My pregnancy was progressing normally with the nausea of what some
call morning sickness but which should be called all damn day sickness that I
know they’d have a cure for if it happened to men, and a better cure than eat
crackers and puke and wait eight more weeks. Anyway, it was all normal until it
wasn’t. I was going into labor at twenty weeks along. Twenty weeks is just at
the border of legal abortion in California because fetuses are not considered
viable at that time although I so wanted Max to be viable and was willing to do
all I could to vie for his life. I watched the computer monitor displaying my
contractions and watched my husband Toby sweaty from his furious bike ride to
the hospital. We sat and waited, as helpless as Max in his contracting womb,
the one pound of him swimming around and only occasionally bumping the side
enough for Toby to see and feel him too.
Life came to a halt — mine so that his would not. The doctor said
“Bed rest” and I nodded eagerly like this prescription would be no trouble, but
I couldn’t concentrate enough to read and I wasn’t supposed to stress even
though I’d printed out a fetal viability table that listed Max’s survival rate
at less than 1% but going up with each day. The first week I lay helpless in
the living room waiting for the cable guy to hook me up to the cable universe
and Max moved into the 1% survival bracket. I’d never had cable, or even an
antenna for network television in years, but I was dying for other people’s stories
to drown out my own so I wouldn’t think of Max being born with immature lungs
or skin so thin that it would slough off like wet Kleenex.
I waited and watched television with nothing on all 100 plus
channels to reach past my fear. I waited and embroidered an incredibly
intricate quilt with panels from “Where the Wild Things Are” to keep my own
monsters from rolling their terrible eyes and gnashing their terrible teeth and
to make my Max king of all that. Toby struggled to draw the panels fast enough
to keep me busy, staying awake late into the night after work to pencil each
one carefully onto the cloth. I waited and sewed through my sisters’ disbelief
in any sign of domesticity from the one least likely to sew on a button and Max
grew and gained ounces every day and each ounce was a tremendous victory.
I waited and became a brief expert on top twenty songs. This
knowledge impressed my teenaged niece, giving me an appearance of hipness that
took me right into the present decade which was a genuine shock to her and Max
grew and moved. I sat and did not move and my joints ached and the medicine
caused my lungs to fill up with fluid, edema they called it, and I was afraid
to cough for starting contractions and through it all Max grew and the
contractions kept coming.
I gulped down the medicine they gave me even though I’d been afraid
to even take aspirin earlier in my pregnancy because we didn’t evolve taking
aspirin while we were pregnant and you just don’t know, not really, not in a
way that I could rationalize in my pregnant mind so I ran around with a
headache. Now I was taking so many pills that Toby bought me a daily pill
organizer at the drug store. He picked a blue one because blue is my favorite
color and he was trying for any gesture of thoughtfulness, of helping. Most
things he brought home had to come from the drug store — prescriptions, blood
pressure monitors, pill organizers, shower chairs, special pillows, and a
wheelchair. Toby went to the drug store nearly every day now, but the drug store
was a place that I only vaguely remembered where outside people went and I was
an inside person who watched television and talked on the phone and embroidered
and Max grew.
Each Monday morning I went to the doctor for a cervical exam. What
woman wouldn’t want to sign up for that embarrassment and discomfort? But, it
was the only time I was allowed to leave the house, so I got to where I looked
forward to the four block car ride. I always rolled the window down to feel the
air on my face, like a golden retriever. Each week the doctor said my cervix
was not dilating, but when he looked at the log I kept of all my contractions
he changed my medicine or the dosage.
The first few weeks Toby asked, “When can she start doing aerobics
again?” and the doctor and I looked at him like he was from Mars because he
couldn’t accept the idea that something was wrong with me. His universe just
did not have space for that possibility — a world where Max or I might die.
Slowly, painfully, his universe expanded to include the possibility of profound
loss.
Each Monday evening my new medication or dosage kicked in. My heart
rate spiked into the 140 range and the doctor said that if it did not go down
in fifteen minutes we had to go to the emergency room. It came down. We changed
medications. I didn’t sleep for three days and started to hallucinate. We
changed medications. Eventually we reached the last medication that might work.
If it didn’t, I was off to the hospital to lie down with my feet raised and a
drip that would stop the contractions but would possibly also stop my heart.
The last medication worked and I was suddenly ridiculously grateful to be able
to stay in the house that had so bored me before.
At thirty-six weeks along, we stopped all the medication and I was
allowed to walk around inside the house as long as I did not walk up and down
stairs. It took a day to get my balance, because I was twenty pounds heavier
than when I sat down. But at last I could make myself lunch again — no more
cold sandwiches and huge bottles of water to last the day. No more intense
cravings for cherry cheesecake that was tantalizingly near, but in a kitchen I
was not allowed to walk to. If I dropped a pen and it rolled away, I could pick
it up myself instead of having to wait eight hours for someone to come home to
get it for me. The freedom was intoxicating.
When Max was thirty-eight weeks along, I was allowed to go outside.
The first day I was so excited that I called everyone I knew and walked
carefully down the front stairs into the rain. I stood with my face upturned to
the gray sky and cried. Then I was so tired I had to go back inside and sit
down. Over the next two weeks, I walked in the rain every day and every night I
stood outside and stared at the stars. I saw every movie at the theater and
visited parks and fed ducks even though you weren’t allowed.
Finally, Max was full term, 40 weeks. Just three days before his
due date we went into labor. After all that work to keep him in, he refused to
be pushed out into the world and eventually we had to do an emergency caesarian
section. When the doctor lifted him out I couldn’t see him because I was
strapped to the operating table with my arms out to the side like Christ and
there was a green drape between me and Max. Toby looked from me to Max, torn.
“Go with him,” I said. “Please.”
“He’s fine,” the doctor said, but what did that mean? They called
out his APGAR score of health — eight out of ten, a wonderful number. He was
perfect. He was normal. I started to cry and tears ran into my ears because I
was so damn grateful that he’d made it and I’d done it in spite of my body
trying to let us both down.
Then they put him by my face and freed my arms and the drugs were
floating me in the sky. I held him and smelled his tarry newborn smell. I knew
I wanted nothing more than to treasure this amazing precious life knowing that
one or both of us would have died ten or twenty years ago and not believing my
luck because I was never a lucky person before. I watched him latch on like a
puppy in the recovery room and eat and eat his first meal ever with Toby
standing over us sheltering Max’s eyes from the bright lights. None of us could
believe our good fortune and I did not know what the next part of the ride was
but I was oh so grateful that we’d reached this stage against all hope and
belief.