No doctor ever determined any official diagnosis for my failure to ovulate regularly (so I named it myself: deviled eggs). In attempting to conceive our second child, John and I again took the necessary measures to shock my lazy ovaries and uncooperative uterus into behaving normally. Each month, as we decided, “Okay, yes, one more go,” the lengths we went to grew increasingly dire: higher dosages, more shots.
This time, however, my body didn’t react as well as it had before to the massive doses of hormones, and I ended up with a wicked case of ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome. The condition itself is not uncommon in women who have undergone fertility treatments; the severity with which I experienced it, however, happens in only 1 to 2 percent of cases.
Here’s the not-too-technical explanation: While I had fertility drugs surging through my system, I successfully became pregnant. Then, the combination of the drugs and the natural pregnancy hormones reached a level that scrambled my brain into pulling some real nonsense moves, like sucking all the water out of my blood and dumping it into my abdominal cavity. Over the course of a weekend, my belly ballooned from its barely pregnant pudge to a beach ball. I knew I’d gone from feeling fine on Friday to feeling huge and out of breath by Saturday; what I didn’t know was that my blood, now thickened by a lack of water, wasn’t flowing properly.
If your blood can’t circulate to your organs, your organs stop working. I didn’t realize I was in danger of multiple organ failure, but I did make several calls to the nurse advice line over that weekend, in which I insisted something felt “not quite right.” (Apparently good manners prevented me from saying “super fucking wrong.”) The nurses told me to put my feet up and come into the office after the weekend.
I waddled into the clinic on Monday morning. When I sat down and opened my paper gown, the doctor looked at my stomach and I saw alarm flash across her face for a second before she composed her features and looked back up at my eyes.
“Okay, let’s get you across the street now,” she said.
At first, I thought, To Burger King? because that was across the street, but then I realized she meant the hospital.
When I got there, I had an IV line placed in my arm to replace my lost fluids; a hole poked just under my ribs; and a drainage pipe inserted through it. A bag attached to that pipe filled drop by drop with liters—LITERS—of liquid that looked like what comes out of rusty old bathtub pipes.
I stayed in the hospital for a couple of sleepless days and nights, with a constant parade of medical professionals coming in to check my vital signs. Then I got to go home, complete with a bag of needles, several vials of blood thinners, and a newly installed portable tap in my side, like a human keg.
* * *
In the chaos of that hospitalization, I didn’t cry. I never said, “I’m scared.” In fact, part of me was intrigued. When you grow up in a family of physicians, you develop a comfortable fascination with medical details. In a typical dinnertime conversation at our house when I was growing up, my dad might have discussed which patients that day had pus oozing from their surgical sites. I’m not grossed out by blood or frightened by beeping monitors or people wearing stethoscopes like scarves. I feel at home around people in white coats.
That’s partially why I was able to focus mainly on logistics: Was someone at home watching our two-year-old son? Was I allowed to change out of this hospital gown and into a real shirt? What’s the stuff being injected into my IV?
About a week after I got home, I was on the phone with my brother, a white coat himself, when it hit me how severe the situation had been (and maybe still was). I was sitting on the floor, my back against the sofa, the half-full drainage bag leaning drunkenly against my hip. My son climbed the cushions behind me, rolling a little Thomas the Train. I held the phone between my shoulder and my ear, so my hands were free to swipe the alcohol pad across my thigh, draw up my dose of blood thinner, and give myself one of the twice-daily heparin injections I’d sworn to the doctors that I could handle myself if they let me go home.
“You know, Mom and Dad were kind of freaked out,” my brother said.
“Mom and Dad like to freak out. It’s their hobby,” I answered, stabbing the needle and depressing the plunger.
He paused.
“No, I mean—they thought you were going to die,” he said, like he was explaining the plot of a confusing storybook to a child who didn’t get it. They’d been discussing whether they should offer to help John raise our son in the event of my demise. I’ll say this for my family: We’re planners. Semper paratus.
He was right. It really was that serious. Intellectually, I knew it, but something in my head kept me from fully feeling it. I got a sense of calm from my wishful self-protection—like if I just acted casual, everything would be fine. If you’ve ever spotted someone creepy coming up alongside you in a parking lot and kept right on walking, polite as you please, you know what I mean. It’s a mental trick: If I start running, that must mean there’s a reason to panic, so I just WON’T run, and therefore this situation WON’T be worth panicking about. It’s as if you think you can tap into an alternate universe by using the powers of your behavior, changing what is into what could be instead, taking danger right out of the equation. That doesn’t work unless you’re a wizard.
I acted as if everything was normal. Just keep walking. There’s nothing to panic about.
* * *
I got to ditch my tap after a few days and quit the blood thinners after a few weeks, but as the pregnancy progressed, complications continued to arise. Month after month, bed rest after scare after bed rest after scare, it became harder to ignore my rising guilt. I’d brought this little life into being—insisted on it with ever greater scientific meddling—only for my own body to threaten it. I was doing everything as right as I could: drinking plenty of water, showing up for every monitoring appointment, exercising just enough but not too much, resting on my left side as instructed. Still, things kept going wrong. Bleeding when there shouldn’t have been bleeding. A heartbeat that didn’t sound the way a heartbeat should. I wanted to say to the doctors, “No, you don’t understand. I’ve read all the books. I’ve done this before. I’m a very good pregnant woman.” Couldn’t they see how I followed the rules?
In my eighth month, my perinatologist said the baby was in trouble again, because the fetal measurements from week to week weren’t up to snuff. Was I eating enough? Yes. Taking my vitamins? Yes. Well, something wasn’t working right, because the baby wasn’t growing.
“I’m sorry, baby. I’m sorry, baby. I’m sorry, baby,” I whispered under my breath, tears rolling from my eyes into my ears, as the doctor pointed to the little creature on the ultrasound, curled up sleeping, probably hungry. Poor baby, stuck with me.
“If you can’t get some weight on the baby,” she said, “we’re going to have to operate. We can’t let this baby starve.”
We can’t let this baby starve.
I climbed down from the crinkly paper tablecloth, stood up, and nodded. Like a lunatic, I kept nodding as I pulled on my maternity jeans in the exam room afterward, crying silently and mouthing, “I can do this. I can do this. I can do this.”
And so I drove to Piece of Cake, my favorite bakery, and picked out a “slice” of carrot cake. If you’ve never been to Piece of Cake in Atlanta, what you need to know is that they bake enormous layer-upon-layer cakes that look like iced top hats, and then they whack them into—oh, about fourths, maybe fifths?—and box up the pieces. Those whopping wedges of cake shouldn’t be single servings any more than a twelve-ounce slab of cow should be a “steak” for one, but if I’m going to bet my health and the health of my unborn child on cake, I’m not going to fool around with some flimsy two-bite cupcake.
I slapped that box of carrot cake onto the counter by the register and said, “I’ll take this . . . and a fork.” Then I went out and sat in my car in the parking lot, watching traffic whiz by on the busy road. I heaped a hunk of carrot cake into my mouth, clamped
my quivering lips closed, and chewed. Listen, baby—this is cake, and it has carrots in it, so it’s also full of vitamins. It’s like dessert and salad at the same time. You are going to LOVE cake. I’m eating as fast as I can. Hang on. Forkful after enormous forkful, I chewed. I sat in my car and cried and ate cake for all it was worth. It was worth everything.
You tell me my baby will starve unless I pound some calories? I will pound calories like a motherfucker. You watch.
* * *
“She’s way too small,” the doctor said to my mother in 1975, examining my tiny body. “This is a case of failure to thrive.” The way she recalls it, he wrinkled up his whole face and looked down at her like she was a two-dollar whore who had been starving her baby on purpose and using food money to buy liquor and weapons.
With the benefit of hindsight, we all know now that my babyhood was merely a preview of my particular body type. (I wasn’t so much a late bloomer as a non-bloomer.) But my mom couldn’t have known that with her first child. I was pale and scrawny, all white hair and invisible eyelashes and see-through skin over impossibly delicate limbs—the genetic opposite of my curvy, tan, brunette mother. Under the doctor’s shaming gaze, she felt accused, defensive. So, as she tells it, she said:
“Failure to thrive, my ass.”
I suspect time and my mother’s flair for storytelling have streamlined this conversation, although I hope she really did say that.
Mom scooped up all zero pounds of me in my OshKosh B’Gosh romper, tossed me into the backseat of our Buick, and took me home to prove a point. Then she made a batch of homemade banana pudding. Not the kind that comes from boxed powder. The kind where you slow-cook a custard out of cream and eggs and sugar and then toss a few bananas and some Nilla wafers in it for decoration. For months, she fed me this concoction every day.
Now, before I show you the “after,” I want you to imagine the “before.” Picture the scraggliest little baby you can. Bony legs, stick arms, and a wild tangle of blond floss stuck on top of what must have been an awfully skinny skull for the doctor to be so grim about it.
Now.
Are you ready?
This is how the pudding diet worked out:
How glorious is that? Look at my grip on that bear. I probably ate him after this picture was taken. And look at my HAIR. It’s like it saw how round my cheeks were getting and poufed itself up just to keep things proportional.
At my next checkup, the pediatrician said I was thriving quite well, and my mom—thank goodness—tapered off the banana pudding.
* * *
It was with that “Failure to thrive, my ass” determination that I loaded carrot cake into my face when my baby’s survival was threatened. Such a small, simple thing to do—eating cake. But God, that cake was holy. I willed it to get where I wanted it to go, through me and into the baby. Take, eat—this is my body and a huge dessert, given for you. This is the first of so many rituals I will perform to protect you. I will buy you fluffy shopping-cart seat covers. I will make you wear the biggest, ugliest bike helmet. I will secretly disable the radio in your first car and allow you to think it’s broken, so you won’t have any musical distractions when you start driving. I can’t stop anything bad that might happen to you, but I will make all the motions, say all the prayers, eat all the cake.
* * *
It worked, for a little while at least. For a couple of weeks, John and I carried on the mundanity of life with our son—bath, dinner, books, bedtime—as normally as we could while I went on a linebacker’s diet. I forced down giant meals of chicken potpie and milkshakes (urp), and at night we lay in bed, John’s hand on my belly. “What’s going on?” he asked. “I don’t know,” I said. I couldn’t tell whether the baby was growing or I was just getting plumper from the steak and cake.
Eventually, the situation my doctor suspected was confirmed. My placenta had given up early and begun to calcify, cutting off access to nutrients. If we didn’t do a C-section pronto, it would begin restricting oxygen, too. We had made it as long as we could. “Do you understand?” my doctor said, squatting in front of me where I sat with a monitor strapped around my stomach. “Yes,” I said. “It’s an emergency, but a calm one.” She nodded. “That’s right. A calm emergency.”
We had twenty-four hours to get ready for surgery, and in that time, we rallied the troops. Our favorite sitter came over to take care of our son. My parents and my in-laws came to town. We made reservations for lunch the next day. That’s the crazy thing about a scheduled C-section. You put it on the calendar, you go about your day, and then you just show up. There’s no labor, no waiting around, no counting contractions. You can do anything you want before your C-section, really. Except eat. No food or drink before surgery.
So while the whole family sat around a table at our favorite neighborhood restaurant, ordering burgers and salads—and oh heck, it’s a special occasion, why not? Light beers!—I sat alongside them, not eating. The mood was festive, and rightly so, as we’d been assured that waiting for an operating room wouldn’t cause any further trouble and that as long as we got the baby out within twenty-four hours, everything would be fine. A baby was coming! But I felt detached from everyone around me at lunch. I could try to pretend everything was fine, but I couldn’t convince myself the danger was imaginary. It was real.
I smiled and sipped water, thinking, I will never be pregnant again. This is it. How many hours until we go? I am so hungry. My baby is even more hungry. My baby is starving and it’s all my fault. I took all those fertility drugs and made this poor baby live in my stupid body that’s not even safe. What if the baby’s not okay? What if I had died? What if I could still die? What if this was my funeral lunch? Can anyone tell I’m thinking these things? Smile! That sandwich smells so good.
* * *
There’s a theory I have about why bad things happen. It’s another little bit of wizardry. When something unfortunate occurs, I tell myself it’s the less-bad thing I bargained with the universe for in exchange for something worse not happening. Like, if I miss my flight and can’t make it on a trip, I tell myself that in an alternate universe, I made the flight but the plane was infested with lice and I got a terrible skin rash, and that I must have made a deal with fate that if I could just be free of my lice-itch, I would give up the vacation. Then missing out on a trip doesn’t feel so bad. Or let’s say I’m trying on clothes and feeling less than impressed with my pasty, flat-chested reflection in the dressing room mirror. I just tell myself that something terrible must have been about to happen in the alternate version of my life—like maybe some kittens were about to be hit by a truck while the busty, even-skin-toned version of me was out jogging—and in my courageous way, I said, “LORD, TAKE MY TAN AND MY BOOBS. JUST SAVE THE KITTENS.” It makes me feel noble and empowered over my destiny. It’s how I was able to stay relatively patient throughout the fertility process: Every time I didn’t get pregnant, I was successfully avoiding whatever might have gone wrong in that pregnancy.
In that final twenty-four hours before I went into surgery, I tried to apply my mental coping mechanism, but the stakes were higher than those of any pretend-deal I’d ever imagined, and I couldn’t follow my own hypothetical logic. There couldn’t be any bargain. Because in any deal, there’s always the possibility that it will fall through and you’ll get stuck with the bad end of it, the alternative conclusion.
There couldn’t be an alternative.
* * *
As I lay on the operating table, pressed by heavy warming blankets, my arms strapped down and my body numb, the surgeons did their work on the other side of a short curtain across my midsection. I felt the bizarre, painless tugging—an understatement of sensation—while I watched the ceiling and listened to holiday carols someone had put on a CD player.
It was a few days before Christmas when our little girl was extracted from my inhospitable womb, a very reasonable four weeks before her January due date. Machines beeped, voices rose and fell, light glinted
off silver instruments, and then a doctor handed her to John, and John held her up next to my face. She blinked. I blinked.
“You’re okay,” I said. We’d gotten what we hoped for, maybe even what I’d bargained for. There she was—healthy, if a bit lightweight, her skin hanging in little purple folds like a molting salamander—right there on the outside of me.
She weighed the same as a sack of sugar, five pounds, when we brought her home, but she ate enthusiastically and made up for lost meals quickly. Had she not, I was prepared to ask the pediatrician how soon babies are allowed to have carrot cake and banana pudding.
* * *
A couple of years later, she coined the phrase “me real,” and it entered our family lexicon for good. We say it whenever we feel the need to push back against what’s getting us down, whenever wishful thinking runs out and we’ve got to buck up and deal with the choices that are actually before us.
Me real.
The Expat Concept
I was whisper-cursing at the oven when the doorbell rang.
At first I thought the ding came from the buttons I’d been poking on the oven’s control panel. They were nonsensical pictographs, much like clothing tags that instruct you to “iron on low, no steam” by way of a diagram that clearly indicates “colonial hat, no noodles.” I wanted to roast a chicken. My mother had come all the way from the States to visit us in Ireland, where John and I had moved with our baby daughter and toddler son, away from our home in Atlanta. His job had transferred him to Dublin, and we’d been there for just a few days before he had to travel again. He was in Brussels that evening as I searched the oven’s dashboard for a picture of a chicken with steam rising from its body, or even one that vaguely suggested “heat” or “fire.”
I Miss You When I Blink Page 9