even less common ground on which to rest.

  Having My Baby

  Monday, May 15, 2000. I leave Bellevue to head to the Upper West Side for an appointment with my midwife; I am thirty-seven weeks pregnant, but the baby’s head has already dropped into posi
tion. I never thought I’d complain so much about having a head between my legs.

  Later that same day, while reading a New Yorker in Mary’s waiting room, I have some cramps and my underwear becomes wet. I get very excited, believing this to signify the onset of labor. I leave Mary’s office before our hour is up, too excited to sit still. Jeremy is in Indianapolis on business, taking pictures of various tourist destinations in the city for an ad campaign. I call his hotel to let him know what’s going on. “I’ll check the flight schedule,” he promises.

  For the rest of the day I feel only cramping that is irregular and mild. Still, I stop by the birthing center for a quick exam. The midwife on duty confirms that I have lost my mucous plug and warns me that there may not be much time between my water breaking and the delivery because the head is so low. She agrees that I’m in early labor but can’t say how soon I will deliver.

  “My husband is away on business,” I say. “He’s shooting a baby elephant at a zoo tomorrow.”

  “Shooting?” she asks.

  “Photographing,” I explain.

  The rhythm of our speech resonates with something in my psyche. Then, like a bomb exploding in my face, I have a flashback of the assault that happened years ago. “Feigning?” he asks. “Faking,” I explain. And then the fist.

  I call Jeremy during the cab ride home and give him an update. He decides to fly back early the next morning, skipping the baby elephant. Once home, I follow the midwife’s advice for stalling labor and pour myself a couple of fingers of Bushmills. Lying in bed, I worry about all the things that can go wrong with my baby. Most pregnant woman fear birth defects; I fear schizophrenia. I know how fragile the brain is. My child will be fine until turning eighteen or so, and then everything will slowly unravel, and I’ll be powerless to stop it.

  The next day, Tuesday, I cancel all my plans for the week, including my private practice patients on Friday. I put my friend Kate, a veteran of two home births, on standby in case Jeremy doesn’t make it home in time. I am all set to deliver. Only nothing really happens after that. Jeremy lands around noon and things have quieted down with my pelvis.

  “Those contractions sound like classic Braxton-Hicks to me,” Joan tells me when I call her to check in. “You’re not in labor at all. It still could be weeks until you deliver.”

  This is unacceptable to me. I ask her about ways to help speed labor along. “Listen, Julie, I’m not going to advise you on how to induce labor. You’re only thirty-eight weeks. The longer you can gestate, the better for the baby.”

  I know she’s right, but I am discouraged. I talk to Kate who tells me that childbirth is like a ride; I can’t drive it. I have to let go and allow my body to be in charge.

  A week goes by. I speak to everyone I have ever known on the phone. I cook and freeze enough food to last us a month. I work incessantly on a book I’m editing about the drug Ecstasy, and have long meetings on the phone with the editor in Vermont. Tonight there’s a party at Grand Central Station celebrating the 150th anniversary of Harper’s Magazine. We know it is our last chance to go out as a childless couple, and we are glad, for once, that the baby hasn’t yet arrived.

  At the party is Spalding Gray, an actor who performs wonderful monologues off-Broadway and in films. I am a fan who has become a friend. When I met him at an earlier Harper’s party, I was too shy to speak to him for very long, but I did manage to ask him to blurb my Ecstasy book, and he graciously agreed. After that, I ended up spending most of my time talking to his wife, Kathie, who was vivacious and garrulous. Over the years, we have become friends. She is with him on the dance floor now, and we go out to join them. Spalding is pretty spazzy and entertaining when he dances, and I laugh a lot while trying to keep up. I feel as if I am shaking the baby down, helping it to drop into place with every shimmy.

  The next morning I have another appointment with the midwife. I go home and have some mild cramping which intensifies later in the day. When my water breaks, I immediately call Joan, who says, “Okay, call me back when your contractions are four minutes apart. Wait until the contractions last a full minute and are so intense you can’t do anything during one. Make sure you’re hydrated. Check back in with me around six o’clock.”

  It is two-thirty in the afternoon. I call Jeremy and my mother, then I figure I’d better grab a shower before we go to the birthing center. During the shower I have four contractions. As I towel off, I have yet another contraction.

  How long was my shower if I’ve had five contractions? Even if it was a twenty-minute shower, they’re four minutes apart, and I wasn’t in there that long. I start to take notes, recording the time and length of each contraction. By three-fifteen, I realize they are coming every ninety seconds or so, and consistently last thirty-five to forty seconds. They are picking up in intensity, so I decide to call Joan again.

  Since she just heard from me less than an hour ago, Joan thinks it’s still early in my labor. She is very focused on the fact that my contractions are not lasting a full minute. “Lie down and do your hypno-birthing exercises and relax for a little while.”

  “Joan, I need to be where you are. I’ll relax once I’m at the birthing center. These contractions are coming fast, and they’re intense, and I would feel much more comfortable if I could labor at the hospital instead of at my apartment. I’d feel better getting into a trance there instead of here.”

  She is still resistant, challenging me. “Isn’t the whole point of doing hypnosis that you can relax anywhere?” But I am not to be dissuaded. Reluctantly she tells me, “Look, if you really want to come in, you can, because there’s nothing much happening here at the center. If you’re only two centimeters, I’ll send you down the street to see a movie.”

  “If I’m only two centimeters when I get there, you can send me home,” I tell her.

  When I get off the phone, I stand staring for a moment, replaying the conversation in my mind. She is acting like me, the way I do at the hospital. She’s being tough and defiant, downplaying my experience, and I am cast in a different role, the one where I have to defend my symptoms, and I have no power. I still have to convince Jeremy, who’s home by now but wants to believe the midwife—the professional. She knows her job, and if she’s telling me it’s too early to come in, then maybe it is.

  “We need to go now!” I tell him.

  We finish packing our bags and head down to the street to find a cab. It is three-thirty in the afternoon, the Thursday before Memorial Day, and the traffic is heavy on Ninety-sixth Street. I lean against a parking meter and then a fire hydrant during my contractions. When they hit, I am doubled over in pain. They have a crescendo to them, and a long plateau. Then, just as I feel I can’t take it another second, they subside, and I can straighten up and walk.

  Two Caribbean women walk by, pointing me out in their lilting island accents, “She look like she ready to drop.” They see me hunched over and ask if I need any help, telling me I should take an ambulance, not a cab, to the hospital.

  “I’m fine between the contractions,” I say to them, and they smile and nod vigorously with understanding. I am about to join their club. Millions of women have done what I am now doing. I’m being hazed into a sorority, the League of Women Birthers.

  The cab ride to the hospital takes around fifteen minutes, and I have at least five contractions as we careen down Fifth Avenue. Each one is getting more intense, coming on the heels of the previous one, and I am getting more irritable.

  At the entrance to the hospital, I have to stop in the middle of the lobby before the security guard’s station, because I am having another huge contraction and am paralyzed. A young nurse shows us to a birthing room. I walk in and start to take off my shoes, my watch, my clothes. I need to be naked, and I can’t stand still. I alternate between shifting my weight from leg to leg and shaking out each leg in succession. I am the size of a manatee, but I can still do a great shimmy.

  “Relax,” the nurse tells me. “You’re too tense,” she s
ays while massaging my shoulders and neck. I’m a teepee, I’m a wigwam, I think to myself, the oldest joke I know. My shoulders are bunched up toward my ears, it’s true, but I am experiencing a vice gripping my pelvis, and I’ve had no success unwinding so far. All the hypno-birthing preparation and the reading about relaxing through the contractions has been wasted on me. It’s just not possible.

  Joan comes in to examine me, and she is wearing scrubs. “Okay, let’s stop playing around now,” she says. I have no idea what she’s talking about. “You’re eight centimeters.”

  Those three lovely words. “So you wanna send me to a movie now?” I ask her, a tad angry, but trying to keep it light. She is in the scrubs, and I am naked. Clearly I need to subordinate myself to her and to the process at hand.

  And right there, in the birthing center of Saint Luke’s Hospital, I have a medium-sized epiphany that has nothing to do with labor and delivery. She didn’t believe me when I called her. My clinician has failed me, and it hurt. Finally I realize, like never before, that I absolutely need to listen to my patients better, to be more open to believing their side of the story, trust that they need my care, and not always assume that I know more than they do. Just because I’m in a position of power does not mean I have to wield it, creating an impenetrable fortress.

  Needless to say, I can’t dwell on this revelation. I am already feeling an urge to push, and I ask her if it’s okay.

  “Do what your body tells you,” she coos.

  With the contractions, I sneak in a squeeze here and there, a way to push against the pain.

  “Let the baby come down,” she whispers.

  I move around on the bed, but I can’t get comfortable. No position brings any kind of relief. The nurse wipes a cold compress on my head every once in a while and I keep thanking her, because it feels so good.

  I have only put in a few pushes, sometimes waiting out a contraction or two before I push again, and already Joan is telling Jeremy to look so he can see the head.