The torture booties
That second night in ICU, it was just me, the ICU nurse and the torture booties. Rima had gone home at my insistence; her ribs were hurting her, and another night sleeping on chairs wasn’t going to help. The torture booties were a clever invention designed to prevent me from dying of a blood clot, as I wasn’t able to take anti-clotting medications due to the internal bleeding. They were strapped to my feet and legs, and inflated and deflated on a timer providing ‘intermittent pneumatic compression’. What it really felt like was a robust whack to the soles of my feet every four minutes or so. Four minutes seemed to be just enough time for me to start drifting off to sleep before—whack, whack—they went off again, and I jerked my broken knee, so that the staples pulled and the bone ached.
The new notebook from Erica was out of reach, but by the red glow of the heartbeat monitor on my finger, I rummaged in my handbag on the nightstand and found my old yellow notebook.
•
I had bought the yellow notebook on the Newcastle campus the week I’d got the phone call telling me my pregnancy blood test had come back positive. The nurse had been deliciously deadpan. ‘Yep, it’s all fine.’ I had to prod her to get the exact level (of hCG or human chorionic gonadotropin, the pregnancy hormone, in my blood) and then for reassurance that the test was positive. I felt like Alice in Wonderland after she ate the mushroom, putting her hand on her head to work out whether she is shrinking or growing. My body was out of whack, unpredictable in a way it hadn’t been since I was a teenager. I had been waking up in the early hours of each night since we’d begun to have real suspicions that this might be it—at first I thought it was nerves and over-excitement. But incessant googling also told me that the surging progesterone of early pregnancy tends to make you tired during the day and interrupt your sleep at night, so maybe that was playing a role.
I found an image of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Annunciation on the internet, and added small speech bubbles:
Archangel Gabriel: ‘You’ve got a hCG level of 2063!’
Mary: ‘So, does that mean a yes or a no?’
•
With cannula-punctured hands I opened the yellow notebook carefully, holding in all the pieces of paper documenting this pregnancy: ultrasound results, blood tests, brochures for prenatal yoga. I opened it to a new page, after my notes from our birthing class, and started to write.
Tuesday, 29 December 2009
I look like heavily discounted supermarket stock—sticky from all the previous price stickers, and leaking in unexpected places. In ICU, they don’t bother with the neat little patient ID plastic bangles—they stick your barcode ID directly onto your skin, securing it with a clear plastic dressing, like a piece of clingwrapped ham. My limbs feel foreign to me. My arms are bandaged and puffy with bruises, I’m only just reclaiming them for my own use. My legs I haven’t quite remembered yet. They belong in the land below sheets. Somehow, I feel like I’ve just been born—uncertain of the sensations assaulting me and reliant on others for my basic needs. I am tentative about my body. It doesn’t feel quite mine again yet. Indeed I’m not really sure whether I haven’t been completely reborn with a new body that I will have to learn how to use again from the beginning.
I dreamt that the sun was rising as the pieces of a shipwreck floated into a beachy shore, the water sparkling innocently where only the night before it had been a violent breaker of things and bodies. Uneven chunks of wood were gently tipped over and over along the sand by foamy waves. The sea isn’t malicious—it is just the sea and the weather is just the weather. It would be pointless to expect fairness.
I woke again with the whack of the torture booties, and all that salt water spilled over into sobs—for my sore knee, for my tiredness, for my baby girl. Janelle, my ICU nurse, came, apologising that she couldn’t turn the boots off without doctor’s orders. She dragged over a stool so she could sit by the bed, took my hand in hers and asked me about the accident. I told her my opiate-smudged story, and wept while she leaned her head against the bed and listened, until I couldn’t cry anymore and we both dozed off, only to wake again with a start when the torture booties went off.
When I woke up next, it felt like a proper awakening, one where a decent chunk of sleep had happened in the interim. It was nearly morning, and the new nurse was muttering to herself about faulty equipment and what the doctors would do if they saw that the compression booties had somehow been turned off in the middle of the night.