“No,” I said, wondering if such a thing even existed in 1970.
“I could refer you for one, but Myra said you’re going to be evaluated for a fetal heart study in the city, right? Fetal surgery? So they’ll certainly be doing one there.”
“What do you see?” I asked.
She pointed to the screen. “It appears that there’s a severe blockage of the aortic valve, which I’m afraid will result in her having hypoplastic left heart syndrome.”
I couldn’t breathe. I was suddenly back in that claustrophobic office at NIH trying to make sense of an image that was a blur before my eyes.
“It’s very serious,” Anita continued, “but I’m sure you already heard that from your North Carolina doctor.” She turned off the machine and handed me a wad of tissues to clean the gel. I wiped it off, but I was too depleted by her news to even sit up. I stared at the ceiling. That beautiful little head. The way she was waving with her tiny fingers. The way she kicked and tumbled around inside of me. How could she possibly be so sick?
“Are you all right?” Anita asked. “Would you like to rest a moment before you sit up?”
“I’m just sad,” I said quietly as I tugged my pants over my stomach. Elbowing my way into a sitting position, I swung my legs over the side of the table. “I was hoping you wouldn’t see what you saw. Is there any chance it just looks like … what you said? Could it actually be something less ominous?”
Once again she wore that unbearably sympathetic expression. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’ll need an echocardiogram to know for sure, but I’d be very surprised if I’m wrong here. The fetal surgery is experimental, but it might save your baby’s life. I hope you get that opportunity.” With a hand on my elbow, she helped me off the examining table. “I’ll look forward to hearing how it goes,” she said.
* * *
“I’ll go with you to the appointment with the fetal surgeon on Monday,” Myra said as we drove away from Anita’s office, my new medical record, such as it was, in a manila folder on my lap. “I’m worried that they’ll want to evaluate your mental health before putting you in the study, and you might say or do something that’ll land you in a psych hospital, so I should be there.”
I was taken aback. “Do I seem that … out of it?” I asked. I wanted to tell her I’d been following her advice, reading the Times and watching TV. But no matter how much I was learning about 2001, I knew I still had the heart and soul and spirit of a 1970s woman.
“You seem fairly normal.” Myra glanced at me. “But every once in a while, you say something that shows a remarkable ignorance of the current day. The microwave the other night, for example. They’ve been around for a long time and it makes no sense that you wouldn’t know how to operate one. I think Hunter sent you here unprepared.”
“He had to send me quickly,” I said, annoyed by her criticism of both Hunter and myself.
“You need to be careful,” she said. “When you meet with the surgeon, you’d better go with the story that your husband is dead to explain why he’s not with you. Figure out how he died. Car accident is probably best, so you don’t get a ton of medical questions. I’ll say I’m a family friend. Are you familiar with New York?”
“I’ve never been.”
“Well, prepare to be overwhelmed. The hospital isn’t far from all the action in the city. It’s only about a mile from Central Park, too, which is where Hunter has you stepping off for your return portal, so that’s perfect. While you’re waiting for the baby, you can catch a Broadway show, visit MoMA, do the usual touristy things.”
“MoMA?”
“Museum of Modern Art.”
I shook my head. “Is that the sort of … ignorance that will make me look stupid?” I asked.
She snorted. “Well, if you’re from North Carolina, I guess you’d have no reason to know about it, so don’t sweat it. I’ll be with you to clean up any faux pas.”
“Thank you,” I said.
She glanced at me again. “The woman I spoke with from the study said you’ll need to stay close to the hospital once you have the surgery and before your baby’s born,” she said. “They’ll be doing tests regularly. Ultrasounds and such and probably blood work. I don’t know what else. She said as long as you’re in the study they’ll pick up a good part of the tab for you to stay at a nearby corporate residence.”
I felt alarm. “Can’t I stay with you and Hunter and go back and forth to New York?”
“She said they want you in the city.”
I stared straight ahead, taking this in. “What’s a corporate residence?” I asked, wondering if that was another thing everyone in the world knew except me.
“Rooms or apartments that are rented long-term, usually to businesspeople,” Myra said, “but often a hospital will have an agreement with them at a reduced rate.”
“So I wouldn’t be coming back here at all?” My palms were beginning to sweat. Even though Myra was not the warmest, most encouraging woman, I didn’t want to leave the safety of her. I didn’t want to leave Hunter. The thought of being alone in a strange city … and a strange time … overwhelmed me.
“If they accept you into the study, no, you won’t be coming back,” she said, turning onto her street. “You’ll stay there. But I’ll keep in touch with you. I come into the city from time to time. A couple of my travelers live there, though one of them is on an extended trip to the late 1800s. And you can always call me. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves,” she said, pulling into her driveway. She stopped the car and looked over at me. “First,” she said, “we have to get you into this study.”
15
Hunter had already left for school by the time I went into the kitchen on the morning of my appointment in New York. I made oatmeal for myself in that crazy microwave oven and I was slicing bananas on top of the cereal when Myra walked into the kitchen speaking sharply into her phone.
I moved my bowl to the table as she poured her coffee, the phone clutched between her cheek and shoulder.
“You should have had that all figured out by now,” she snapped into the phone.
I had no idea what she was talking about, but she set my nerves on edge with the tone of her voice. I poured hot water over the teabag in my cup and took my seat while she continued berating someone on the other end of her phone line.
Finally, she slammed her phone onto the counter and sat down across from me, coffee cup in her hand.
“I can’t go with you today,” she announced. “We have a problem with the calculations for one of our travelers and I have to work today or the current experiment will be called off after a year of planning. There are too many people depending on it for me to risk screwing it up.”
I sat there, fingers white on the handle of my teacup, quietly freaking out.
“You’ll be fine,” she said. “You’ve been here what? Eight days now?”
“Seven,” I said quietly.
“You’re doing a lot better. You’re not going to screw up. I’ll drop you off at the train station.” She lifted her cup to her lips and took a sip. “You’ll take the train to Penn Station, then instead of hassling with the subway, just take a cab to Lincoln Hospital.” Picking up the pack of cigarettes from the table, she shook one out and lifted it to her mouth. I waited wordlessly while she lit it and blew a stream of smoke to her right. “The cabs are right there outside Penn Station,” she said. “It’ll actually be good for you to be on your own, I think. You need to prove to yourself you can do it.”
I nodded. “All right,” I said, although I felt like a little kid whose mother was abandoning her. But if I could travel from 1970 to 2001, I told myself, I could certainly travel from Princeton to New York.
* * *
The hour-long train ride was easy and getting a cab outside Penn Station a snap, as Myra had said. New York, though, stunned me. I knew what to expect, certainly. How many movies had I seen set in New York City? I knew there would be skyscrapers and glaring lights, even in the
daytime. I expected the crowded sidewalks. But I wasn’t prepared for the noise that assaulted me despite closed taxi windows, or the gaudy advertising on the buildings. The utter sense of chaos. The insanity of the drivers. The street was wall-to-wall taxis and cars and trucks and there appeared to be no lanes that I could discern. I’d never been claustrophobic, but I felt my heart pound with the sense of being trapped. Although I was surrounded by hundreds of vehicles and thousands of people, I’d never felt so alone. I was in a strange place where I knew no one and no one knew me. Except for Joanna. Hand on my belly, I reminded myself my baby was with me. Joanna was the reason for everything.
My cab driver spoke broken English, and I could only hope he understood where I needed to go. I could have walked much faster than the cab was traveling, I thought, but soon the neighborhood changed dramatically and I knew we were getting closer to the hospital. The cluttered streets gave way to a more open feeling, and small trees bearing tiny new leaves rose up along the broad sidewalks. The tall buildings gave way to shorter—short being a relative term—buildings made of … limestone? Granite? Concrete? I didn’t know, but the overall effect on the atmosphere was lighter and brighter and I felt as though I could breathe.
The driver pulled up in front of a modern, many-storied white-and-glass building. He said nothing, simply pointed to the meter. I paid him with some of my cash and got out of the taxi.
The lobby of the hospital was nearly as chaotic and crowded as the streets around Penn Station. It was filled with chatter and, ironically, the soft notes of piano music. I looked around and spotted an elderly man dressed in a suit sitting at a grand piano, his thin fingers flying over the keys. The music—I didn’t recognize the melody—echoed against the hard surfaces, but it took an edge off my nerves as I hunted for the elevator.
I rode the elevator, crammed with far too many people, to the tenth floor, then followed the signs to the Maternal and Fetal Care Center. A receptionist greeted me and I sat in a nearly empty waiting room for fifteen minutes before a woman showed up in the doorway, calling my name. She looked about my age and wore a white jacket, with E. Rightmire, RN and a few other initials embroidered above the pocket. She smiled.
“I’m Liz Rightmire,” she said as I approached her, and she shook my hand. She had a pixie haircut, the color somewhere between red and purple, and now that I was closer, I noticed a thin gold hoop through a piercing in her left nostril. I’d seen pierced noses and eyebrows and even tongues in the music posters in Hunter’s room, but I was slightly stunned to see this sort of piercing on a professional woman. “Follow me,” she said, and we started walking together down a wide hallway.
“I think you’ve been advised that the study is full, right?” she said as we walked.
My heart seemed to drop. “No,” I said. I was suddenly on the verge of tears.
“Well, don’t worry,” she said. “If you meet our criteria, we’re not going to turn you away.” She was a quick talker, the words full of hard edges and dropped rs, but there was a kindness in her voice that I clung to. “Your OB faxed us your most recent ultrasound and Dr. Perelle took a look at it. He wants us to do another one here, a little more detailed, plus you’ll have a fetal echocardiogram and some blood work. But first, we’ll make sure you’re a good match for our research.”
“All right.” I was afraid to say too much, remembering what Myra had said about my possible faux pas. One thing I’d learned in the last seven days was that I didn’t even know when I was making them.
Liz led me into a small room where four leather straight-backed chairs were the only furniture, and we sat down across from each other. I clutched my purse on my lap while she held a clipboard on hers, and I noticed with a jolt that her nails were painted blue. She asked me my name and birthdate—now March 5, 1974—and verified much of the information she must have already known from my brand-new, very slim medical record.
“You’re from North Carolina, right?” she asked, and I nodded. “What brings you up here?”
“I have a family friend here … well, in New Jersey … who felt strongly that I could get better care up here if there was a problem with my baby.”
“So you’re staying with your friend?”
“Yes. In Princeton.”
“Any support—family or friends—in the city?”
“No,” I said. “My family’s in North Carolina.”
“Who’s in your family?”
“My sister and brother-in-law and nephew,” I said, and just saying those words made my heart ache. Do not cry, I told myself. I needed to look strong. Psychologically healthy.
“And it says here that you’re widowed?”
“My husband died in a car accident in November.”
She looked both concerned and sympathetic. “What a rough time for you,” she said, her voice kind enough to nearly trigger the tears I was fighting to hold back.
“Yes,” I said. “And the most important thing to me now is to do everything I can to give our baby a chance at a healthy life.”
“Of course,” she said, without looking up from the clipboard. “This is your first pregnancy, right?”
“Yes.”
“Are you working? Can you take time off from your job?”
“I’m not working right now. I’m a physical therapist, but I took time off after my husband died, and once I realized I was pregnant, I decided not to go back right away.”
Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought her opinion of me climbed a notch or two at the realization that I’d worked in the medical field, and I sat up a little straighter. I needed to remind myself I was an accomplished person. I’d felt so small and weak and fearful lately. Liz went on to ask me questions about my health, my family’s health, my alcohol consumption—none since learning I was pregnant—my nonexistent drug use, any experience with depression, and on and on.
I must have passed her assessment, because she then sent me from place to place in the hospital, first for blood work, then for the ultrasound, and finally for the echocardiogram. The technicians running those tests gave absolutely nothing away in their steely blank faces, so I had no idea what to expect when I was finally called into the fetal surgeon’s office.
Dr. Perelle stood up when I entered the spacious office and he walked around his desk to shake my hand and offer me a seat. He was fiftyish, his hair mostly gray, and he wore jeans and a long-sleeved blue shirt, open at the neck. No white coat. No stethoscope. His warm smile was infectious and I liked him instantly. I began to relax a bit after the harrowing morning of tests.
He took his seat behind his desk and looked at me with sympathetic blue-green eyes. “I believe you already know this,” he said, “but your baby is critically ill.”
My eyes filled at hearing the words spoken so clearly. I nodded, acknowledging the truth for the first time.
“Our tests show conclusively that the valve controlling the flow of blood from the left ventricle to the aorta is partly blocked. Without intervention, the left ventricle will become hypoplastic … in a nutshell, no longer able to do its job, and—”
“And that’s fatal,” I said.
He nodded. “As I said, ‘without intervention,’ yes.”
I bit my lip. “I was hoping somehow…” My voice faded into the air.
“Of course you were,” he said, “and I’m sorry that the news isn’t better. The good news, though, is that you qualify for our study.”
I let out my breath. “Thank God,” I said, more to myself than to him.
“It’ll have to be very soon, though,” he said. “You’re already at twenty-eight weeks and twenty-nine is our cutoff. And you need to understand that although fetal surgery’s been around for a while, it’s considered experimental for this condition,” he cautioned. “Frankly, it’s been unsuccessful elsewhere, for the most part, but we’re getting encouraging results here at Lincoln. The technique I’m using is particularly new and we’re hopeful. We’ve performed the surgery in only nine cas
es so far and none of those babies has been born yet, although a couple should be very soon and we’re extremely optimistic. But you need to know that three of the babies we operated on have died in utero.”
“Three!” I said, horrified.
“Yes,” he responded soberly. “I want you to know the risks. One died during the surgery, the other two a couple of weeks after. The reality is, though, that those babies wouldn’t have survived more than a day or two after they were born.” He then showed me diagrams as he explained what he would do—what he would attempt to do—to my baby’s tiny, fragile heart. I heard some of what he said. “A wire as thin as a human hair” and “inflate a tiny balloon to force the valve open.” The images blurred in front of me. Three babies had died. Had I come all this way to lose Joanna to the surgery I thought would save her?
When he was done telling me about the surgery, he sent me back to Liz who congratulated me on making it into the study.
“I’m happy for you,” she said, taking a seat in the office with the leather straight-backed chairs. “Dr. Perelle is excellent and he’ll give your baby her best chance.”
I had trouble smiling back at her, I was so overwhelmed by the last few hours. All the tests. All the information. The disheartening statistics. “I’m scared,” I admitted, lowering myself to one of the chairs.
“We’ll take good care of you,” she said. She was looking down at her clipboard and I noticed that my file had grown over the last few hours. “Now, you may know your insurance won’t cover this procedure or any of the follow-up care because it’s experimental,” she said, “but it’s a study, so you don’t need to worry about that. You said you don’t have family or friends in New York, right?”
“Right.”
“But you need to stay nearby—that’s a requirement of the study that you’ll have to agree to. We can get you a reduced weekly rate at nearby corporate housing, which will come in at around four-fifty a week. And you have eleven or twelve weeks left in your pregnancy. I know that adds up. Can you manage it?”
The Dream Daughter Page 12
