The Best Day?
I support myself against the sink, while I look in the mirror. All day long, in cheerful voices, people have been telling me how much better I look. As I look over my hair, hanging lank and tangled, and my skin, which is a pale, uneven yellow somewhat resembling parchment, I think to myself, “If this is better, what in the world did I look like before?” It is December 20th, two days since my son was born, and I can’t imagine that I have ever felt worse in my life.
It all started in the middle of the night on December 17th. I went into labor. It hurt, but it didn’t last long, and at 10:48 on the 18th, after only two solid pushes, my son was born. “You’re a natural! You hardly even tore! We just need to sew that up, and you can settle in for a rest,” they told me. Just a few stitches and I would be back home in no time. “We just need you to stay here for a few hours and then you can go home,” they said. Everybody was so happy and full of smiles. My parents looked so proud, my brothers happy, but slightly disturbed by the whole thing. The midwives got me sewn up, changed, into bed, and then gave me the baby. David lay down next to me on the double bed and asked if I had decided on a name yet. We had discussed names, but after he showed a predilection for such boring names as Billy and Chris, I informed him that since he didn’t marry me, he didn’t have a say. “Fair enough,” he replied. I had finally settled on Ethan Alexander or Zachary Xavier, and I was really leaning toward Zachary, just because David really despised that name. But when he asked, I looked down at the little face and knew that he wasn’t a Zachary. “I guess I’ll go with Ethan,” I said. David sighed in relief. Everyone was amazed because Ethan could focus on things right away. “Of course he can,” I thought, “he’s my boy. He’s special. We always do things early in my family.”
They showed me how to nurse, which didn’t work out so well, but they said Ethan wouldn’t need to nurse for several hours. David looked at Ethan for a long time, and said, “Well, he looks just like me, so I guess if there was any doubt he’s mine, it’s gone now.” “Of course he’s yours,” I reply with my eyebrows drawn together, “you’re the only guy I’ve slept with for the past two years.” What the Hell does he think of me? Does he think that just because I took him back every time we broke up, I’d jump into bed with anybody?
As time went by, I started getting drowsy and grumpy. Pretty soon, I was feeling a shooting pain down the back of my left leg. “Oh that’s normal,” they said, “there’s a nerve running right by the uterus that sometimes is irritated by delivery. It should go away.” But it didn’t go away. As the minutes crawled by, the pain grew worse and worse. Three hours after delivery, it felt like someone was shoving a white hot ice pick into the back of my leg, and I was screaming at the top of my lungs. “It’s no big deal, we’ll get you some pain killers,” they told me. But in the hallway, I later found out, their chatter was a little different, “She hardly even complained during labor, she didn’t even scream during hard labor, why is she in so much pain now?”
My midwife came in and told me she was going to take my stitches out and take another look. Since the stitches hurt quite a bit the first time, I said, “No, no, that’s ok! I’ll be fine;” she insisted, however. She took a look, and discovered that although I had hardly torn externally, internally I had torn quite extensively. I was also bleeding internally, but she thought she could take care of it. As I squirmed in pain, they moved me to an exam room and gave me an IV, so that they could give me some drug that would make me ‘not so aware of the pain.’ As they shot the drug into my IV, I asked, “How long will it take for this to wor. . .?“ My voice trailed off into silence. “MMM. That’s nice!” I thought to myself. But I still felt the pain; after a few seconds had passed I didn’t care about the past pain anymore, just the current pain. After that, I was only aware of moments at a time. They had to have David hold me down because I wouldn’t stay still. They filled up garbage cans with blood soaked gauze. “Hey wait,” I thought sleepily, “I need that!” I was so tired. “I wish whoever is screaming would stop it so I can sleep,” I thought several times. I nodded off a few times, and once they woke me up as they were putting me into an ambulance. My midwife told me, “We’re sending you to the emergency room. When you get there, they’re going to put you to sleep so Doctor Fredrickson can do surgery on you.” “Oh good,” I say, “I like to sleep.” I’d never been in an ambulance before. I noticed the walls seem very tall and shiny before I drifted off again.
When I awoke once more, I was in an operating room, and there were doctors and nurses all around doing things to me. “She LIED!” I screamed, “She said I’d be asleep!” “We couldn’t put you to sleep. . .” I fell asleep before hearing why.
A man woke me up to tell me that he’s my anesthesiologist and he’s going to give me more oxygen so I’ll wake up more so they can do an epidural. “Do I need the epidural for the surgery?” I asked. “Oh no, he’s already done the surgery, he just needs to check his work.” “Why did you need to wake me up for that?” I wonder. They set me up with my legs straight out in front of me and I almost fell over. It was somewhat difficult getting the idea across to them that I couldn’t sit that way because my hamstrings were too tight and I thought I was going to fall over, but they finally let me swing my legs down on either side of the table. They did the epidural while I swam in and out of consciousness, and as they were leaving, I heard one of them say, “What would we have done if she had fallen off the table?” “Get that big husband of hers in here to pick her up, I guess,” someone else said, laughingly. “He’s not my husba. . .” I said as I drifted off again.
I woke up later and looked around in confusion. I seemed to be in a supply closet? Soon, a nurse came in and told me that all the recovery rooms were full, but they’d get me to my room soon. She needed to put a catheter in, and she was telling me oh so gently what she was doing step by step until I told her I had an epidural.
Soon enough, I was in my room with people swirling and bobbing all around me, making me feel sick to my stomach. “Where’s Ethan?” I ask. “Oh, Linda took him home,” my mom tells me. Linda is David’s mother. She was always nice to me, doing all that she could to help me. Sometimes I found it a bit stifling. “She seemed pleased as she could be to get to be the one to take him, but I couldn’t leave you. She’s on her way up here with him. The hospital will let him stay in the room with you as long as someone else is here 24 hours a day to take care of him so you don’t have to.” “But this is supposed to be the important bonding time,” I thought, sadly. Everybody came, my parents, David, his parents, his grandparents (being oh so nice and with all the gifts just like I was family), my brothers, my friends, people from church, whom I hardly knew; all of them talking, talking, talking and giving me things. “Why do people give potted plants to new mothers?” I thought, “Like a new baby isn’t enough to take care of.” I felt so weak; I could barely lift my arms. David bought me some really expensive looking white roses. It was the first time I got expensive roses, and it turns out that I am allergic to roses. Grocery store roses don’t smell, so I never noticed before. The smell of these gave me a colossal headache, but I would never let David know. It didn’t seem like a fair trade somehow: he kept his love and I got a kid and some stinky flowers.
One of my nurses recognized me somehow, maybe by my name. It turns out she is the mother of one of my “friends” from junior high, named Jennifer. Jennifer actually hung out with the people I hung out with, but we never liked each other. She turned them all against me before the end of junior high. “Oh, Jennifer will be so glad to hear how you’re doing!” she exclaimed. “Yeah, she’ll be thrilled to hear that the girl she thought was a lame ass loser in junior high has grown up to be an even bigger loser: college drop out, can’t get anybody to marry her, and turns out she can’t even have a baby without almost killing herself. Women in third world countries have babies successfully every day, but I can’t even do that right,” I think numbly.
Dr. Fredrickson came to see how I was doing and when he looked at the affected area, he wrinkles his nose and says, “Ew, gross! It looks like someone shoved a grenade up there!” I laughed. His frankness put me at ease. I’ve always hated how doctors pussyfoot around, never saying what they really mean, so as to not offend your ‘delicate sensibilities’. I’d never seen Dr. Fredrickson before, although I’d seen his name on my prescriptions often enough. He was the doctor my midwives reported to. He was a small African man with a kind face, and I liked him immediately, although I realized I had screamed at him the day before when I found out that I wasn’t unconscious. I apologized for anything horrible I might have said and he told me I didn’t say anything wrong, that I was perfectly polite. He also told me that I had a hematoma the size of a grapefruit. I asked what a hematoma was, and he said, “It’s like a blood blister, but it’s inside your body instead of outside.” I had ripped halfway up my uterus, all the way through to the rectum inside. The hematoma was putting pressure on the nerve that runs down my leg, that’s why my leg had hurt so badly. That nerve would bother me for years to come.
Someone was with me all the time, sometimes David, sometimes Mom, or my brother Joey. I would watch them holding Ethan or changing Ethan and sometimes I would be glad I didn’t have to do all that, and sometimes I would get angry that I couldn’t do that. The midwives had been against David before, but they would whisper to me, “He’s so sweet; you should give him another chance!” Of course he was sweet, he loves playing the knight in shining armor saving the damsel in distress. When another of his girlfriends, Erin, got a kidney stone during church one time, I thought he was going to carry her all the way to the hospital himself. But he had proven he didn’t want me, no matter how he was acting now. I would never forget how when I told him after I came to terms with the fact that I was pregnant that I thought we should get married, he told me that he never loved me, never even liked me, he just came back every time because the sex was so good. Then when he proposed to me so sweetly, and it all started to fall apart before the day was over, and I remembered how he later told me that he came there that day to tell me that it was over forever, but I was so beautiful that he proposed instead. “I can’t stand you,” “spend the rest of your life with me;” I can see how you could get those two confused. No sir, he would have to do more than hold my hand in delivery to prove himself to me. Fool me once, shame on me; fool me two hundred times. . .
On the second day, they took out my catheter and told me to walk to the bathroom. It didn’t go well. That was when I got to see how terrible I looked for the first time. On the third day, they sent me on a walk down the hall. I got tunnel vision and my legs buckled. They had to bring me back to my room in a wheelchair, but they still declared me fit for release. They told me that I lost half of my blood, and I really needed a transfusion, but transfusions were dangerous and they didn’t want to take the chance. Instead, I was to spend two months in bed, getting up only to go to the bathroom, take care of Ethan, or go to my check ups with my midwives. I was to eat lots of iron rich foods. And with that, on December 21st, they sent me off.
It was all arranged. My dad was moving to my room and I would stay with mom so she could take care of me and Ethan. The ride home was very uncomfortable. I couldn’t sit without pain and the roses were stinking the car up. Between the ride and the roses, when we got home I had to throw up. My dad carried Ethan inside, and when I was done vomiting, he helped me inside, too. David hadn’t come. When I got settled, I looked at Ethan. “You may look like your dad, but you’re my boy,” I thought. “It’s you and me, kid. You and me.” The roses didn’t get to stay.
