I jerked awake, then stared at him like an otoscope had grown where his nose should’ve been. It took a second to remember where I was. Once it all came back to me, I snapped my knees together and clutched what I could of my paper garments over my dignity.
I couldn’t figure out why this man-doctor with a pudgy face and lima bean eyes stood over me. My appointment was with a woman. I never saw man-doctors. The scheduling secretary had made some kind of terrible mistake.
“Where’s my doctor?”
No way was this my doctor.
“At your service,” he said, oozing with confidence. He told me his name but I was too busy arranging my paper clothes around me to listen.
I lifted my head and raised up onto my elbows. “No. Wait.”
“I’m sorry you had to wait. I’m running a little behind.”
His nurse stepped into the room, but stood impatiently by the door like she had better things to do.
“Lie back down and scoot to the end of the table,” he said as he patted the butcher paper that covered the exam table, making it crackle. “Let’s not get any later.”
He wasn’t giving me a chance to say I’d prefer a female doctor, even if I’d mustered the courage to talk back. Just assumed I’d do what he said.
I hesitated, not sure what to do. I wish my vertebrae didn’t turn to mashed potatoes when men bossed me around.
He sat back on his rolling stool and folded his hands in his lap. His glare said he wasn’t happy with my behavior. His nurse folded her arms and leaned against the door with an eye roll.
I did not like this place. And I sure as heck did not like him. Not one bit. I should have high-tailed it out of there. Without bothering to change out of my origami-wear. You just can’t know when a simple act is about to change your life forever. But his look of censure echoed something from my past. I had to do what he said.
He stopped staring me down and lurched from his chair. “Scoot to the end of the table,” he said as he clunked the stirrups out from the sides of the exam table. His voice had lost all patience. “Jen, go tell my next patient I’ll be there as soon as I can.” His eye-rolling nurse, Jen, left.
I scooted, while trying to hold the paper around me. He snapped on his gloves. Reluctantly, I placed my heels in the footrests and lay my head back down.
He examined me, pushing and poking, peeking and prodding. I tried to keep my breathing steady, to not let his touch freak me out. He said I should have a Pap smear. While he used a wooden spatula to scrape the roof of my mouth from between my legs, he asked some routine questions, like when my last period was, if I took vitamins, if there was any cancer in my family.
Then he said, “What kind of birth control are you using?”
Birth control? The only protection I used was sunscreen. What girl needed birth control when all she’d kissed in years was George Clooney? His photo. In People magazine.
But I wasn’t telling this strange man-doctor that.
So I lied.
“Oh, um, my boyfriend. He takes care of things. You know.”
He said hmm, then grunted, “Huh,” then invaded my personal space in some more ways, ways I don’t want to think about, and finally had me sit up. He told me he felt something on my ovary, maybe a cyst.
“It might just be normal ovulation,” he said, “but I want to examine it more thoroughly with an ultrasound.”
“Do you think it’s serious?”
“Nothing to waste worry on.”
“Won’t an ultrasound be expensive?”
“You shouldn’t let money determine your prescribed medical treatment. You wouldn’t want to let something go that needs attention.”
But you just said not to worry about it.
While I tried to process what his words meant, Jen came back in and he told her to give me an ovulation kit. He said to call the day it tested positive. That would be the best time to check the cyst.
I took my egg kit (hidden in a brown paper bag), escaped that horrid place, and boarded the crowded bus for home. A smelly wino near the back, who was conversing with an invisible companion, stopped talking with his psychosis long enough to eye my brown bag. I pulled it closer to my chest and got up to wait by the exit door.
I arrived at my apartment by noon. After I scratched my Himalayan cat, Ollie, behind the ears and emptied the junk from my pockets into a basket on my credenza, I peeled the sweaty scrubs from my body. I changed into my oversized Hello Kitty T-shirt, turned on the fan, and fell across my bed. I was asleep before the box springs stopped wobbling beneath me.
Chapter 2
When I woke up, it was late afternoon. I was hot, sticky, and exhausted. My fan hummed, rotating from side to side and panting hot Chicago breath across me. I needed a shower. A cold, slap-me-in-the-face-and-wake-me-up shower.
One more shift and I’d be off for the weekend. Thank the Lord and his good sense in not making the week any longer than he had. After six days straight, and most of them twelve hour shifts, I was ready for a Day of Rest that lasted at least a month.
I staggered into my bathroom, trying to wake up without hitting a wall or tripping on the clothes on the floor. Then I remembered the ovulation kit. Ugh, who felt like doing that first thing? I asked Ollie if he’d fill the tiny cup for me, but he ignored me.
Figured. Men.
“Fine, I’ll do it myself,” I told him.
After wrestling with the cellophane wrapper, I finally won and got the plastic off and figured out how to use the stupid thing. “I can’t imagine that I really need this,” I told Ollie. Then the anxious side of me whispered, It’s probably some rare condition that will kill us even before we can finish peeing all over our hand.
Shut-up. I didn’t need the drama.
I ran the test. Negative. No egg. Good. Onward ho for another day. I showered and pulled on a tank top and shorts.
Though it was nearly five in the evening, I was craving breakfast. I could’ve killed for a Denver omelet and banana nut muffins. Or at least hurt someone really badly. I looked in the fridge and only found three different containers of green fuzzy stuff. Deciding against trying to improvise a Denver omelet from their contents, I settled for a peanut butter and honey sandwich instead—washed down with a can of warm Coke from the sack of groceries I’d forgotten to put away. At least I got variety. Ollie’s food was always the same. He needed consistency. The vet said so. She thought the month that Ollie refused to use his potty box was because of lack of consistency in his life.
I’m leaning more toward my theory that I’d not changed the litter frequently enough.
I spent the time till my shift was about to start in my tiny apartment. I thought about straightening up some, but then came to my senses. It was too hot for such nonsense anyway.
Carefully, generating as little heat as possible, I dumped the unsorted laundry off the saggy sofa and settled in to watch TV. I’d given up cable to save money, so I watched network TV now.
Okay, so I hadn’t paid my bill and they shut it off. I was going to cancel it anyway. Eventually. Unless I got a raise.
So I was down to five stations, two of them in Spanish—which I didn’t speak, but still sometimes listened to—and about every third day I got PBS, if the moon was right, Ollie was sitting by the TV, and I held my arms in the air to bounce the signal toward the rabbit ears. At least I still got a few of my favorite programs on the three networks I could understand.
I watched one of my shows, and then the local news. When it finished, I turned off the tube. Ollie protested. He liked to watch David Letterman, always hoping for stupid pet tricks. But it was time to go to work. And I hadn’t broken the news to him yet that David had retired.
***
The unit was slow again, so I had only one patient and would be assigned the first admit. Our charge nurse was back from Disneyland, so I didn’t have to pretend to be managerial. I got to just disappear into my patient’s room and do real nursing.
Nikki was my lone pa
tient. Nothing had happened for her during the day, so she was on the schedule to start Pitocin in the morning. Oh, the wonder of Pit. You take an excruciating event and make it worse. Pitocin gets pumped into the veins until the uterus contracts to the point of explosion, then you lock it down at that perfect level and wait for one of two things to happen. One—the poor mom goes berserk, kills everyone around her, and then blows into pieces all over the room. Or Two—the mom pushes something as big as a watermelon through something as narrow as a baby bootie.
Moms usually go with choice Number Two. Eventually, anyway. But every single one of them considers Option Number One for a time.
So this was Nikki’s fate. I didn’t have to be anywhere else for a while, so I decided to spend some time with her, in case she wanted to talk. Or ask any questions.
Or explode.
It had been good news in Report that her glamorous beau had hit the trail after the dinner trays were passed out. I didn’t really want to have to deal with him for the night. If he was around and thinking of touching any baby produced on my watch, I’d have to grab him by the ear, drag him to the sink, and scrub his filthy fingernails till they shined.
What a mother figure I would make. And to think I’d sworn off ever having kids of my own. But attend enough watermelon v. bootie events and you figure out there’s no way you’re going to let that kind of thing happen to you. No way, José.
My cousin, Anna, had spent the last ten years trying to have a kid and would have been thrilled to sacrifice her body on the altar of childbirth.
Not me. No sir.
I knocked on Nikki’s door and heard a faint voice. I let myself in and was surprised to find a very petite, scared looking young lady in the bed.
A couple of the metal things were removed from her face, and her blue spikes were no longer at attention.
“Hi, Nikki,” I said.
She rolled to face me.
“Hey.” Her voice had lost the sharp corners.
“How you feeling?”
“My back is killing me.”
“How about we strap the monitor on for a few minutes and see if anything is happening? Your contractions might be starting up.”
She wriggled up her gown to present her soccer-ball-sized belly. While I gooed up her skin with warm jelly and put the belt next to her butterfly tattoo, she settled into her pillow.
“So Dad’s gone home for the night?”
“Gone for good.”
I raised my eyebrows but didn’t press her.
“He isn’t the father. We’ve only been together a little while. He got freaked out and had to get away.”
My guess, he probably needed to reload. His dilated pupils told me he took something stronger than aspirin to deal with life’s pain.
“Hey, look,” I said pointing at the squiggly hump the monitor’s jerky needle was drawing across the graph paper. “Back hurt right now?”
She was squirming enough for me to know.
“Yeah it hurts. Is that what a contraction looks like?”
I explained how the transducer picked up the tightening of her uterine muscle and registered it as a swelling hill on the strip. “I think you’re progressing without any help from Pitocin. That’s good.”
I strapped the fetal monitor transducer above the uterine monitor and a rapid, hollow kewhewhewhe whooshed out of the speaker.
Nikki said, “Does it sound okay?”
“Sounds great. Doing just like it’s supposed to.”
“Good.” She paused a moment. “I tried to do the best I could. I’ve stayed clean since I found out I was pregnant.”
“I bet it’s been tough.”
“What’s not?”
Too true.
She turned her big, frightened eyes to me a moment. Tears puddled on her lashes, but I could tell she used every iota of strength she could summon to keep from breaking down.
I probably broke every rule in the blue-spiked-metal-pierced-and-liberally-tattooed-rule-book, but I picked up her hand and held it.
“Whacha thinking?” I asked.
What do you know? She didn’t yank her hand away. A tear let go, then another, chasing the first down her cheek. She held onto my hand like a scared child. And she started talking.
She told me about losing her mom to cancer when she was only twelve, and losing her dad to booze a couple of years later. She didn’t know where he was, or if he was even alive. Then she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder right after she went to live with her grandparents. They tried to take care of her, to support her, but they just never seemed to get it, Nikki said. They’d never been able to understand her. She eventually ran away and lived with a group of older kids, and it was downhill from there.
But when she turned up pregnant, she pulled herself together and decided she’d do at least one thing right with her life before something worse happened. Before it was too late.
Wow. Hard to believe this virtuous kid lived beneath the tough, mean façade. I couldn’t help wondering where she might be if her life hadn’t been so torn apart by her mother’s premature death.
She said, “I won’t be able to stay clean once this is over. And I can’t take the baby with me where I’m going. I’m putting her up for adoption. I need you to find some parents.”
Another wow. This had never happened to me in all the years I’d been in nursing. She waited while I tried to find where my voice had gone.
“You do know people who want a baby, don’t you?” She slipped her hand from mine and plucked the covers on her bed. She averted her round eyes to the wall.
My skeptical side argued with my hopeful side while I tried to figure out how to respond. My non-biased professional side finally answered.
“Are you sure, Nikki? This is a huge decision.” I reached out to still her hand that picked the fuzz balls off the blanket draped below her mound of belly.
She narrowed her eyes at me. “It’s already made.” An edge had crept back into her voice. “I’m going to do this. Can you help me? Do you know anyone?”
I felt guilty. “Yes, there’s a couple I know.”
“They good people?”
“The best you could meet.” I meant it sincerely, but it sounded like a sales pitch.
“Tell me about them.” The sharp edges had dropped back out of her voice. Then she moaned, cussed, and closed her eyes. “Wait, another one’s coming.” Her eyes refocused on me once the contraction had passed.
“Well…” I put my hair behind my ear. “She’s my father’s sister’s daughter—my cousin, Anna. She’s thirty-four. Been married twelve years to Joe, her high school sweetheart. They’ve tried to have kids for ten years but can’t, even with all kinds of treatments. They have a dog—a little beagle, like Snoopy. That’s his name too. Joe’s a CPA. Anna’s a third-grade teacher. She’s very meticulous about everything. Let’s see. They’re healthy, happy, you know. All that kind of thing.” I caught my breath a moment, trying not to let my hopeful side take over, then pressed on. “They’ve gone through the whole adoption evaluation process already. They’ve just been waiting for a baby.”
“Do they love each other?” She looked at me more earnestly than ever.
“They’re like newlyweds,” I said. And meant it. They actually still adored each other, unlike so many other couples I knew.
“Will you call them, see if they want my baby?”
“Oh, I know they’ll want your baby. But I don’t think I can just call them. We should contact a mediator or something, if this is what you want.” This was surreal. Can I really be just a phone call away from getting a baby for Anna? “I know someone, a lawyer. He’s my uncle. He’ll help, and it won’t cost you anything. I’ll call him and see what he says, okay?”
Nikki nodded, but then another contraction distracted her and she said no more.
“I’ll come back in a few minutes.” She nodded, her eyes shut as she tried to deal with the pain. Though it was late, I knew I should try to get Uncle Howard
on the phone. If this was going to happen, he’d need to get a jump on things.
***
I called Uncle Howard from a courtesy phone in a dimly-lit waiting room down the hall from the Labor and Delivery main desk. My cell was in a bag of rice on my kitchen counter, where I daily chanted spells over it to will it to turn back on. It hadn’t cooperated since two weeks ago when it somehow jumped out of my scrub pocket and did a belly flop into the toilet at work. I’d fished it out, but since I was afraid to open my eyes to see where my hand was, it took a lot more swishing around than probably was good for it.
But a girl could still hope. And chant. And invoke every possible power she could think of to get it to work again, because that puppy wasn’t insured and had a year of payments left. After extensive financial counseling plus consolidating my debt, I knew just buying a new one would break all kinds of rules. Rice and mojo were my only hope.
I held the phone to my ear while my stomach flip-flopped between a pit of sorrow for Nikki’s bleak story and guilty excitement over the possibilities for Anna. My fingers trembled as I punched in his number and I had to redial when I hit the wrong key. Twice. After five rings, he answered with a frog croak.
“Hi, Uncle Howard.” He was my mom’s step-brother. “It’s Kate. Sorry to call so late.” I sounded strange.
He cleared the frog from his voice. “Never too late for a call from you, Katy-pie. Everything okay?” His warm, jolly voice reassured me.
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