The next step was obvious.
Chris and I had wasted no time. After coming home from one final pre-baby-making trip to Costa Rica just a few short months into married life, I had cornered him in front of the pantry where he was crunching through a box of crackers.
“We’re going to make a baby!”
“Right now? I have to go to work.”
I swatted him on the shoulder. “Not now. I’m just telling you so you can prepare whatever it is you have to prepare.”
“Right. What am I preparing? Do you want me to lift weights? This sounds hard.” His head still in the pantry, I could see crumbs forming in a pyramid on the floor.
“Just make sure your boys have a lot of breathing room, okay? Is there enough ventilation under your desk at work?”
“Don’t worry, they’re safe.” He kissed me and headed out the door.
“I’m serious,” I yelled after him, but he was gone.
Chris had quit his city job to become a real estate agent, one of the few potentially profitable jobs in our area, but he had been eyeing a lawn and power equipment business that had just gone up for sale and had applied for a loan to purchase it. Real estate took up a lot of time, and he thought that owning a steady business with set hours would allow him to be home more once we had a baby.
On New Year’s Eve Chris came home with the flu. I made sure he stayed hydrated and was getting enough to eat because I cared deeply for his well-being, but I’m not going to lie—I was ovulating. I plied him with champagne and made a small attempt at sexy talk, but I could tell I was losing him, and even when our lovemaking reached a fever pitch, I knew his flushed face was because his temperature was rising and not because of my sexual prowess. Luckily, inebriated and sick as he was, Chris was a willing accomplice.
Two weeks later I was standing tall and strong in Warrior One pose during a Sunday morning yoga class, arms reaching to the sky, my lower half grounded toward the earth. Suddenly my legs began to twitch; my flesh tingled. My stomach growled, loudly. People were looking at me. A wave of warmth rushed over me, rising up and enveloping me as though a supernatural force was taking hold. I didn’t have to pee on a stick. I didn’t scramble to make a doctor’s appointment. I knew. After a few more weeks passed, I called my OB-GYN. At the appointment, the nurse marveled at how calm and self-assured I was. I had no questions and I wasn’t nervous, which was unusual given my penchant for worrying as a pastime.
I was on a good and steady course, not giving in to my cravings, cutting back on the caffeine, giving up wine and martinis, and maintaining a healthy diet. I even earmarked pages in what I called the “baby bibles” for Chris to read. Every appointment since my first had gone off without a hitch.
At eighteen weeks I came home from a long day of walking around Manhattan with Chris. I was feeling an unusual pain in my lower belly, so I called the nurse. She told me not to worry and that I should wait for my already scheduled appointment the next day to address my concerns with the doctor. Every mother I had confided in had informed me that aches and pains were par for the course, and it almost felt like I was being initiated into a special club.
The exam began in the usual way with the nurse asking questions and taking my blood pressure. When the doctor walked in and said hello, the first thing I noticed was the curve of her lips. They glistened with a red sheen that was painted on so precisely I knew she must touch up her lipstick between patients. I told her about my pain and she asked to examine me, Chris sitting by my side. A few moments later, caught up in my own reverie, I could not make sense of what the doctor was trying to tell me; I could only register the fact that my baby might fall out of my uterus at any moment. My vision began to blur and both Chris and the doctor seemed far away, her voice echoing like she was down a rabbit hole.
I was rushed into an emergency sonogram. Chris squeezed into the corner of the small room. I arched my neck back, compelled to see the screen behind me, as if I could diagnose the problem on my own.
“Wow, um. Okay,” said the sonographer, Sherry. She moved her magic wand around my belly and looked at the ultrasound screen. “Let’s just measure these.” A veil of professionalism swept over her face. I’d seen that look on television shows before, when the nurse lifts the sheets and sees mangled and irreparable body parts.
“What do you see?” I asked, not sure I wanted to know.
“You’ve got some pretty big fibroids in there. No one ever mentioned this to you?”
“It hasn’t come up in conversation.” I waited, expecting more, but she said nothing. As she was printing out the scans, the doctor reappeared and said that I had two football-sized fibroids and another tennis ball–sized one growing in my uterus, and because they were so big, they were pressing up against some vital things in there. I don’t know if she was exaggerating their size or not, but she had made her point. Oh, and one of those vital things was the baby.
Fibroids are noncancerous tumors that look like big, meaty, bulbous growths. They are a bit reminiscent of that old movie The Blob where the amoeba-like alien terrorizes a small town, getting bigger and bigger with every victim it consumes. So my uterus had pretty much become the setting of a horror movie.
I’d had no idea I had fibroids before this moment. I feel it’s necessary to clarify this point here because every single person I have met since that doctor’s appointment, including the doctor, has asked me how it is possible that I didn’t know I had fibroids before getting pregnant. But since I had never actually looked inside my own uterus, and no one had ever told me during previous sonograms, I was just as surprised as everyone else to find out. Now I finally had an explanation as to why for the past fifteen years of my life I had to take a pee break every half hour. And yes, I had inquired about this as well but was always shrugged off as women often are when they have medical concerns. In any case I felt momentarily vindicated for all the times I screwed up someone’s plans, missed the end of a movie, or caused other people to be late because I had to pee.
My fibroids were so astronomically large that Sherry dubbed them the “Monster Fibroids.” In all her years she had never seen such large masses competing with a fetus. The doctor explained that one of the Monsters was pressing against my cervix, and the pressure was shortening it to an alarming degree. The term incompetent cervix was bandied about; as if I didn’t have enough self-esteem issues, now my cervix was incompetent. That was like five more years of therapy right there. I’d like to lobby for a name change on this one. How about Independent Cervix That Makes Its Own Decisions About Whom And What It Will Support? All we need to do is throw in hostile uterus, another offensive medical term, and between the two, we’d have the workings of a perfectly dysfunctional marriage. Whatever we chose to call it at the time, the doctor’s diagnosis said it all: “There’s a good chance you won’t be able to support a full-term pregnancy. You’ll be tremendously lucky if your baby makes it to twenty-four weeks.”
I turned to Chris, who had been sitting quietly as if trying to teleport himself out of the room, and our eyes connected. The color had drained from his face. His full lips formed a flat line but then pursed up on one side. It was too much to bear witness to, and so I averted my gaze. I almost wished he’d scream, get up, ask all the questions, so I wouldn’t have to.
I turned back to the doctor, focusing again on her mouth. I no longer saw the rest of her face, just those stop-sign-red lips delivering bad news. Dr. Lipstick was so nonchalant, talking as though she were providing the day’s weather forecast, that when I glanced at Chris again he had an expression of utter hatred for this woman. He brought his hands, palms together, up to his mouth and began tapping his fingers.
I was eighteen weeks along, hardly showing my baby bump. The heaviness in my belly was intense, but I couldn’t distinguish the physical pain from the emotional. Her words became a jumble as I flashed back to the wintry morning when I had told Chris I was pregnant, a few short weeks after New Year’s Eve. The cars were swooshing by on our unplowed road. Standing before him in the kitchen as he was about to pour his cereal, I whispered in his ear, “We planted a seedling.” Chris stopped mid-pour, put down the cereal box, and pulled me toward him. We held on to each other’s arms and jumped up and down like two kids out for summer recess.
“Already? That fast?”
“One and done, baby.”
Grinning, he hugged me. “I didn’t think it would be that fast.” My normally quiet, reserved husband twirled me around the room and dipped me. We both laughed, shocked and giddy.
But in the doctor’s office, with this news, and the way it was presented to us, that memory in the kitchen didn’t seem to belong to us anymore. Those were different people full of hope and happiness, and I hardly recognized them. So I put that memory in my pocket for now.
“I don’t like her,” Chris said dryly when the doctor left us alone, wrapping his arm around me as I got up from the table. I just stared back at him. It was one of the very few times in my life I had ever been speechless.
I threw on my overpriced maternity jeans, embarrassed now that I had spent so much money on this splurge. “I thought I was doing everything right,” I mumbled, grabbing my purse.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Chris replied.
Dinner plans forgotten, we drove home, my husband’s strong hand holding my thigh.
I wanted to call my father. He would tell me what to do, how to feel, and we would come up with a plan to outsmart the Monster Fibroids. But he wasn’t here, and I felt the hollowness of it.
Chris and I woke up early the next morning, limbs entangled. “It’ll be okay,” he reassured me as he prepared breakfast, urging me to eat. I barely spoke, trying to take a bite of toast.
We drove over an hour to Poughkeepsie to see a specialist. Doctors have a strong need to cover their asses, so the first doctor requested a second opinion. Dr. Lipstick insisted this specialist was the best in the area, and all high-risk pregnancies were referred to him. High-risk. It was a term that lingered in the air, like the remnants of an exploded star that can never be pieced back together.
When we were first told a specialist with advanced-tech ultrasound equipment was the next step, I saw money swirling down the toilet. I knew it wasn’t what I was supposed to think about, but we had crappy insurance with a high deductible, and specialists tend to charge 250 bucks just to shake hands. It seemed unfair, since I was the one who had to take off all my clothes below the waist; maybe for 250 smackers, the specialist should have to take his clothes off instead. And then, if I liked what I saw, we could go from there.
Dr. Specialist’s technician took a fancy picture of my uterus. I could tell that the tech was trying hard to keep her professional demeanor while looking at her screen, but she, like Sherry the sonographer the day before, was horrified. The Monster Fibroids, it turns out, were bigger than the baby.
Dr. Specialist floated in. A gust of wind drifted across the room and the temperature dipped slightly. It was a $250 entrance if I ever saw one. I was almost disappointed to see that his feet did indeed touch the ground. He took off his black-framed glasses and tapped one of the chrome arms against his teeth as he looked over the sonogram pictures. Then he explained to us that eventually there would be a battle of wills when the Monsters would try to suck the blood supply away from the baby, and because the baby was, well, a baby and not a mutant growth, he or she would likely win. (He forgot to mention the excruciating pain this would cause the host uterus.)
The end of this appointment held out more hope than the one the day before, but it wasn’t even close to the miracle we had been looking for. We were told that although the largest Monster was pressing against my cervix, and also the baby’s head, my cervix was not in as much danger of effacing as Dr. Lipstick had thought. Still, it was a precarious situation, and the message was clear: lie down for the next five months and don’t get up. Ever. Well, at least not until the baby starts to crown.