Выбрать главу
New England Journal of Medicine. I couldn’t stop my arms from shaking, my voice was way up like this, and I couldn’t stay still. I clawed at the sheets, and I was miserable, and I couldn’t rest, and I was hyper, and I said, “Get me out of here.” I said, “This is not helping. What is this about? There’s nothing wrong with my mind. I’m not emotionally ill. I’m nauseous from being pregnant. Get me out of here, this is awful.” And I said to Mark’s father, “If you don’t take me out today, I am gonna crawl out on my hands and knees.” I was all bloody down both arms, with scabs from doing this, from clawing on the rough hospital linens. And I said, “Just get me out of here. Without the doctor’s permission, just sign me out! Take me home!” And, one way or another, I was finally released. And I was profoundly grateful to be home after that, and everything was fine then — until the hemorrhage. I bent down one night to tie Mark’s shoe — we were at my mom’s and we were just about ready to go home, we’d had dinner there, and I was in, oh, I guess my third month — and as I bent down to tie his shoe, I started to hemorrhage. And I had to go back to the hospital. And I was there a couple of days, at that horrible place where they did nothing positive for me at all, back at that hospital for a couple of days, until they felt that was under control. And then this doctor said that to me, “There is nothing wrong. The heartbeat is very strong. You’re a nice strong girl. Everything is perfect.” And I said, “But I bled buckets. How is that okay?” And he said, “Well…”—he said this prophetically—“well, sometimes the fetus isn’t as firmly attached to the uterus as it should be, and that’s why you hemorrhaged, but everything is fine now, it’s fine.” And, um, then, when I got home this time, I was told I had to stay in bed for at least a month — a stupid idea under any circumstances, but particularly stupid under those circumstances, because if I had gotten up…I should have run up and down about four thousand stairs, because if I had had a miscarriage, it would have been the best thing that could have happened. Instead, during that time, I didn’t even understand what was happening to me. I tried to stay still and sleep as much as possible and not be as nauseous and as miserable as I was, and Mark would come in and I’d talk to him and he’d talk to me. And he was pretty happy with Nana Harriet while the two of us were at her house, living there for that month, but I knew he wanted more from me…I knew that…and I felt terribly guilt-ridden. I never got over feeling that I had ruined his life, that I had done something terrible to him by showing my own weakness in that way and not being there for him. Nevertheless, it didn’t act out in that way. Right after we came home, I seemed to feel a lot better, certainly never really good, but enough better so I could take care of him. I was very nauseous through the entire pregnancy. I was extremely nauseous all the time with each of my pregnancies, but this was worse because I was much weaker. But Mark and I would talk and play, and I was so grateful to be home and to be with him, and he was so wonderful to talk to, and we would sing together. He’s the only person (along with his sister, Chase) who has ever heard me sing, and it’s lucky for the rest of the world that they haven’t, but the two of them seemed to like it. And we would play games and I would say, “Would you like to walk over to Grandma’s now, wanna go see Nana?” And, um, he didn’t know that he was actually walking me. He would hold my hand and we would talk to each other and he — I was his security, which I was supposed to be, but he was mine too. And he was such, always, always, such an interesting person to talk to, and we would really talk to each other, and I never understood quite the women who were so angry at having to be home with their kids, angry that they had no one to talk to and their interests were, um, pitiful because all they could do is talk baby talk to babies. And our life was nothing like that. I didn’t talk baby talk to him and he didn’t talk baby talk back to me. He had questions about things, I had stories to tell him, and he had stories to tell me, and I honestly and absolutely loved our time together and never ever felt as if I was missing something that would have been better than that. So the rest of that pregnancy was “fine”—I just didn’t tell anyone that I threw up every single day, several times a day, and, um, this doctor kept saying things to me like “Look at your hands. Look how beautiful your hands are! What a lovely-looking girl you are.” And, um, “What a beautiful child you have. And this child will be a beautiful child.” And stuff like that. But that wasn’t the answer to any of the questions I really had. I knew that. But I couldn’t have possibly known how badly this was going to end. I went into labor and I went to the hospital and I was knocked for a loop by this doctor. And next thing I knew…well, the next thing I knew was nothing — I was fast asleep, I was out of it. The truth is, what he should have done is, the moment I called him or the day or so before that, he should have been seeing me virtually every day then, in the ninth month, and he should have taken me into the hospital, and either done a cesarean or induced labor and watched me every moment. Because while I was out of it, the placenta — that’s what the fetus is attached to, the placenta — the placenta, which was clearly weak to begin with, burst. And from what I’ve been told years since, I’m lucky I didn’t die. Or needed an immediate hysterectomy at that moment. And the baby was without oxygen — beautiful, beautiful little girl, beautiful dark-haired, perfect-looking little girl…Not a chance, because he was an incompetent. And that guy I told you about, the Italian anesthesiologist, he happened to be in the hospital that day, and he told us later, he might have told your father earlier on, but he told me when he thought I could handle talking about it that he was there and that this man was completely incompetent in the face of what was happening. And so after the birth when I woke up, there were two people punching me in the belly, kneading me, pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing. Because they had to get everything, every piece, every tiny little piece out, otherwise you can die of fever. So in those senses, I was very lucky, I suppose…But they kept me there a week, which is what they did in those days. Instead of just keeping me overnight or a day or so, and then letting me out of there, away from the sounds of crying infants and the sight of crying infants and happy infants, they made me stay and they thought they were doing something wonderful for me…it was simply the protocol of the day. And the woman they put me in the room with, thinking they were being very compassionate, this woman had a baby who had, um, hemophilia, so that baby was not brought into the room, that baby was having special care in the nursery until about the fourth day, when they felt he was strong enough to come to her. And that’s when I said to Mark’s father to tell the people at the hospital either you release me or I am getting dressed and I am going home. This is beyond bearing. It’s a useless terrible thing that you’re doing. And all right…all kinds of hormones are still very active and, uh, I was not made to feel better, by the way, by the people who kept telling me how lucky I was. That doesn’t work. If anyone wants to know how to help somebody who’s having something awful happening to them, you don’t tell them they’re lucky because they have a beautiful wonderful child and a great family and a husband who adores you and how beautiful you were and um, what a great life you had and how young you were. And I couldn’t stop the tears, I was sobbing, but they just kept running out of my eyes and I couldn’t stop the wetness, it just kept happening. And I knew I had to get out of there and that it was not good. I needed to be able to be just with the people whom I cared about, who cared about me, and I needed to start to live some kind of normal life, and I needed to get away from this a little bit, and not be pushed in this way. There were also a couple of other awful things that happened, or one at least. The head nurse, the day that I was leaving, clearly didn’t like us, didn’t like the looks of my husband, of my father, and didn’t like the way I looked. Uh, to her we were just rich Jews, and she really had such hatred, and it was made very clear, because the day I was getting dressed to leave and I was waiting for Joel to pick me up, she came in and she said, “There’s a question I have to ask you because the proper protocol has not been followed, and I don’t know what to do because I’m having a problem.” And I said, “Why don’t you just wait. I don’t want to talk about anything that’s going on. Please wait for my husband and my father. They’ll be here in a little while. If you have papers to fill out or questions to ask, please ask them.” And she said, “But this is absolutely urgent. We have to know what to do with the baby’s body.” She couldn’t wait to come in to me to talk about my dead baby’s body. Out of spite. Oh, yes. When I turned to look at her, I could not even really believe what I was hearing. She had such a look of sort of satisfaction on her face, to be able to approach me with something that was going to make me feel terrible. I think this was both a class thing and an anti-Semitic thing, but I could be wrong about one or the other. It was very definitely a socioeconomic thing. She didn’t like the way we spoke, she didn’t like the way we looked or dressed. It was all much too much for her. I assumed that she knew we were Jews, and that my father and indeed Mark’s father looked Jewish — I don’t know about me, it’s hard to tell about yourself…I just could not wait to get out of there. I walked toward her, as I remember, one or two steps, because I really wanted to just do something horrible to her, but I was mostly…I was too weak at that point emotionally, I showed my feelings, the tears just rolled down my face, so I couldn’t act tough because I just wasn’t quite ready for that. I could have said awful things to her and I said whatever I said, like “That is a horrible thing to say to me, and I told you that I’m not speaking to you about any of these things. Get out of the room now. I’m getting dressed to go home.” And the truth is, and I’ve lived to rue this, that I never knew what they did with my little girl. And I would have liked to know where she went, and I would have liked some kind of dignity, to the poor little creature who didn’t have a chance to have a life.