Three hours passed while the doctor worked on Nathaniel. This seemed promising, as Dr. Bernstein had always come out of the OR so quickly with the news that he couldn’t do anything. I was thinking, Oh my God, it’s happening! He’s going to be successful!
Finally the doctor emerged, white as a ghost. He sat us down in a private room and said, “I am very sorry, my hand slipped. I went too far. I poked your son’s brain with the drill. I made a hole. His brain fluid is leaking through his nose.”
“Your. Hand. Slipped.” Russel was incredulous. What happened to Jesus Christ steering it? Had this doctor put a little too much medical responsibility in Jesus’s hands?
He explained that they had filled the hole and put two feet of bandages into Nathaniel’s nose.
“Is he going to be brain damaged?” I asked the doctor.
“I just don’t know,” he said. “If bacteria got in the brain, anything is possible.”
I did not take this news calmly. My first thought was, I’m not going to get my son back. I’m going to get a vegetable back. I went into shock, literally pulling fistfuls of hair from my head. I don’t know how I did it; I must have pulled really hard.
Nathaniel was the one with the medical issues, but every time he had surgery, Russel and I had our own emotional struggles. Most people had some concept of this. “It must be so hard on you,” they would say. But it was more than that. It was stressful, exhausting, and enduring. Hair pulling had become my response to the most stressful situations, and while Russel had his hair-pulling moments too, more often he would punch the walls. What a pair we were.
When Nathaniel came out of the OR he was still unconscious. I lay down on the bed next to him, holding his hand and wailing loudly, imagining him waking up and not knowing who I was.
Finally, he opened his eyes. He took one look at my face, stroked my back, and said, “It’s okay, Mommy.” And it was. At least for him. My turn was next.
They sent him home after a week in the hospital, instructing me, “Keep looking to see if something is leaking from his nose.”
Pondering a lawsuit sometime later, Russel requested the surgical notes. That’s how we found out how serious the situation had been. Apparently, before the surgeon emerged from the OR to tell us what he had done, the operating room had gone into emergency mode, with a neurosurgeon running in to plug Nathaniel’s leaking skull with a waxy rubber substance. It was literally like a cork, and it was extremely important that it stay in place for an indefinite period of time. In every surgery Nathaniel would have for the next eight years, the surgeon would have to take care not to dislodge the plug. They would literally map a way to avoid that area because, as it turns out, poking a hole in someone’s skull is a big deal.
Russel also noticed an interesting detail about the doctor’s method in the notes. Ordinarily in surgeries requiring this level of precision (we must be among a special group of people who can talk about what’s ordinary in surgeries of this sort), the surgeon will use a 3D CT scan to guide the drilling equipment. This scan is a backup protection that—in layman’s terms—prevents the drill from going where it shouldn’t, like into someone’s skull. Turns out that equipment failed as the procedure was beginning. Anywhere else, they would have aborted the surgery, but this doctor decided to carry on without it—I guess he thought Jesus would take care of that small detail. Two days after, while Nathaniel was still in intensive care, the doctor left for Israel on a mission. We never saw him again, and we never sued him. We wanted the whole experience left in the past.
Thankfully, aside from future precautions, Nathaniel was fine. But damage radiates in ways that cannot be quantified. Up until then, my pregnancy had been going smoothly. I was still mowing the lawn, cleaning the house, playing with Nathaniel, eating healthily, and getting plenty of sleep. After the surgery, my energy changed. For the next month, I constantly hovered near Nathaniel to see if there was leakage. I was always nervous, always on edge. I will always believe that the trauma of that moment, the slip of the doctor’s tool, had an effect on me that would reveal itself only after Jacob was born.
12. Bad Luck
Jacob’s birth was normal, even exceptional in that I was one of those annoying people who experiences painless childbirth. (I’d paid my dues, right?) Also, Jacob came very fast—Russel raced on the shoulder of the highway, police cars chasing us, trying to make it before the baby arrived. When we pulled up to the hospital, two cops came toward us with guns drawn, ready to reclaim whatever we’d stolen, but one glance at my heaving body told them why we’d been speeding. A short twenty minutes later, Jacob was born.
Things had gone so smoothly that I only spent one night in the hospital, which was convenient. Nathaniel was staying with a neighbor while Russel’s parents made their way from Hendersonville, a city nearly two hours away, near the mountains, and nobody but me had ever taken care of Nathaniel for long. (What if something happened, who would put the trach back in?) Jacob, only hours old, was already accommodating his brother.
There he was, ten fingers, ten toes, with his own quirks and delights and needs. Looking at the round, pink baby sleeping next to me in the hospital bed, I thought, Oh my God, this is so easy, so comfortable, so peaceful. I felt powerful, like I had accomplished something. Doctors and nurses stopped by and congratulated me, saying, “Look at him, he looks like a doll.” So this was what most people experienced after childbirth: joy, pride, celebration. The horror movie audience was gone, and in their place the cooing smiles of a heartwarming family flick. I wondered if there was a way to find that experience even when your child had serious, unexpected complications.
The next day I was home, breastfeeding, and I said to Russel, “We are complete.”
We didn’t circumcise Nathaniel at birth because we were hoping to have a bris, but when he was a few months old, Dr. Ginsburg said prayers and performed the circumcision when Nathaniel was under anesthesia for another procedure. Since he had never had a ceremonial bris, we arranged for him to have his on the same day as his newborn brother’s. We invited family and a few neighbors, including my friend Samantha. Russel’s father brought some of his own friends, all of whom were liberals, and when they started talking politics with our Carolinian guests, the volume in the house escalated. Then Nathaniel had a meltdown, probably because he was jealous of the attention the baby was receiving, and as I was trying to calm him down, Samantha came up to me. Crying.
She said, “I feel so terrible for you.”
I thought she was referring to Nathaniel’s tantrum, but she continued. “It’s just so sad that your children and my children won’t be able to play together in heaven.”
At first I was so distracted by Nathaniel’s howling that I didn’t get it. “Our children won’t . . . what? What are you talking about?”
She explained, “Jewish people don’t go to heaven.”
Putting aside the ridiculousness of her assumption that our children would still be children playing together when they went to heaven, I could not believe how rude she was being. Thankfully, before I could kick her out of my house, Russel’s father brought up politics, which led to him leaving in a huff. The party was over. And that was the last time I spoke to Samantha.
Soon after we brought Jacob home, Nathaniel, who was two and a half, started getting jealous. He was used to having me all to himself. He said, “It’s time for that baby to go back to the hospital,” and every so often would try to take a swipe at Jacob’s head with one of his trains.
To ease the fratricidal tendencies, I tried to keep the routines that were familiar to Nathaniel. We still went to the park first thing every morning, before it got too hot. Jacob would nap in the stroller while I pushed Nathaniel on the swings.
At dinnertime, the four of us sat around the table, Nathaniel now in a regular chair and Jacob using the high chair in which Nathaniel had played with more food than he’d consumed. It was what families do all the time without even thinking: eating dinner together, squabbl
ing, being told to take one more bite of broccoli, clamoring for dessert. It was what I’d grown up with in Poland without ever stopping to appreciate it, what I’d always expected to be my own family’s life.
Afterward, we’d turn on the TV above the fireplace, switch the channel to Baby Looney Tunes, and all dance together, with me bouncing Jacob in my arms.
This was starting to feel like normal. It was all I had wanted.
But fate had a trick to play on me. Within a week of giving birth, I dropped to a size 0. The glands behind my ears swelled up. They looked like eggs. I went to the family doctor, who told me I was anemic.
A week or two later I felt like I was having a panic attack. I couldn’t breathe. I went to the emergency room where they did an EKG to see if I was having a heart attack. It was stress, they told me. Maybe postpartum depression.
I had a pain in the middle of my spine—it made me walk funny—but I was too busy to pay much attention. We had decided to build a new house from the ground up, Russel was traveling a lot, and I had a toddler and a newborn.
My mother came to visit and found me weighing ninety pounds. (Have I mentioned that I’m 5'7"?) She took one look at me and asked, “What’s wrong with you? Your skin is the color of dirt. Something’s wrong.” Every doctor I went to told me I had postpartum depression, and I believed them. Nathaniel’s birth had been such a circus—maybe I’d reacted this way last time and hadn’t noticed.
Our house in Charlotte sold more quickly than we thought it would, and the new house was far from being finished. For the first few months of Jacob’s life, we stayed at the one-bedroom apartment of Russel’s friend Oliver while he decamped to his girlfriend’s place. A few times a week, Oliver and his girlfriend would come over and I’d cook them dinner as a small thank-you for a big kindness.
When the back pain got worse, Oliver took me for an MRI.
“There’s nothing here,” the doctors told me. “This is left over from the pregnancy. You need physical therapy.” Again they suggested that it might be postpartum depression. They gave me OxyContin for the pain and Xanax for the stress.
I was so drugged up and miserable that when we moved to the new house, it barely registered. All I remember is that I didn’t trust the mortgage guy when he told us that we’d been approved to buy the property. In Poland back then, at least in my village, there was no such thing as a mortgage. If you could afford a house, you bought it; otherwise, you kept saving. I didn’t want us to live paycheck to paycheck, but everyone assured me that this was how it worked, especially in our new neighborhood. The banks were handing out mortgages like lollipops.
I was feeling worse and worse. By the time Jacob was four months old, I couldn’t get warm. My whole jaw hurt from my teeth chattering.
My father came to visit. At one point he was downstairs, and I was up in my bedroom, shaking so much that I was having weird little convulsions. It was hard to utter a word through my shivers. I managed to moan “Dad” loudly enough for him to hear me.
He came into the room and asked, “What’s the matter?”
I had three blankets piled on the bed and asked him for a fourth.
“Magda, something is seriously wrong with you. I think you’re really sick,” he said. “What kind of doctor did you go to?” Then he went down the road that any parent of an immigrant has traveled: “Why did you come to this country? Look what is happening to you. You should come back to Poland with me.”
A week after my dad left, I could no longer walk up the stairs. I’d crawl up on all fours and slide back down on my butt, sometimes with the baby snug under one arm. I sat on the floor to prepare meals, peeling potatoes as I leaned against the cabinet, bowl between my legs, like a rag-doll Cinderella. To an outsider it probably looked like I was practicing a new parenting philosophy: Be on their level! Model crawling! It’s not a hard doctrine to follow if standing up to change a diaper causes you excruciating pain.
Russel was at the end of his rope. The doctors had told him I was depressed and he had sympathy for that, but my physical suffering seemed over the top. He worked all day and came home to a household that was holding on by a thread. The strain began to show. One night I was up in my room shivering and I overheard him on the phone downstairs.
“Magda is really faking it. All the doctors say she’s depressed. I’ve been dealing with this for four months. She says she can’t breathe, she can’t walk, she’s got pain. I don’t know what I’m going to do with her. She doesn’t want to be a mother.”
I thought, I’m dying. I’m literally dying. I crawled down the hall to the top of the stairs and spoke to Russel through the spindles of the banister. “Look at me—I’m not making this up. I’ve never had pain like this. My body is failing me; I’m dying. You want me to die. I want a divorce. If you don’t take me to a doctor tomorrow morning, I’m going back to Poland where my family who loves me will save my life.” Then I went to sleep.
Russel made an appointment with a doctor for the next morning. He shook me awake at 7:00 a.m., saying “get out of bed” in a mean voice, like I was lazy. He was really frustrated with my ongoing complaints. I drove myself to the doctor. On the way there I threw up, all over myself and the car, green as if I’d been eating spinach. When I pulled up to the emergency entrance of the hospital, a volunteer was standing outside, helping direct people.
“Can I please have a wheelchair?” I asked. I was crying and covered with vomit. He followed me to a parking spot and helped me into a wheelchair. I rolled myself to the building. When I got to the doctor’s office, I lay down on the examining table to wait. They brought me warm blankets, and I dozed off until he showed up.
“Hi, Mrs. Newman, what brings you in?” He had a cheerful, almost feminine voice. I could barely talk. He felt my lymph nodes. Suddenly his face was serious. “I see that you’re underweight. Let’s X-ray your lungs.”
They brought an X-ray machine into the room. Ten minutes later the doctor came back with paperwork. He said, “Well, Mrs. Newman, first we have to do some blood work to rule out blood cancers, but even without looking at that, I feel certain that you have cancer, and it’s pretty far advanced. I’m not an oncologist, just a family doctor, but I want to show you something.”
He pointed at the X ray. “Your lungs are three-quarters full of fluid. That’s because your lymph nodes are so swollen. You have shivers, high fever, weight loss, and bad pain. These are signs of leukemia or lymphoma.”
Crying hysterically, I grabbed his shoulders and said, “Thank you.”
I called Russel to tell him they were doing bloodwork to confirm cancer. He came straight to the doctor’s office, got down on his knees in front of me and the doctor, and begged me to forgive him. “I failed you. I never deserved you in the first place, and I failed you.”
Three years earlier, Russel had gotten a stable job so I would agree to move to the United States and marry him. That summer, I returned to the Hamptons to babysit for the same family I had worked for the year before. Russel spent the week in the city, then joined me on the weekends to wait tables and bartend at the same restaurant, which was now run by the Argentinian celebrity chef Francis Mallmann and called Patagonia West. Patagonia West was the “it” restaurant of the summer, and Russel was serving celebrities like the cast of the Sopranos, earning more in a weekend of bartending than he did at his office job all week.
One night, the mayor of Westhampton Beach came into the bar. After he’d had a few drinks, Russel persuaded him to officiate our wedding and to let us have the ceremony in a Westhampton park for free. As a lawyer, Russel insisted that he get their agreement in writing. And, like every agreement ever made in a bar, this one was scrawled on a napkin.
A couple days later, Russel showed up at town hall and showed his napkin to the secretary. She was incredulous, but the mayor had signed it so they had to honor it.
On September 8, 2002, we were married in a little gazebo in the center of Westhampton village. About thirty-five people came,
and the mayor officiated, as promised. Afterward, Francis Mallmann had a reception for us at his restaurant. The waitstaff, who were Russel’s friends, worked for free. This entire fantastic event probably cost him a grand total of $700 (after all, he did need to rent a tuxedo). As for me, I went to the East Village and on a rack outside a boutique found a white dress that went down to my ankles for $75. It was perfect for getting married in a beach town. I had left a prestigious music school behind, but the way he pulled together the wedding highlighted what I loved about Russel. He was clever, resourceful, and determined. He kept trying to prove himself to me, but I never doubted that I had made the right decision.
That fall we rented an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and started our life together. It was love and marriage in a 400-square-foot three-story walkup. The single window looked out on a brick wall that was four inches away. We loved it.
Now I was so sick that I didn’t dwell on Russel’s mistake. I understood it. I had gone to so many doctors, and all of them diagnosed my symptoms as postpartum or psychological. I was either faking or suffering from a mental breakdown. The doctors were so convincing that I myself had started to believe them. When we talk about it now, Russel doesn’t make excuses, but I remind him of our timeline: We met in the summer of 2001 and married in the summer of 2002. Less than a year later, I was pregnant. Nathaniel was born in February of 2004. It all happened very quickly. If we’d been together longer, he would have known that I was tough and rarely complained, and that shirking my role as a mother was antithetical to my very core. Even so, maybe it was too much for him to imagine that we could have another stroke of bad luck. Probably he was just too tired to think straight. Also, it is just impossible to understand, under any circumstances, the toll that a highly needy baby takes on a person. If my pain turned inward, Russel’s turned outward. There was nothing to forgive.
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