Beneath the Surface

by Libby Trickett

  It’s a difficult time for us. Men seem to want to fix things, but Luke can’t fix this. I still get overwhelmed by the emotions, which come in waves. I feel completely despondent at times. I still think about the baby that I lost. And in between these bouts of grief and despair and this masochistic fixation with ‘what I did wrong’ and ‘why I deserved it’, I’m having mechanical sex every second day with my husband. My husband, who I love so deeply. My husband, who doesn’t really understand what is wrong with me.

  I struggle to have any perspective. It’s not completely my fault—I just don’t know any better at this stage. I’m simply not aware of the many women who struggle for years to conceive, who have multiple miscarriages, who never have the chance to have a child at all. Maybe I shouldn’t feel so bad about an early miscarriage when so many women have much more significant and traumatic losses, but all I can see from where I’m standing right now is this thing that I have lost, which has absolutely crushed my heart. Like every wrong turn and every major disappointment in my swimming career, what has happened is incredibly disappointing to me because it’s not what I expected to happen. I didn’t imagine the worst, so I was completely unprepared for it, and I can’t seem to shake away the shock.

  Sometimes I wonder if, on some deep psychological level, failure just doesn’t work for me. This is a hangover from my swimming career—I know that much. I am aware that I had success at a young age, and maybe it made me a little arrogant about what I thought I could achieve. The truth is you have to be a little arrogant to achieve at the highest level as a swimmer, because there is absolutely no way you can be the best in the world if you don’t believe you deserve to be there. It’s the only way you can compete at that level. But I recognise now that there are two sides to that coin: too much confidence and not enough wariness leaves you utterly exposed, because you’re totally unprepared when things go wrong.

  My grief over the miscarriage is acutely personal and intimate, but there are other things feeding into it that are only making it worse. I want to know that I’m on the right path, that I’m doing the right thing. I want to know that one day I will be successful at something other than swimming. Everything has been so piecemeal and ill-fitting since my swimming career ended that it feels like I’m never going be successful again. I feel like the world expects something of me and I can’t deliver. Nothing is working.

  I just want to be as passionate about something as I was about swimming. Being pregnant was so incredibly different, but it meant just as much to me.

  Four months later. I know the symptoms now. I’m 60 days into my cycle, my breasts are sore and swollen, and I’m confident enough to buy a home pregnancy test. I try not to expect anything, try not to hope, but those three minutes of waiting, watching the timer on my phone, are filled with nervous anticipation. When the word ‘pregnant’ appears in the little window of the tester, my heart swells. But I don’t want to be too happy—I don’t want to assume that everything will be okay. I know now that there are no guarantees. I buy another six or seven home pregnancy tests that week, and every day I check to see if it is real.

  I still feel joy, but I am so wary now, and sad that the experience seems much less innocent the second time around. Instead of feeling like I am on the verge of my next great adventure in life, I feel like we have only just passed the first hurdle. I want to get an early scan, but in mid-January 2015 I am only three or four weeks along. I have to wait at least until six weeks have passed. Slowly and cautiously, this time. We have to take each day as it comes.

  At six weeks, there is a heartbeat, and I feel the knots in my chest loosen a couple of millimetres. There are other signs, too, that things are different this time. I start to feel nauseated very early. I see Rob again for a second scan at nine weeks, and there is still a heartbeat, and then the morning sickness goes next-level. It feels like the worst hangover of my life, every single day: from nine weeks through to eighteen weeks I am vomiting multiple times a day. My baby is definitely in there, making itself known. The world feels like it’s constantly swaying. I have never felt so revolting. But I’m comforted by the morning sickness, in a way, because I know what it means. I am still pregnant. I am still pregnant! From eighteen weeks to 28 weeks I get some respite—I stop vomiting at least—but we’re far enough along now for the knots to loosen a little more. At 28 weeks the nausea comes back, and it stays for the rest of the pregnancy.

  The only moment of panic comes after the twenty-week scan, when the radiographer is busy measuring our baby’s internal organs and checking all the fingers and toes. ‘Okay, I’m just going to go and grab the doctor. He’ll be back to check everything for you,’ she says pleasantly, and walks calmly out of the room.

  ‘She spent a lot of time in that one spot, didn’t she?’ Luke comments.

  I hadn’t been paying much attention. Moments later, a doctor I don’t know comes in and retraces the entire scan that the radiographer has just done, pausing in the same place she did for a long while, which turns out to be the baby’s liver.

  ‘Do you see that white spot?’ the doctor asks. ‘It looks like calcification. It could be nothing at all, like a strawberry mole. But we need to do some more tests.’

  He tells us that, at worst, it could be cystic fibrosis, but I don’t really understand what that means. It’s not until we visit Rob that the gravity of the situation hits me and my heart muscle clenches again. But Rob explains that both Luke and I have to be carriers of the gene and a simple blood test will tell us. It feels like I’m holding my breath for two weeks, until the test results come in. Yet again I have the feeling that things are veering off course. I still have my baby, but its future could be completely different from how I imagined. Is that something I should be sad about? I don’t know.

  This is the worst moment in my pregnancy, but ultimately it’s a blip because I’m not a carrier. There are other tests, but the worst is over. Whatever the spot is on my baby’s liver, it seems benign.

  My expectations and my reality don’t match up at all. I imagined that when I got pregnant, I would treat my body like a temple. I’d fuel my body with all of these amazing things and I wouldn’t eat sushi or drink coffee and everything would be macrobiotic and organic and nutritious and blah blah blah. In fact, what happens is that, around week eleven, I realise that the only thing that makes me feel mildly less sick is eating KFC. Any greasy hangover food, really. I eat salty, fatty, oily food and for about an hour, I feel human. Then the fatigue, nausea and headaches come back again, and along with them comes the puking. I puke a lot.

  I gain a huge amount weight, much more than the recommended guidelines, but more alarmingly I retain a massive amount of water. I swell up like a water balloon and stay that way for weeks, almost audibly sloshing when I move. It’s bizarre. If I push down on my skin, particularly on my legs, the depression mark stays there for literally five minutes. It’s called pitting oedema and it’s totally gross—I’m like a weird water balloon monster—but I feel so violently ill that my appearance is a distant concern. I’m far more alarmed when flashing lights start appearing in front of my eyes. ‘That’s not good,’ Rob says, running another suite of tests, then diagnosing me with gestational hypertension.

  I have high blood pressure, which is a precondition for pre-eclampsia. It can be life-threatening for both the mum and the baby if eclampsia develops, but we’re just monitoring things for now. With Rob’s permission, Luke and I go on a ‘babymoon’ to Hamilton Island, one last sunny break before our lives change forever. I have the most fabulous dinner on the island one night—a gorgeous, buttery spaghetti ragu—then I waddle back to our hotel room and projectile-vomit all over the bathroom. So romantic. I develop peri-natal carpal tunnel syndrome and spend hours icing my wrists from the champagne bucket to reduce the swelling and the pain. While we’re there, the pitting oedema also gets significantly worse. We call Rob and he asks us to come in immediately.

  ‘We sort of can’t—we’re on an island,�
� I tell him.

  ‘No problem,’ he says. ‘Just come in as soon as you can.’

  It’s Monday by the time we get back to the clinic, and in the following week there are another couple of episodes of flashing lights. On Friday, Rob sends me to hospital for observation because my blood pressure is way too high. ‘It was probably high because Rob did the reading,’ one of the midwives laughs. ‘He gets my heart going too.’ But over the weekend, Rob reluctantly decides it’s time to induce. My symptoms are only going to get worse.

  ‘I’m only 37 weeks!’ I fret lamely. The baby is coming now? I feel ripped off that my maternity leave has suddenly evaporated into thin air. I had a whole list of television shows I was planning to watch while I was setting up the nursery. I thought I’d have another month to prepare, because first-time pregnancies are always late. I didn’t want to be induced—I’d dreamed (of course) of having a natural birth while meditating and listening to whale song, but that plan seems to be out the window. On the other hand, I’ve been feeling so wretched for so long that having the end in sight is actually a relief.

  Luke and I eat Thai takeaway before heading into the Mater Mother’s Hospital on the Sunday night, where the midwives put prostaglandin gel on my cervix, which is the first step in the whole inducement process. Then, we wait. I’m swinging between fear and an incredible sense of anticipation that I’m about to meet my child. When I went to the Olympic Games for the first time I felt a similar electricity, but I didn’t have this muddle of excitement and anxiety, the sense of stepping into the unknown. I have no idea what I’m doing or what to expect. I have no idea how my body will handle this process, and the risks with gestational hypertension are very real.

  I start having period cramps overnight but there is no movement of the cervix, so the midwives apply another layer of gel on Monday morning. By Monday afternoon, when Rob comes to visit, I am only one centimetre dilated, but that is just enough for him to poke what looks like a little sewing hook up there and break my waters. The pain is unbelievable—truly intergalactic. It takes my breath away. I can’t imagine any part of this hurting more than that.

  I’m hooked up to a drip of synthetic oxytocin, which is the hormone your body releases to bring on contractions. Normally, the spread of oxytocin is slow so the contractions come on slowly, but the drip accelerates the process, from zero to a hundred in what feels like minutes. It’s like dropping off the edge of a cliff. Some part of my brain is still hoping for a natural birth—as though I’m going to get some kind of prize at the end for all of my noble suffering—but that idea is quickly drowned out by the un-fucking-believable pain. After four hours of grunting and sweating, my cervix is only dilated four centimetres, which is still six centimetres away from where we need to be. ‘I can’t do this for another six hours,’ I moan. ‘Get me an epidural!’

  An anaesthetist comes in to give me the spinal needle for the epidural. It’s a challenging thing to do in an established labour because the contractions are so severe and I’m doubled over with the pain, struggling to stay still, but he doesn’t seem to have any problems. An hour later, the pain still hasn’t subsided. The contractions are coming every second minute, so it’s one minute on, one minute off.

  ‘How long should it take for the epidural to work?’ I ask a nurse.

  ‘Ten minutes,’ she replies.

  ‘Okay, it’s not working.’

  A second anaesthetist comes in to examine me and tells me the first guy missed my spine. Because of my scoliosis my spine curves a little, and the needle apparently went somewhere useless. The second attempt is like magic. Ten minutes, zero pain—I’m just utterly exhausted.

  The team around me pauses for breath. The midwife has left the room and Rob is about to go home and grab some dinner with his family. Luke goes outside to make some calls and update our families. I’m alone in the room, enjoying this brief moment of serenity, when the foetal heart monitor suddenly drops to 40 beats per minute. The beeps slow right down, alarmingly slow, then jumps rapidly to 90 beats per minute, then drops down to 40 again. What the hell is happening? I draw a sharp breath and hit the buzzer for the midwife, panic rising in my throat.

  She rushes in, all business, but almost as soon as she’s back in the room the monitor settles back into a steady rhythm. Thankfully, Rob hasn’t left yet and comes in for an assessment. ‘The baby is going into foetal distress—we’ll have to schedule an emergency C-section,’ he tells me, hustling away to the corner of the room to organise a theatre for the surgery.

  ‘I kind of feel like I need to poo,’ I tell the nurse.

  ‘Hmm,’ she says thoughtfully. ‘Let’s check where you’re at.’ She ducks down and has a quick look. ‘Yep, that baby is ready to come out.’ I’ve gone from four centimetres to ten centimetres dilation in less than an hour, presumably because my body was finally able to relax.

  ‘Okay, if you’re ready to go, we’ll go,’ Rob says—so we go.

  I start pushing, straining and moaning through gritted teeth. All the while, Rob is monitoring the baby very closely. It takes a full hour for the little thing to come out, and when the baby is ready Rob steps aside and invites Luke to step in and receive it. One last epic push, and out it comes. A perfect, tiny little thing.

  My baby has arrived. This feeling is so big, it’s hard to hold. It is so much more personal, so much less public, and so much more meaningful that any of my other achievements. But I felt prepared for those other achievements, and I’m so ill-prepared for this. It’s funny to think that throughout my swimming career I spent thousands of hours in the pool, training for less than a minute of competition. You can’t train for the birth experience, but it is the most protracted, physically demanding, exhausting experience my body has ever gone through. The hypno-birthing class I attended in the last trimester of my pregnancy didn’t entirely work for my situation—it allowed me to go into the birth in a very positive way, but everything about meditating, my cervix opening like a lotus flower and breathing my baby down the birth canal went right out the window when the contractions started. It was a straight up hot mess.

  Yet I am so proud that my body has pulled this off. I am so amazed that I’ve done this epic and inconceivable thing—but for some reason, I feel guilty for having the epidural. I was so sure that, as an Olympic champion, my physical abilities would mean I could have a natural birth, but it just wasn’t meant to be for me. I will quickly learn that, as a mother, a constant underlying sense of guilt is unfortunately just part of the territory.

  I feel a profound connection to all the other women who have been on this journey, which is a strange and beautiful feeling. But more than anything, I feel connected to Luke. I flood with love when I see our baby in his arms. This is something we have done together. And when he lays the baby on my chest and I see its perfect face for the first time, I am absolutely stunned.

  Luke has missed a step, however.

  ‘What is it, Luke?’ Rob asks.

  Luke forgot to check its gender. He picks the baby up again, sees the umbilical cord and proudly announces that it’s a baby boy. Rob starts laughing and gently suggests that Luke check again.

  ‘Oh, right,’ Luke blushes, looking a bit more closely. ‘It’s a baby girl!’

  I start laughing through tears of joy. ‘You had one job, Luke!’

  Poppy Frances Trickett was born on 31 August at 9.24 p.m. with the sweetest nose and a full head of hair. She has a small bruise on her head from the vacuum suction cup and she looks exactly like her dad, except for the curl at the top of her ears which I know so well. She has elf ears, like her mum! Even covered in vernix, with hair plastered to her head, Poppy is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. I can’t fathom how this baby can be so beautiful.

  My body is pulsing with adrenaline when we meet, but the dominant feeling in my chest is not love but a sense of responsibility. She’s mine and I have to protect her, for the rest of her life. Holy crap, I created a human, I think. I am in shock. I am
in joyful but absolute shock. This thing that I have done—it’s not about me, it’s about her. It’s feels like one of the first truly selfless things I’ve ever done.

  Becoming a mother makes me reflect on my relationship with my own parents, and I think again about how much my mother has sacrificed for me, and wonder why my father couldn’t do the same. A couple of days after Poppy is born, I include him in the group message to my closest family and friends: ‘We’re delighted to announce that Poppy Frances Trickett was born on the 31st of August, weighing 2.9kg and 51cm long.’ My father doesn’t respond at all. No phone call, no flowers, not even a text.

  The rejection is like a knife. I can’t tell you how painful it is that he doesn’t even acknowledge my child’s existence. It is one thing for him to abandon me, to reject me, but to reject my child, his granddaughter, makes me wildly angry and protective. I felt grief for her as well as for myself.

  I make the decision then and there that I won’t try again to include him in my life. I’m not going to bend over backwards for someone who was so seemingly fine not to have a relationship with me. It has been such an endless source of pain, and I just have to shut it down. The constant angst—Should I try? Should I not? Why doesn’t he love me? What have I done? What’s wrong with me?—I need to put it all in a box and try to move on. The scab will never heal if I keep picking at it.

  2008

  ‘Accept whatever comes to you woven in the pattern of your destiny, for what could more aptly fit your needs?’

  —Marcus Aurelius

  At 23, I was at the peak of my career. The wedding, the drug test—they were erased. After three months of grieving I had packed all my emotions about those events away and dived back into training. I was an athlete; it was etched into my cells. Get in the water. You need to work.