I shouldn't be alive right now. And none of you should be reading this, because the person this post is dedicated to shouldn't be here either. Not according to western medicine...
In early September, 1999, I killed another rabbit. I suspected it's demise even before the stick turned blue. Eleven weeks into the pregnancy, I began bleeding. Certain I was experiencing a miscarriage, I rushed to a local ER, where the doctor on staff ordered an ultrasound. As I lay on the table emotionally numb, yet silently crying, the technician took pity on me and allowed me to sneak a peak of the monitor screen. There it was. A tiny yet sustained life, happily swimming around inside of me. Diagnosis: subchorionic hemmorhage. AKA, a hair's breath.
A few more weeks passed without a hitch, and I was in the clear. Or so I thought. Upon an exam in my eighteenth week, it was discovered that I was, in the words of my physician himself, "the poster child for all obstetrical emergencies". I had been diagnosed with not one, but two dueling and potentially lethal pregnancy anomalies. Placental abruption and placenta previa. Further compounding my medical nightmare were the words I had so desperately wanted to hear three children sooner: Congratulations! You're having a baby girl!
Even in the midst of such fucktastical news, I couldn't help being excited at the prospect of a daughter. In a house filled to the brim with testosterone, I craved a little girl, a partner-in-crime. In my family, the girls were always born first. I was the exception. Having had three boys right off the bat, it was easy to feel like something was missing during holiday get-togethers. Superficial? Absolutely. But don't mistake me for someone who hadn't loved her sons from the word scrotum. And so one by one, I called every female I was related to and shared the news. And then, the next morning, the powers that be decided to teach me a fucking lesson. I began to hemmorhage again.
Such was the case off and on for the next nine weeks. A little here, a lot there. Never any pain. Pelvic rest at home. Confined to a bed on labor & deliver in the hospital. And a constant battle with my increasingly impatient doctors who failed to understand that three and a half months in Club Med was unfeasible when you already had two toddlers, a preschooler, and a husband who worked night shift. So we came to a compromise which allowed for me to continue the duration of my incarceration as an outpatient. A compromise which involved me having to relinquish my boys to their paternal grandmother for the duration of the pregnancy. We all had to make sacrifices.
I spent the following few days doing my damndest to resist the urge to do anything but lay in bed and count the friggin' ceiling tiles. I read every word in every magazine on the market, twice. I programmed the speed dial on my phone (finally!). I watched Forrest Gump so many times that I can still, to this very day, recite it word for word. And then just as I reached over to turn off the bedside lamp during the wee hours of the morning of April 7th, I felt a pop. And subsequently, a gush. In a split second, one thought entered my mind. Either my water just broke, or I was bleeding again. Two seconds later, I forced myself to look. It. Was blood. A lot of blood. I bunched up the comforter between my legs and ran down the hallway toward the bathroom, grabbing the phone on my way thru the living room.
When I say a lot of blood, I'm talkin' seven to eight hundred cc's in the bathroom alone, as was the estimate of my sister and the paramedics when they arrived. In the time it took them to insert a fifteen gauge IV in each wrist, my blood pressure dropped to that of a freshly declared corpse. On the way to the hospital, I hummed the alphabet to myself as a means of trying to stay awake. No sooner did I arrive on the maternity floor did a team of nurses begin stripping me down and covering me in iodine. If the bleeding continued once my doctor arrived, they were taking my daughter, thirteen weeks early or not.
This was the first time she and I communicated. We bonded. Scared shitless, I began tapping on my belly, and quietly instructing her to kick me back if she could feel me. And she did. Then, I asked her to please stop her shenaningans before Mommy had a complete mental break. And she did. No sooner did Doc walk into the room did the bleeding cease. A few hours and a couple of blood transfusions later, we were resting comfortably with my head five feet below sea level and my hoo hoo pointed toward the heavens. For the time being, she was still very much a physical part of me. And she stayed that way for seventeen more days.
On the night of April 24th, I began experiencing what I hoped to have been Braxton Hicks contractions (otherwise known as "fuck you, you're not in real labor yet"). Being that MFH was in the midst of being diagnosed with what we thought was a pulled muscle in his back, I calmly reassured him that it was nothing, and to go ahead and take those pain meds and go to sleep. It'll pass! I'll be fine! So I had myself a few tall glasses of water and stretched out on the sofa, waiting for it to go away. To my surprise, I was crying on my hands and knees on the hallway floor by 2:30am. Apparently, there was nothing false about those labor pains.
I woke MFH in a panic, telling him it was time to go now. Fully expecting a magnesium sulfate drip and another extended vacation on Labor & Delivery, that's where we ended up by 3:30 that morning. I was right about the mag bag, but wrong about everything else. By that point, I began bleeding with each contraction. I had also sent MFH home in my false assumption that everything would be under control by the time they rolled my breakfast tray(s) in. When the staff changed shifts at 7:00am, Doc informed me that they were unable to stop the delivery of #4, and that they were shipping me out to a facility better equipped to handle a preemie. I frantically dialed the house, in a futile attempt to inform MFH of the sudden change in plans. You see, back in the day, we had dial up internet. And upon returning home, he logged online, and had forgotten to disconnect before going back to bed. The fucking line was busy. So I did what any other woman in my situation would have done. I sent out the bat signal.
Really, I (along with every available nurse on the floor) called every single neighboring resident within a five mile radius of my house, desperately trying to get someone, anyone, to break the fuck in and wake him up. Eventually, I was able to reach his mother, who did just that. No, really. He didn't hear her banging on the door and she had to break in. But, she did get him. And by then, I was already being admitted into another hospital an hour and a half away.
Not long after I arrived, I was given the great displeasure of meeting Dr. Asshole (who's real name sounds freakishly similar). Not wanting to fuck up his manicure, he stood at the foot of my bed and barked orders to the other thirty five medical professionals designated to my care. What he expected was to be the hero. What he didn't expect was for me to put him in his place. After declaring that the plan of action would be to insert an epidural and allow me to labor vaginally for the rest of the day, regardless of how many more pints of blood I would require, I declared war. In one simple sentence: Sign your name to a statement that says my daughter will be born without so much as a missing eyelash, or you can go fuck yourself. C-section it will be.
He tried, but epically failed, to convince me that it was perfectly safe to continue to contract with a rupturing placenta. You know, because he'd have me do it on an OR table. How comforting to know that should I or my daughter suddenly bleed out, we'd die in a surgically sterile environment. I simply can not repeat what I originally said to him in that moment (saying it twice would surely reserve my special seat in Hell). Just know that he wasn't happy about not becoming the Hero of The Hospital that day.
Three minutes later (because a doctor that's pissed off is a doctor who wastes no time making sure your husband doesn't make it to the delivery on time), I was on that OR table, being prepped for an emergency c-section. Fifteen minutes after that, I was listening to the sounds of my newborn daughter (my newborn daughter!) crying her first cries. It was music. To my ears.
I spent months wondering what my daughter was going to look like, and be like. And let me tell ya', nothing. Nothing could have ever prepared me for her. Never did I expect her to be so breathtakingly beautiful. So happy. So...amazing. I spent the first weeks of her life literally just staring at her in absolute amazement. Even now, there are times when she walks into the room and I think, "Oh my God! I helped create that elegant creature!". And it's so much more than physical appearance. She has the biggest heart out of anyone I'd ever met. She loves with everything she's got. And I couldn't imagine her any other way.
The past eleven years with her have brought me so much happiness. Words cannot suffice. I hope & pray that the bond she and I have together will never weaken. I can not hypothesize my life without her in it. I wouldn't ever want to have to. When a mother has a baby, it is magical. But when a mother has a daughter, it is so much more...
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