Exhale

I wanted to sit up and scream, “Help! Help, please, they are sucking the life out of me,” but when I looked at the nurse next to me, the words wouldn’t come out.  Outside I was still, but inside my heart was racing. I couldn’t catch my breath.

She caught the pleading in my eyes, and with a kind smile said, “I’m sorry you’re here today.”

“I just can’t believe this is happening,” I whispered.

She blotted my first tears with the flannel cover and said softly, “Don’t worry.  We have plenty of blankets.”

I closed my eyes and tried to remember that it wasn’t life they were sucking out, it was death.

* * *

The fact of this baby, our second, had just taken root in my mind when I learned it had not taken root in my body.  Just emerging from the anxiety and sleeplessness and overwhelming sense of responsibility that had made up my daughter’s first year, nearly drowned in a sea of fatigue and hormones, I had hardly begun to right myself when I was suddenly, suspiciously nauseous and peeing on a stick.

The truth took a few days to sink in.  But unplanned is not the same as unwanted, and I started digging in the back of my closet for pants with elastic waist bands. I thought about names.

We brought our daughter to the first sonogram, thinking it would be fun.  She started screaming as soon as the technician asked me to lie down on the table.  I was amazed how clearly she could say, “Get your hands off my mom!” without using actual words.  I had just begged my husband to take her out of the room, when the doctor started muttering.

“Are you sure about those dates?” he asked, looking at the screen.

“Very,” I said.

“Well, this doesn’t look like eight weeks.”

He paused, moved the probe around, and clicked the computer a few dozen more times before he said, “Let’s measure the heart rate.”

My daughter was still screaming, and sixty-five beats per minute didn’t sound so bad to me, so it barely registered when he said he had hoped to see more like 120.

“Could you repeat that please, doctor?” I asked, suddenly giving him my full attention.

“I have real concerns about the viability of this pregnancy,” he said. “Maybe you’re just wrong about the calendar.”

He said I should come back in a week, and he would look again. It wasn’t until we reached the elevator that I started to cry.

Later, on the phone, the midwife confirmed that it was very unlikely the baby would make it.  In fact, I could start bleeding at any minute. Or any day.  Or in a few weeks.  If I did, she said I could just take to my bed and “let nature take it’s course.”

* * *

I had a Physics professor who once tried to explain how he could believe in God despite being a scientist.

“You know when you have a cat?” he asked with his singsong Indian accent.  “And then you have a cat that’s been hit by a car and is dead?  All the pieces are the same, right?  It is still a cat, right?  But it is different, changed somehow.  We can’t explain the difference.”

I thought about him all week.  Would I know the difference?  If all the parts were still there, but the heart wasn’t beating, was the thing inside me still a baby?  Would I still feel pregnant?  Would I still be pregnant?  Could I have a glass of wine?  What if the doctor was wrong?  I ordered one, but couldn’t drink it.

Wednesday came, and the doctor told me what I expected to hear. Where there once had been a tiny beating heart, there was only silence.

I scheduled a D&C for the next day.  There would be no “letting nature take its course,” no sitting around the office, waiting for days, weeks to start bleeding all over my desk chair.  I’m not big on medical intervention, but I am a “rip the Band-Aid off fast” kind of gal.  Besides, Nature had already let this baby die, so I wasn’t feeling too respectful of her timetable.

* * *

“When you say ‘light sedation,’ that doesn’t mean twilight sleep or anything like that, right? I don’t want to wake up or remember any of this.”

The anesthesiologist chuckled at my question, smirked, patted my hand told me not to worry.  I’m sure he thought I was afraid of pain, but what I feared was worse. I feared another agonizing second of dread.  An hour later I woke up, and it was over, just like that.  It wasn’t even messy.

* * *

The baby should have been born in early January. The date sort of snuck up on me because there are many, many days when I didn’t even think about it.  But I suppose my body remembered.  For weeks, I couldn’t get the bitter taste out of my mouth, no matter how many sweets I stuffed in.  I entered the New Year tired and surly and scared that despite my best laid plans, I would never really be over my loss.  I was afraid that in the place ofa little life, a little piece of darkness had been planted inside me.  I couldn’t sleep at night or get up in the morning.

One night, I couldn’t even put my daughter to bed.  I laid her down next to me in my room and read her story books there, unable to raise my head from the pillow.  She wedged into the tiny space between my body and the bed, and pressed her nose right up against mine in a perpetual Eskimo kiss. She was asleep in minutes.  I watched the flowers of her pajamas rise and fall and the tiny twitch on her face when she started to dream.  Now two, she really only looks like a baby when she’s sleeping.  She sighed her milky puppy breath onto my face and into the dark, dry place inside me.  Slowly, silently, I started to laugh.

Turns out, there is no room for grief in a heart being pumped full of milky puppy breath.  Turns out I already had everything I thought I had lost.

I closed my eyes and savored her scent. Finally, peacefully, I slept.

_________________________________________________________________________

Magan Crane is a writer, editor, runner, wife, mother, and juggler living in Arlington, VA.  She has one daughter, now three, who – despite her mother’s tomboy sensibilities – loves princess dresses and fairies.  She makes Magan laugh every day.