When we arrive outside of the ultrasound room, the porter decides to switch back to conversational mode. “So, why are you here? Who was that baby in your room? Yours?”
“She’s mine, yeah. My daughter. I just had a baby, but I don’t feel very well. I think I’m crazy now.”
“I get that. My wife was so strung out after we had our baby. It’s such a hard time. You don’t sleep. I get it.”
He seems friendly and sympathetic. It’s a bit strange to have a normal conversation without sensing judgment. He parks the wheelchair outside of the ultrasound room and walks away, disappearing around a corner.
In a moment he returns hands me a newspaper — the same metro daily I used to read on my morning subway commute. “Here. Have a look at this while we wait for your turn.” It’s a kind gesture. Something from the world outside.
The ultrasound is painful. A large white metal wand is inserted inside me, through all the bleeding and raw stiches from delivery. I’m familiar with ultrasounds — I had so many in the months leading up to Fiona’s backward birth — but this internal ultrasound when no baby is present gives me a whole new sense of vulnerability. On the way back up my new porter friend tells me about his kids, the joys of parenthood, the camaraderie in raising humans. I can’t participate the way I want to. I give a small laugh and a subtle nod to show I’m listening. I’m lost in my wheelchair, the binder weighing me down with all the ways I’m not a member of the sane community.
When I return to my familiar room with my hospital bed beside the storage lockers, pumping machine, and two plastic green chairs, I feel a small bit of relief. I lift myself out of the wheelchair and feel the pain from the internal ultrasound that poked at my stitches. Childbirth feels raw again, like it only just happened. Recent is relative.
None of my relatives gets up to greet me. Although it’s an unnecessary formality, I’m craving any sign that I’m still a person worth respecting. “They better figure out what is wrong with you or I’m breaking you out of this psych ward and taking you to a different hospital,” Gordon says. He seems a little more agitated than when I left, likely to do with being up all night with the baby. I start to apologize for making him carry so much of the parental load when a nurse returns for her regular daytime bed check. They want to add a fourth antibiotic to my IV course, but they need my proper weight before they can begin the dosage. Gordon tries to guess my weight, throwing numbers around like we’re at a live auction, and I’m reminded that there is no mortification I won’t endure here.
Everyone looks to me for the real answer, but I am genuinely unsure how much I weigh. I had a baby less than two weeks ago. My midwife encouraged me never to weigh myself while pregnant. Before the baby, I was in a strong fitness routine, seeing a trainer and working out four to five times a week. I thought I was setting myself up for a lifetime of health and wellness. Now I don’t know where I’ve netted out, ten months after I realized I’d have to put some of those fitness goals on hold for a little while.
“If you really don’t know how much you weigh, I’ll go and get a scale,” says the nurse. She doesn’t bring me to the scale, because that would mean bringing me out of my cave, a place I find comfort in, where I don’t have to look the other inmates in the eye. I wonder if they resent me for having the privilege of sharing a room with my child and family? My mother is cooing at the baby. I try to remind myself that I’m lucky to have my family here. I could be completed isolated from them. I am lucky.
When the nurse returns with the scale, I feel less lucky. I’m about to stand on this scale in front of everyone, The Biggest Loser–style. I doubt there’s a prize at the end of the episode. I move slowly to the scale that she’s placed in the middle of the floor, dragging my IV stand with me, careful not to pull the IV out and need the team of students to return and painfully reinstall it. Gordon hangs over my shoulder while bouncing the baby, looking for the number, which he proudly yells out when we’re all satisfied the scale is accurate.
My mother and sister nod appropriately. “Wow. You didn’t gain very much by having the baby. Good for you.”
My body is a shared experience.
I haven’t eaten much this week and I was throwing up pretty frequently leading up to her birth. Nonetheless, this new post-baby weight is an achievement I’ll take. Everyone is surprised the birth didn’t impact my body too severely. Except it impacted everything severely. Conversation turns to diet and health chat, a welcome break from the persistent mental-illness discussion.
Days of fever and uncertain medical diagnoses pass and I meet a good subsection of the labour and delivery staff at the hospital. Doctor after doctor has an opinion about what is going on. It could be a viral flu, but it’s unlikely given my only symptoms are fever and exhaustion. Childbirth is the most likely cause, which makes me feel blamed. Connecting the fever and childbirth in-furiates Rose, who called earlier to complain to Gordon that we haven’t been keeping her up to date with the baby and my progress. She hasn’t formally discharged me from her services, and she wants to come visit and find out what’s going on.
“Rose delivered my baby, so she’s welcome in the psych ward,” I remind everyone in the room.
When Rose arrives in my room and checks me over herself, she doesn’t believe the fever was caused by mastitis or a uterine infection or anything else childbirth-related. She thinks my body is simply rejecting the psych ward sentence and the shock of all this. I believe her and I trust her judgment. How do medical establishments like this maintain that lockdown and processed food and invasive bed checks are conducive to recovery?
Rose asks the question I’ve been dreading. “Have you started to feed Fiona with formula?” I look sheepishly to Gordon. The answer is yes. It happened. I couldn’t pump enough to keep up with Fiona’s hunger, so he’s started supplementing with formula. There are only two things we talk about in this hospital room. What the heck caused my fever and the high price of baby formula. Today Gordon seems more upset that organic formula is $40 per can than he is that the baby has to eat it in the first place.
Rose’s first suggestion is about getting the breastmilk back on track.
“You should absolutely still keep pumping and adding the breastmilk in with the formula. Any amount of breastmilk is a good thing. I’m going to recommend that the nurses bring you down an industrial breast pump. The automated machine will be way easier for you than that manual one.” She says it with such kindness. I wish I’d heard “any amount of breastmilk is a good thing” weeks ago. I’ve thought for so, so long that any amount of formula was poison. It’s odd that the rules have changed now that I’m depressed. My idyllic parenting methods are forever nullified.
Beyond Rose’s questions about formula and my failed attempts to downplay the whole thing, the investigation into my high fever continues. With my other doctors it feels like finding the root of my fever is as much about assigning blame as it is about addressing my need to heal. They want to find the source, not the cure. When Rose leaves and our daily checks nurse returns, I’m careful not to ask to leave, because I’ve heard how well that works out for others on the floor. The more you demand a pass, the more resistant the staff are to give you one. Or so it has come to feel, with every rejection I overhear.
The fever is definitely affecting my ability to breastfeed. When Fiona cries, I look to Gordon with pleading eyes, hoping he’ll be willing to give her a bottle of formula so I don’t have to nurse — the last thing I want is another source of heat on my body. The high fever has spiked again, or at least it feels like it to me. Gordon senses that I’m having a hard time today, with Rose’s visit and the non-stop tests. When he offers to pack up the baby and take Alice home a little earlier than normal, I don’t protest. They offer to return for a night shift, but my mother and brother tell them they can manage my care, between them and the hospital staff. My mother offers to sleep overnight in the hospital room with me so I’m not alone in case my symptoms worsen and the bed check interval
s stretch too long again.
Max is sitting on one side of my bed and my mother’s in a chair at the foot. He arrived after work with magazines and food he made for me at his restaurant. In my normal life, I love his cooking and I relish the opportunity to eat whatever he’ll cook me. He is a very talented chef who takes care to nourish and entertain with every meal. His food is never bland or boring, nor gratuitous and unhealthy. Today he arrives with a whole wheat BLT with thick-cut bacon and a side of fries, the perfect healthy-ish-meets-indulgence I need in the state I’m in. He finds a way to balance what you should eat with what you want to eat.
The trouble is, I don’t want to eat. I still feel so sick. So I pick at a couple of fries and cry at the tugging pain of my IV, which since he arrived has had to be reinserted twice because it fell out of my arm. Maybe because of all the shuffling with breastfeeding, maybe because it wasn’t installed correctly the first time. We’re crowded around my small tablet trying to watch a sitcom when the night shift changeover happens and the new night nurse comes in to introduce herself.
She is shocked to see my mother has wrapped me up in so many blankets; she immediately strips me down to just a tank top and shorts. “You have to cool your internal body temperature if you’re going to combat this persistent fever,” she says. Now I’m frigid and shivering, and I have a powerful, aching headache. I need more blankets, not fewer. When she leaves, my mother kindly and softly pulls the blankets back up to my waist.
“You can have some warmth; you don’t have to suffer like this … I wish I could take this from you.” She looks exhausted.
Max is reading the copy of the New Yorker he brought me, looking up occasionally to see me rocking side-to-side. “Listen, Amanda,” he says, “you are going to get through this. It’s just like if you broke your arm. You broke your arm and you need to get treatment for it. This is not a life sentence okay? You are sick and you’re getting medicine. Please try to sleep so you can begin to feel better. Crying and getting upset isn’t helping you.” He gets up and sits on the bed beside me, rubbing the back of my neck while I sob. “Sleep, Amanda, sleep.”
I hate being told to sleep, but when he tells me to I want to listen. I sense my mom and brother are feeling worried and helpless. I have a fever, a baby I’m not allowed to be alone with, a hospital I can’t leave, and a plan to go home that keeps getting extended with each new change to my physical condition. Few people would wish this on their family members. This isn’t the way I was supposed to welcome our newest person. It’s a tragedy I feel like everyone is trying to downplay. I curl into my own melancholy, fed up with needing so much from everyone else, unable to support even my own basic needs.
The IV makes everything more claustrophobic. If it wasn’t enough that I can’t leave the ward, I can barely make it to the bathroom to relieve myself or change a menstrual pad without causing a big scene involving at least two family members. Everything is so hard today.
It’s well past midnight and Max lingers in a hug before heading out the door. He reminds me that things improve with time, and says he’ll come back tomorrow to spend more of it with me. I’m grateful we’re together in this moment. My brother and I grew up together, emotionally and physically. When the world pushes against us, it’s Max and I who hold each other up. Our parents’ divorce wasn’t frictionless. And in the years following my father’s mental illness, we have faced a lot of darkness together as siblings. I often joke that if I rank my people in order of priority, my brother sits at the top of the list, and everyone else comes after. He understands the complexity of our divorced-kids history in a way Alice can’t, a life we struggled to make positive, memories we recreate in happy ways even when I was fighting with my stepfather or longing to go back to my dad’s house. There are some stories only he and I find funny, which makes each story itself funnier. There’s a perspective that comes from a fragmented upbringing that makes the mundane hilarious, and most challenges seem manageable.
While normally I bring calm to Max’s stress, tonight he’s the one stabilizing me. It’s his words of comfort, his assurance that it won’t always be like this, that settle my breathing to a normal pace. It’s his presence here that reminds me I was capable of getting through it all before the baby, and that I’m capable of fighting this, too. Only his confidence that this too shall pass really resonates. When he says I’ll be okay, he means I’ll be okay. He knows how to define okay for me. A quiet voice reminds me that I’m causing my favourite person pain, but I’m so grateful he’s here with me through this. Through the fog of all my illness, I hear his message of will.
It’s funny to be trying to convince medical professionals in a hospital that you’re ill. Sure, some people who work here have decided I need to be observed, but they seem to me to not be well-versed in sporadic fevers. It feels like everyone here is just trying to hold it all together, which is faintly reminiscent of how I felt before I had the baby. Yes, I was stressed, but at least I appeared to be holding it together. Now I’ve gone off the rails, but I can still recognize that others are struggling, too. Maybe it’s a sign that part of me is still in here, and that maybe I could start feeling better soon? Feeling annoyed at the psych ward staff for the haphazard response to my fever is making me feel more like myself, as hilarious and ridiculous as that is. Maybe I’m recovering after all?
The theories of what is causing my fever are all over the map.
“It must be mastitis.”
“It must be some post-labour complication.”
“Maybe signs of endometritis?”
It’s been called everything from a sign of a severe life--threatening illness to a plain old summer flu. The swings in diagnosis are all the proof I need that no one knows what’s going on. My body is rejecting this hospital. I’ve heard that bodies will display physical symptoms from stress, although unless I’m forgetting some previous event in my life, this is the first time that I’ve had anxiety and stress manifest themselves in a high fever. But what is a fever except a signal that your body is working to cure an infection? The doctors won’t say it, but I know the truth: the infection is in my mind.
July 1, 2014
IT’S THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT and all I want to do is sleep. Tonight I can’t sleep for a different reason than before. I toss and turn, fighting the throbbing pain in my head and the achy flu-like chills that come with my fever. There was a time I thought this hospital might be helping me.
Night check. A knock on the door brings in a new nurse, one my mother and I haven’t met before. She’s part of the night crew and is curious in the details of my case. I watch her scan my dark room with a flashlight. Is she looking for the baby? Everyone wants to see the baby; it’s almost as if they’re all caring for her, through me. I’m just here to keep the baby well. I wish so much that the concern was still on me in the same way, because I feel like a shell of my former self. Now that I’ve created life, she’s the focus, not me. She’s the reason for being. I should be thankful she is well. More than well, she’s a delight. Am I a bad mother for not wanting to lose myself to her?
This nurse is the ultimate character of night shift nurses in a psych ward. Her blond hair is teased high on her head and she’s styled her bangs to be smooth over her eyebrows. The jagged edge of her messy hairline draws my gaze to her eyes. Even in the dim light from the hallway I can tell she’s layered on the bright blue eyeshadow and painted on at least three coats of mascara. The makeup makes her look alert, wild almost. I’ll remember her as Royal Blue. She wheels over a green plastic chair to sit right between my mother and me, both tucked into our uncomfortable hospital beds.
Royal Blue has questions for my mother — and she begins talking to her as if I’m not in the room. I’m fine with being ignored. With all that’s going on, I’m not really here anyway.
“Is she taking Materna? She should be taking postnatal vitamins. The fever must be from breastfeeding. Where is the baby now? Who’s going to help her when she gets out of here? How long a
s she been like this?”
My mother half-answers the questions like the nurse is a nosy neighbour stopping by to get the latest gossip. These questions aren’t about my current state, but rather my previous state — mostly, the nurse is here to make small talk with my mother. Maybe that’s the best thing right now — someone to empathize with my mother’s stress. I’m too deep into high fever and child-abandonment fears and paralyzing anxiety to join in the chit-chat. The chatter distracts me enough that I feel like maybe I can sleep. The last thing I hear her say is, “Can I bring you some orange juice?”
My mother graciously accepts, another sign we’re all desperate for a little kindness tonight. It’s 4:00 a.m. — my IV machine has been beeping every five minutes for the last hour. It’s a quiet beep, so I haven’t deemed it worthy of notifying anyone. It just so happens that that annoying beep has never happened during one of the fifteen-minute bed checks, so Royal Blue hasn’t noticed either. This time, though, at her 4:00 a.m. small-talk visit, she moves her flashlight to see that my fluids need to be reset. She shuffles in to flash the light directly in my eye — I close them tighter. I’m asleep! Leave me be.
She pushes a bunch of buttons on the machine and then rushes out of the room. I let out a deep sigh, and my mother sits up groggily — clearly she’s not quite asleep either. Royal Blue returns and pulls on the string for the overhead light attached to my bed. It’s the worst possible choice for extra lighting, a bright blue light that flickers and buzzes and shines directly down onto my forehead. The sudden bright light makes me wince, destroying what little pain relief I had gained through sleep.
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