The Bright Side of Disaster

by Katherine Center

  Betty’s packet suggested I eat something, and so I had some shredded wheat. After all the Mexican food, it seemed prudent to lie low gastronomically for a while. My hospital bag had been by the door for weeks, and my mother headed out to put it in the car. And, as instructed, I called Nicole to let her know we were heading in.

  “Nicole’s had to leave town for a family emergency,” the answering service operator told me. “We have a doctor filling in. He’s part of the larger medical practice.”

  I didn’t speak.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “She left town?” I said.

  “It was a family emergency,” she said again.

  “Where did she go?”

  “I’m really only authorized to say that it was a family emergency and that Dr. Fred Hale will be filling in.”

  “Dr. Fred Hale?”

  “He’s very good,” she said. “He’s the best.”

  “But I’m supposed to have Nicole,” I said, my voice starting to rise. My mother poked her head back in to see what was keeping me.

  “I know, and I’m sorry, but she’s not available right now.”

  “This is a fucking nightmare,” I said.

  “Dr. Hale will meet you at the hospital,” she said firmly. “I suggest you get going.”

  On the drive to the hospital, my mother got feisty. “We could sue that midwife,” she said, speeding along the highway, changing in and out of lanes, even though there were no other cars to speak of. “She sold you a bill of goods.”

  “Use your blinker,” I said. The whole situation was making me limp.

  “Don’t get defeated,” she said. “We’re going to get her back one way or another.”

  “I don’t want to get her back,” I said. “I just want her to come and deliver this baby!”

  My mom sped past a pickup truck going forty with three guys in the back.

  “Slow down, Mom. This is not a race.”

  She pressed on the brake. “Sorry,” she said.

  “You’re supposed to be a calming presence.”

  She thought about that a minute. Then she said, “Maybe this Dr. Hale really is the best in the business. Maybe he’s a great doctor. Maybe you’ll wish you’d had him all along.”

  Her words lingered as we tooled along the empty highway, my mother changing lanes randomly, but careful to use the blinker. We didn’t talk the rest of the drive. Dr. Hale might be a great doctor. It was at least possible.

  11

  But Dr. Fred Hale was no Nicole. We had not even made it to a room yet when he found us in the corridor and introduced himself. “I’m Dr. Fred,” he said. He was tall and redheaded, with a pillow-shaped torso and toothpick legs. He was maybe fifty. He opened the door of room 903 for us, and I had not even walked through it when he said, “Where the heck is your husband?”

  I couldn’t think of a reply. There was nothing at all I wanted to share with Dr. Fred. But he was waiting for an answer. And just when I was thinking I had no option but to burst into tears, my mother, using every ounce of charm she possessed, slapped her delicate hand up on Dr. Fred’s big shoulder and said, “He’s on a business trip, Fred. Wouldn’t you know it? On a business trip to Florida.”

  Fred looked at me, then back to my mother. “I prefer Dr. Fred,” he said.

  My mother squeezed his arm. “Dr. Fred it is,” she said, and went to set down our bags.

  Dr. Fred, who seemed a little flustered by the arm-squeeze, flipped through my chart. After a few minutes, he said, “I see you’ve written out a birth plan.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Go ahead and kiss it good-bye. Nobody takes those things seriously here. And, a word to the wise, the ‘birth-plan people’ are far more likely to be treated as whiners.” He patted me on the back. “I wouldn’t bring it up with the nurses.”

  I thought about the time I’d spent trying to craft just the right letter to communicate my preferences to the vast, anonymous hospital staff that would deliver my child. This had been months ago, and I wrote draft after draft, trying to strike the perfect tone of both friendly and serious, both accommodating and steadfast, both in awe of their medical expertise and firm in my own wishes.

  I wanted no drugs of any kind, no whisking of the baby off to the nursery, no plastic warming box, no formula. I wanted to walk around while I labored, to sit on a birthing ball and moan, to use gravity to help pull the baby down and out. It was my plan to birth him and then warm him against my own skin while he nursed. I didn’t want them to cut the cord right away, either. Betty had said it was better to wait until it had stopped pulsating—a few minutes at least—so it could continue supplying blood until the baby was comfortable breathing on his own. I just wanted to do things the way nature intended, as much as was possible inside this ten-story hospital.

  “And I’m ordering you an epidural,” Dr. Fred said, writing something on a chart.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t want an epidural.”

  He stopped writing and stared at me. Either he hadn’t read the birth plan or he was being a drama queen. “I don’t think you understand,” he said, “just how very badly this is going to hurt.”

  “No drugs,” I said.

  He looked at me a second longer, then slapped my chart closed and said, “Okeydokey,” in a “you’re a nut job” kind of way. And then he walked out of the room.

  I looked at my mother. “Where’s he going? Was he mad at me?”

  “No, darlin’,” she said. “I’m sure he’s just busy.”

  “We weren’t done!” I said. “Were we done?”

  My mother walked to the door. “I’ll go see if I can find him,” she said, and popped out into the hallway.

  While she was gone, I had another searing contraction. This one had me down on my hands and knees on the slick, cool floor. I tried to breathe and relax like Betty said, but it’s hard enough to decide to relax when you’re sitting in a chair pretending. Relaxing now, in the face of the real thing, seemed like a quaint and almost comical idea. I lowered my cheek down to the floor and rested it there. This wasn’t quite how I’d pictured things.

  As the contraction subsided, I decided I might just stay down there awhile. Then two white sneakers appeared just inches from my eyes, and a rich, buttery woman’s voice said, “Let’s get you hooked up.”

  “I’m good,” I said, my squished lips rubbery. “I’ll just hang out here.”

  And then two hands were under my arms, pulling me up. I was panting for breath.

  “Looks like your water broke,” the woman said as I made it to my feet. My sweatpants were soaked. The floor was wet, too. I hadn’t even felt it.

  She leaned me against the bed and started to bustle around the room. I liked the way she moved—so confident, like she’d done this a million times. She wiped up the floor and then brought a gown over to me.

  “No, no,” I said, a little woozy. “I want to labor in my own clothes. It’s in my birth—” I stopped before I said “plan.”

  “These wet clothes?” she said, touching my sweatpants. She didn’t seem like someone who would think I was a whiner.

  I paused. “I guess not.”

  She helped me change into a gown and wiped me down with a nubby washrag that she’d soaked in steaming hot water. It was too hot, but it felt good.

  “I want to be able to walk around,” I said as we got me into the bed.

  “Okay,” she said, the way you might talk to a feral cat under your porch. “We’re just going to check on your baby first.”

  The nurse’s name was Marie and she told me she was from Aruba. She looked about twenty, but her voice sounded much older. I closed my eyes while she fiddled with the machine, and she talked on and on in a kind of lullaby: the rain outside, the pinging sound in her car’s engine, her little boy on vacation back home with her parents. My mother came back in then, and introduced herself, and she and Marie complimented each other on their earrings—my mother’s small gold hoops and Marie’
s multicolored wooden fish.

  While they were chatting, I got another contraction. This one was so blindingly painful that I pushed myself out of bed and paced the floor like I was in an asylum. I let out a moan that I’m sure people heard all the way in the parking garage. This one lasted longer than the others had, and a splash of blood came with it. As it subsided, Marie got to wiping up the floor. All I could think to say was “Sorry about the mess.”

  When we finally got me hooked up to the monitor, it turned out I was having a thing called “decels.”

  “That sounds bad,” I said.

  She said it meant that the baby’s heart rate was slowing down with contractions. “We’re just going to keep an eye on it,” Marie said, patting my hand.

  The baby’s heart rate did not indicate that it was in distress. But something was a little bit wrong. Not necessarily badly wrong, but the umbilical cord, for example, might have been wrapped around his neck or his arm.

  “That’s sounds very bad!” I said.

  “Not necessarily,” she said. “Babies can be born with a cord around their necks and be fine. But it’s something to watch.”

  Several contractions later, Marie had also determined that the baby was still facing the wrong direction. “Usually they’ve turned by now,” she said.

  “That can’t be good,” I said.

  “It’s fine for the baby,” she said. “But for you, it’s very painful.”

  I was steadfast in my desire for no drugs, so my mother, her Chanel handbag in one of the side chairs, was holding and rocking and patting me as I thrashed my way through each contraction. I couldn’t bear to have anything touching me during them—especially that hospital gown—so I was pacing the room stark naked, splashing buckets of blood on every surface and person in the room. In between contractions, I was freezing cold and required three blankets. My poor mother, in her DKNY exercise togs, tended to me: blankets on, blankets off, bucket of blood, blankets on…The contractions came faster and faster, and they continued to attach a fetal monitor to my belly every few minutes to check on the little one.

  During one particularly agonizing contraction, the phone in the room rang. The sound of it absolutely made me panic. I pointed in the direction of the noise and shouted, “Make it stop!” My mother walked over, lifted the receiver, and dropped it right back down. Whoever it was did not try to call again, and it occurred to me only later that it might have been Dean.

  I had been at this for what felt like hours when Marie came in to tell me her shift would be over at six. She had been in the room almost constantly, wiping up the floor, checking the monitor, helping to hold me during the worst moments. We had not seen Dr. Fred since we arrived, and I hoped not to see him again. Marie was the person I wanted to deliver my baby.

  “No!” I said. “Don’t leave me!”

  And just as I said it, another contraction. I put my arms around Marie’s neck and she held me, stark naked, until it passed.

  “I need to talk to you about something before I go,” she said, helping me to the chair. Then she told me that Dr. Fred, who had been checking the printouts from the monitor, did not like the increasing frequency of the decels. He’d told Marie that it was no longer safe to monitor the baby only periodically. He wanted me hooked up to the monitor at all times.

  “But I have to be in bed to be hooked up,” I protested.

  “Yes,” Marie said.

  “But I can’t make it through the contractions unless I can move around.”

  “He wants you to have an epidural,” she said.

  “No drugs!” I said.

  She put her hand on my hand. “This is what you need to do now,” she said quietly.

  I had spent many months imagining the birth. In my mind, I was always tough and noble, saintlike in my ability to endure pain. I just marched into the hospital and birthed that baby, the way my own mother had, the way all mothers in the history of motherhood had—up until recently. But in my imagination, it had not hurt like this. And in my imagination, it had not taken this long.

  “This is not the kind of birth I want,” I said.

  And Marie, who might have been an angel, said, “It may be time to start thinking about what kind of birth your baby would want.”

  And so I relented. Dr. Fred won. I requested the epidural and, two contractions later, a very tall Asian man came wordlessly into the room with a rolling tray of tools. When he finally spoke, he said this: “It will be very important that you do not move after we begin. Even if you have a contraction, you must not move. Do you understand me?”

  I nodded. One of the many reasons I had not wanted an epidural was that I hated the idea of a needle going into my spine. “I won’t move,” I said. “I promise.”

  Sure enough, I had a contraction as he was inserting the needle. I squeezed my mother’s hand so hard I left a bruise that stayed there for almost a week. I trembled, and I held my breath until I felt dizzy. And as the contraction subsided, he said, “All done.”

  He said it would take a while to kick in, but I didn’t have any contractions after that. I kept waiting for another one, but none came. And then, just as I was starting to wonder if my labor had stopped altogether, our new nurse showed me the monitor and pointed out the contractions that had been happening all along. I’d had four since the epidural. My body had been doing the exact same thing that had sent me reeling across the room time and again for hours, but now I no longer felt it. It was kind of wonderful. And it was kind of awful, too.

  I was relieved for the pain to be over. And so was my mother, who pulled a clean T-shirt out of her overnight bag and threw her old one into the medical-waste garbage. But suddenly it was like nothing was happening. I lay in bed, watching the monitor for the next contraction, and I felt so quiet and still it was almost boring. After a while, tears were dripping onto my pillow. My mother, who had started reading a trashy romance novel, looked up at me and said, “Are you hurting?”

  “No,” I said.

  “What’s wrong, sweetheart?”

  Her tenderness made it worse. Finally, I said, “I read an article that said babies whose mothers have epidurals are more likely to become drug addicts.”

  My mother didn’t know what to say to that. She just squeezed my hand and waited for me to go on.

  “I’ve ruined him!” I said. “He’s ruined because I couldn’t hack it.”

  “Darlin’,” she said kindly. “He’s not ruined yet. You’ve got his whole childhood to ruin him.”

  But I couldn’t even give her a smile. Everything was all wrong. No Dean, no Nicole. The awful Dr. Fred. Marie gone home. The pain, the blood. The fetal monitor. Nothing at all was right.

  “It’s not how you wanted it, but it’s how it is,” she said in her tenderest voice. “In truth,” she added, “much of mothering is that way.”

  I was supposed to rest, so I closed my eyes. But then I had something else to say.

  “Mom?” I said.

  She looked up.

  “The invitations have already gone out.”

  She knew that, of course. She’d mailed them weeks ago. But my mother wasn’t one to linger on such details, so she just crinkled up her nose. Then she squeezed my hand and told me to close my eyes. After a bit, she started dozing in the recliner chair, but I couldn’t sleep. Every time the door opened, I thought it was Dean. I had to open my eyes and look. Finally I gave up on sleep and turned on the TV.

  It felt so wrong to be watching Love Boat in the wee morning hours when I should have been laboring. It felt so strange to be so immobile and for the room to be so quiet. It was so awful to think of all those invitations lying on people’s desks. People had marked their calendars. Out-of-towners were booking hotel rooms. My mother had a collection of early gifts on a table in her living room. It wasn’t how it was supposed to be, but it was how it was.

  12

  At about eight in the morning, just as I was dozing off, Dr. Fred arrived.

  “Well, you’re
going to need a Cesarean,” he announced, as if we’d been in midconversation, and startled my mother out of a deep sleep. “We like to play it safe around here. If you start to push and the decels get worse, the fetus might get trapped in the birth canal.”

  “What do you do then?” I asked.

  He looked at me. “Nothing,” he said. “There’s nothing to be done.”

  He handed us some forms to sign and some handouts. “I recommend the C-section,” he said. “It’s the no-risk way to go.” He stood up to leave. “But it is harder on the mother.” At the door, he turned around and told us he was getting some coffee and would be back in five.

  My mother went to the windowless bathroom and splashed some water on her face.

  “C-section!” I shouted from the bed. “Nobody’s even mentioned that at all!”

  “He doesn’t have the best bedside manner,” she said as she reappeared.

  As she sat on the edge of the bed and started combing through the pamphlets, there was a knock at the door. The nurses never knocked, just moved silently in and out. A knock. It had to be Dean. Who else would it be at 8:00 A.M.? Dean. Just in the nick of time to become a daddy, one way or another.

  The door opened, and in walked Nicole, carrying her scrubs over her arm.

  “How could you leave me with Dr. Fred?” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, taking my hand. She said that her father had had a heart attack.

  I thought about saying “That’s no excuse,” but decided against it.

  “How is he now?” my mother asked.

  Nicole said, “Stable.” She was flying back to Chicago the next day.

  “Where’s Dean?” Nicole said, looking around.

  “He left me.”

  “He left you?”