In Shock Read online

  “It was a girl. But she died,” I managed, as the tears came.

  “Oh, I am so sorry,” she said, putting her arm across my shoulders. “I didn’t know.”

  “Uh-huh, I know. You couldn’t have known.” I shook my head, feeling as badly for her as I did for myself.

  The radiology tech fiddled with something in the corner, pretending not to know what was happening. “OK, just let me know when you’re ready,” he said.

  The nurse helped me to slide over to the CT scan table, where I sat, waiting for direction. He walked over.

  “OK, lay flat, and we’ll tell you when to hold your breath,” the radiology tech said as he fastened a belt across my waist.

  “I can’t lie flat.” I hadn’t lain flat since the day of the code blue.

  “You have to try. It’s only for a few minutes. I’ll put a pillow under your head,” he said.

  I dutifully lay back, wondering when the drowning sensation would come.

  He and the nurse went into the control room, leaving me alone.

  I suddenly realized I was not on oxygen. I instinctively padded around with my hands to see if I could feel the oxygen tubing. No, there was none.

  “Try to hold still,” he said through the speaker.

  When transport had come, I must have been off it, and so they had transported me without it. I began to panic.

  “OK, now hold your breath.” His voice through the speaker from the control room made him seem a million miles away.

  Are you insane? I could hardly breathe. I tried to sit up but the belt restricted my movements. I looked around for a monitor to reassure myself that my oxygen saturation was fine, but found I was not attached to any monitoring equipment.

  “Almost done, please try to hold still so we get good images for the doctor to look at,” he pleaded.

  They walked back into the room.

  “OK, all done,” he congratulated me. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

  “I need oxygen. I’m supposed to be on oxygen.” I pointed at the wall where the gas outlet was.

  “OK, we’ll get you hooked up,” he assured me, as the nurse opened a clean bag of tubing to connect to the wall.

  I grabbed on to him and tried to pull myself up.

  “Whoa there, let me help you,” he said as he pulled me up to sit.

  Sitting up, with oxygen on, I began to calm down. It was just a CT scan. I thought of how many scans I had ordered on my patients. How many everything I had ordered. It was shocking how little thought I had given to what it meant to leave the safety of the ICU, to be bumped and jostled and made to lie flat with lungs filled with fluid from heart failure or pus from pneumonia. How pathetically arrogant that I thought only of how clinically useful the images would be, or how necessary the test. I saw the patients leave and I saw them return, and what happened in between was unknown to me. How thoughtless I had been.

  As the transporter wheeled me back to the unit, he asked, “So, they gotta send you for any more tests?”

  “I think one more,” I sighed.

  He was there when it was time to take me to the next test, whether through randomness of scheduling, or personal ownership, I can only guess. As we arrived in radiology, he marched directly to the tech with my chart and advised her, “Do not ask her about the baby.” She looked shocked initially by his tone, but then her expression softened and she nodded.

  I smiled, then quickly neutralized my expression. It was clear he didn’t intend for me to overhear him. She didn’t ask about the baby. Nor did anyone else for the rest of my hospitalization. It seemed every transporter now knew the expectation was to protect me from well-meaning questions while I was off the floor. In an eight-hundred-bed hospital, they had united to form a protective enclosure around one patient.

  Back in the relative safety of the ICU, we waited for the results of the testing. I had asked repeatedly each day when I would be well enough to leave. Now I sat, acutely aware of each and every person I was dependent upon to provide assistance, supply supplemental oxygen or administer some treatment necessary to keep me alive. They constructed a lattice of support beneath me so deftly and discreetly that, like a teenager, I had mistaken security for self-sufficiency.

  The repeat CT scan showed improvement, the fluid around my lung unchanged and my labs stable; they were running out of rational reasons to keep me. There were plenty of fear-based reasons, the what-ifs still haunted us, but they were easily identified as worries rather than risks. I was to be discharged. I sat in a wheelchair, cradling a box filled with the sympathy and get-well-soon cards that had papered the walls. The elastic maternity pants and T-shirt I was wearing defined my body’s perimeter so explicitly, I felt more exposed than I had when draped in the handkerchief-like hospital gowns. I was reidentifying as myself and it was uncomfortable. In the gown, I was a sick patient, depersonalized and part of a larger community. By clothing myself, I was in effect reintroducing a version of me. A bloated, scarred, disabled and inferior me. What should have felt like a victory felt instead like a resignation. I had lost something in this battle, something more intangible than the concrete loss of the baby. I had lost my sense of myself as a strong, capable, independent person.

  “The pharmacy will deliver your prescriptions shortly, and remember our motto, ‘Drugs not Hugs’,” the attending doctor joked. I had been warned to avoid every possible threat to my liver capsule including, comically, contact sports, car accidents and hugs.

  Randy brought the car around and I was wheeled to the door. I had entered the hospital in spring and was leaving in the full heat of summer. We wouldn’t be returning to our house. I had just regained the skill of walking, and couldn’t have ascended the stairs to get to our bedroom. I’d be moving instead into my childhood home, where one floor of the split-level graciously accommodated a rented hospital bed, a shower with a shower chair, and the upholstered rocker and ottoman we’d bought for the baby. I would be cared for there by my mom, who had been schooled by nuns and understood the transformative nature of hard work and good deeds. She would find a way to transfigure her thoughts and worry into physical manifestations of helpfulness: helping me to shower, positioning me with pillows, counting out my pills and endless attempts to entice me to eat. Feeding your child obviously being the highest form of prayer.

  The old house had been packed up while I was still critically ill, Randy intuitively understanding that we couldn’t ever again live in a house where he watched me slowly die in the living room. I would not remember anything about the eventual move; I’d only recall turning up one day at the new house after I’d healed enough to leave my mom’s care. The deficits in my memory later became a convenient pretext for my inability to find whatever I might be looking for. Randy, having worked feverishly to prepare our new home, would comically sigh when I’d wonder aloud, “Whoever put my stuff away could have at least left notes.” Eight years on, I still blame the imaginary movers when I can’t find the tea.

  Breathing in the fresh summer air, I found I had an intense nostalgia for everything I saw.

  “Wow, that’s your car,” I said, stating the obvious.

  He indulged me. “Yeah, remember it?”

  “I do. Wow, I haven’t been in your car…”

  “In a long time,” he said, finishing my sentence.

  I settled into the front passenger seat before stealing a quick look over my shoulder at the backseat. I looked at Randy as he buckled himself in. “Wow. Here we are again,” was all I could manage.

  Five

  Increments and Impediments

  I’ve found that it is sometimes easier to inhabit a space when not faced with the additional challenge of actually having to be there. I had fantasized for so long about going home, it had come to represent success to me. Instead, being in such a familiar space only seemed to accentuate every loss. The house felt filled with memories of a thousand days that had been easier than the current one. Even if I had been strong enough to make it up the
stairs to my rose-colored, childhood bedroom, I couldn’t lie flat, so sleeping in my own bed was out. The hospital bed that the discharging team had sent was placed in the lower-level den. And though I had longed for quiet, away from the constant beeps and hallway chatter of the ICU, the dull silence of that half-underground room, with no one to monitor me, felt like a crypt. I moved to the rocker in the family room.

  The dark blanket of illness that enveloped me was an easy distraction from the lack of a baby, and I found I wasn’t mourning that loss most days. I was mourning something, but it was more intangible. I was mourning the imagined and unmet future. A vision of what I had thought lay ahead, but couldn’t quite bring into focus. When I tried to bring it into view, it was like watching grainy footage shot in 16 millimeter projected onto a white sheet. It was subject to disruption by the slightest shift in the wind. Randy, to his credit, acted as though I were the only living thing that had ever mattered and that he’d gladly live out the rest of his life with just me in tow. Most days I thought he should have married someone else. Someone as healthy as a thirty-three-year-old was supposed to be. I thought he got a raw deal.

  When we knew we wouldn’t be bringing home a baby, we’d asked a friend to call and cancel the furniture we’d ordered for the baby’s room. We’d not need the crib or dresser, but we elected to still take delivery of the rocker and ottoman we’d had upholstered in a neutral pattern of off-white swirls. I am not sure why we made this choice, except that we probably thought we’d have a use for it in the new house, and it wasn’t entirely obvious it had been intended for a baby’s room, so the sight of it wouldn’t necessarily gut us.

  That rocker defined the new border of my small world. It was the only place I could find any measure of comfort. In the rocker, I was able to elevate my legs, pack myself in with pillows and sleep upright, with an airline neck pillow for support. It allowed me to stay upright twenty-four hours a day, which proved necessary because if I lay back at all it felt as if a heavy bowling ball were crushing my heart and lungs. When I found it difficult to explain why I couldn’t lie flat, I calculated the volume and estimated the mass, like the scientist I had once been. I announced I thought the hematoma weighed roughly ten pounds. “Imagine a ten-pound ball crushing you from the inside,” I would say. I stopped telling anyone that after hearing the response: “Wow. It’s just like a baby.” Let me tell you all the ways this is not at all like a baby.

  I sat, or slept. When I slept, I dreamt of drowning. Dreams where the water is murky and heavy, and no light penetrates the surface. I’d flail and struggle to ascend while feeling crushed by the weight and pressure of the vastness above me. Awake, I was in constant pain. The pill form of the pain medication was no match for the intravenous version I’d been receiving at the hospital. And, unlike at the hospital, if I were to fall asleep, no one dared wake me, so I would miss a dose and get behind the pain, unable to catch up for hours.

  Visitors came and drank coffee near me. I couldn’t stomach it. I couldn’t stomach much. Two spoonsful of anything and I was hopelessly nauseated for hours. I had flashes of cravings, some childhood memory of a sticky sweet. My mom spent hours carefully trying to recreate the dish from memory. I’d take a bite, maybe two, to honor her efforts, but nothing had the taste I was hoping for. Nothing fit right. I showered sitting on a plastic bench with someone always just outside the door, in case of something. Something like passing out, or something like getting claustrophobic and panicking in the enclosure, or something like just not being able to clean myself. When had I become claustrophobic? In the CT scanner, when I thought I would drown again, or in that first shower in the hospital, trapped with my disfigured body for the first time? I didn’t know. I couldn’t turn the water temperature past lukewarm. If any steam at all accumulated, I’d feel suffocated by it. I needed to feel the coolness of the air entering my lungs to believe I was even breathing.

  When I could stay awake, I passively listened to the conversations happening around me. Like sitting in a hotel room, with loud voices next door coming unbidden through the wall. I just wanted quiet. Attempts to cheer me with stories, gossip or idle chatter were unwelcome. For some reason, it all made me angry, and then sad. Or sad, then tired. I just didn’t get it. Like a stranger from another world, I didn’t understand what they were doing. Was this how we were going to spend our time? I felt displaced and unsure of exactly what my part was, or how I was intended to play it. Fortunately, no one seemed to expect much of me, except to be on the stage and to answer that I was doing much better whenever asked. Then the performance would continue without me.

  When my favorite uncle visited, I noticed how his skin tone had the same yellowish hue mine did. It was subtle enough then that anyone had yet to acknowledge it and had not begun the testing that eventually led to surgery and chemotherapy. I couldn’t access the repository of diagnoses the discoloration implied, but I knew we’d be trading positions soon. I would one day be well and I would visit him during his recovery, as he struggled to get comfortable in his recliner. I would not know what to do, so I would attempt to cheer him with silly stories. He would learn to feign a smile, despite how acutely miserable he felt. He would sense the charade around him and play his role accordingly. He would do it for us.

  I would be driven frequently for blood work and imaging studies, and once for the baby’s burial. I hadn’t thought there would be a burial. I’m not sure exactly what I had thought would happen to her body. In the hospital when I was told they would keep her body for us in the morgue until I managed to get home, I thought it was an odd place for the remains. I had imagined that the very premature baby, being only twenty-seven weeks, would perhaps be sent to the pathology lab to be examined in the same way they would examine the placenta, sliced and sectioned so the pathologist could issue a report that covered every microscopic abnormality, like an autopsy. Brain tissue demonstrates ischemia, evidence of lack of blood flow, and lungs are not adequately developed, eyelids remain fused shut, no cardiac defect noted. And after she was examined, I didn’t know what would happen next. I thought of surgical terminations of pregnancy I had seen performed in the operating room as a medical student. Those remains went to pathology, not a cemetery. I recall the term “medical waste” entering my mind before I reprimanded myself.

  When I was told there would be a service, a burial in a portion of the cemetery reserved for stillborn babies, I thought it seemed an excessive response, but I had no idea how to rein it in. I had the sense there wasn’t another choice, or perhaps worse, that the ritual was intended to help me somehow. Or maybe it was for Randy; he was Catholic after all … perhaps there was some rule. My mom elected not to join us for the small funeral, a choice that revealed the sharp edges of her own personal grief over the loss. I sat and stared silently at the miniature coffin, numb from the extra doses of oxycodone I’d had to take in preparation, just to tolerate the road. I looked at our priest, the only other person invited to be present besides Randy, and understood he expected some outward manifestation of sorrow. I suppose mothers did cry at burials. From the front of the small chapel, he contorted his face into a comforting worried expression, enticing emotion. There was nowhere to hide from his gaze, so I met it. I looked back from the pew and thought, Well, I’m not technically a mother, am I? So who are you to tell me how to feel? I bit my cheek and dug my fingernails into my palms for the duration of the service, like a petulant child in a contest of will.

  Acknowledging the loss in that formal, ritualized way hurt far worse than I had expected it to. And I conceded that perhaps that had been the point of it all.

  We were handed a box of prayer cards at the end of the service. They had a pastel-colored angel on the front, with her name and a prayer on the reverse side. I walked out of the small chapel trying to recall if we had selected a grave marker, though the answer was irrelevant. I knew I wouldn’t be coming to look for her.

  On the ride home, I was angry at Randy for not memorizing the topography of
the route. I couldn’t comprehend how he could forget something as important as the location of the potholes. The stabbing pain caused by every bump in the road was a quick remedy for any delusion I had concocted of getting out more often. I wondered if maybe it would have been easier for everyone if I had died, if they didn’t have to be bothered with me.

  * * *

  In a transparent effort to brighten my mood, Randy drove me one day to see the new house he had bought for us. It was only a few miles from my mom. We’d been considering moving when we found out I was pregnant. We wanted to be closer to her, as she would help us to raise the baby. Instead, in a dark twist of fate, we were moving closer so she could continue to care for me, an adult invalid. I remembered we had looked at a number of houses, though my memories of them were more like dreams now. I thought I recalled while still in the ICU signing power of attorney papers so that we could close on a house. As an attorney, Randy knew that drugged on narcotics post-op, I was not in any state to sign my legal rights away. I stared at him, suddenly doubting his intention.

  “Did you have me sign something, when I was drugged?” I asked, sounding more accusatory than I had intended.

  “You had just lost the baby, and I couldn’t stand the idea that you might lose this house, too, so yes. Even though you weren’t in the best shape, I had you sign papers so that we could buy it. We can rip them up now; you don’t have to worry.”

  I allowed that maybe he wasn’t a complete sociopath who was trying to take advantage of me. Maybe.

  He expanded upon his explanation with some commentary on the “time-sensitive” nature of the real estate market. “If we didn’t act, we would have missed the chance,” he explained. Wasn’t that basically true of everything in life, I wondered? My mind spun in a loop, trying to come up with a single example of something that wasn’t time-sensitive. Relationships were time-sensitive, certainly. If you met the right person at the wrong time, it would fail by virtue of timing. Treatment for a disease, however effective if correctly timed, could come too late to help. Children were exquisitely time-sensitive.