Undone
In the emergency waiting room at the Women’s, we ran into my friend Sophie, tall as always, but rounder than usual. She was coming in with her partner for her 38-week check-up. Soph had been at the picnic on the day of our accident. She had just been starting IVF, and there I was, heavily, smugly pregnant. When we said our goodbyes, I gave her a hug and said, ‘Good luck!’ She squeezed me back and smiled, ‘You too!’ And as I’d walked to the car, I thought, ‘I don’t need luck, I’m already there.’ How these little memories mocked me. Now, it was the best I could do to acknowledge Sophie and indicate that we couldn’t really talk.
The hospital took bloods and let us wait around for the results. My hCG levels were still rising, but we’d need a scan to get any real information on what this bleeding meant.
We went to our fertility clinic the next morning, and, despite the horror-movie bleeding, the scan showed that the little fetal sac was still there. There was still no sign of a fetal pole but the sac was persisting nonetheless. When we went back four days later and saw the same sight on the ultrasound screen—no growth, no embryo—our doctor was pragmatic. ‘Looks like nothing is going to happen with this one; I’m sorry. I can book you in for a D&C on Friday, if that suits?’
I wanted to be just as pragmatic. I would work, as planned, on Wednesday and Thursday, then go in for the D&C on Friday. Miscarriage managed—a Harry Potter-esque tap of a wand and the slate (uterus?) would be wiped clean. This is just a blip, I told myself. We will get there.
That Wednesday morning, I forced myself into some clothes and out the door. I was too shaky to drive, so I took the tram, hoping that none of my students would see me sobbing behind my sunglasses. By the time I reached work, my tears had crystallised into a hard, mean anger. Walking to my building from the tram stop, I slammed each foot down. I deliberately grazed my knuckles against walls. I locked myself in the bathroom, and wept against the wall, tapping and then knocking my forehead against the bricks. While my head was screaming expletives, there was another voice there too; the one I would speak to Z in when I looked up at her star, or leaned in close to open roses and breathed them in. Oh, honey, this is so hard. It was that voice that stopped me from punching the wall, that gently took me back outside so I could retrace my steps, get back on the tram, walk home and get into bed, send an email to my colleague that I wouldn’t be able to teach the next day, that I was having a miscarriage. Today there would be no forward motion. This pregnancy had to be unravelled before we could go on; things were not just paused, but would have to go in reverse for a while.
My colleague responded compassionately. ‘Take this week and next week off,’ she urged. I did that, and, instead of booking in for the D&C, called up my doctor’s office and asked for recommendations of where to go for the less interventionist medical version. Part of that white-hot anger, I’d discovered when I took the time to listen to it, was anger with myself, for thinking that I could just timetable my grief around my work responsibilities. But the whitest white-hot anger focused on the planned procedure on Friday and the thought of more surgery, more prodding. I had handed my body over to the IVF people so many times already. I’d never wanted a C-section, I’d never wanted to go through IVF, and the thought of more surgery triggered a kind of roar within me of Leave me alone! I was furious that my body couldn’t just sort this out on its own; yet, I still wanted to defend this small bit of turf, to retain some kind of control.
After a few hours, I heard back from our IVF doctor. Yes, a medical termination was probably possible, but you needed to be specially registered in order to prescribe it, and he wasn’t. He gave me the name of another provider, and I drove for an hour to find myself in a dodgy-looking carpark with vague signage, and, soon after that, a dingy waiting room full of brochures about ‘options’.
So this was what an abortion clinic looked like. It was a far cry from the soft lighting and tasteful art that decorated the IVF clinic where this pregnancy had started. The accusing fingers of the anti-abortion lobby had marked out pregnancy termination care as something controversial and distasteful—in the process, stigmatising the women who needed these services and the health professionals who provided them. Services like this were construed as the exact opposite of the optimistic health business of making people well and delivering living babies. Yet, here I was, straddling those categories—desperate for a living child, but needing help to evict a pregnancy.
This doctor wasn’t used to seeing people who wanted to be pregnant. When I asked if he was sure that the pregnancy wasn’t viable, he said, ‘I don’t know—if you’re not ready, wait a week and have another scan.’ I chickened out and drove home, cursing and crying at the thought of another week’s purgatory.
At home, I spoke to a midwife friend, who informed me that the Women’s Hospital could admit me as a day patient for ‘medical management of miscarriage’. I called their clinic, and when I went in for another scan, we saw the same little heartbeatless oval floating there. ‘Come back tomorrow,’ they said, ‘at 7 a.m.’
I took comfortable clothes and a good book. After they’d given me the medicine, I stared earnestly out the window. Little one, it’s okay to go now. I know, you tried so hard, it wasn’t your fault that things didn’t work out. It’s okay, little one. This time, when I bled, I was relieved rather than scared. I didn’t want to be unconscious for this. I needed to be there to know for myself that it was over. When the pains became bad, the nurses gave me some pethidine, and, when it was all over, a cup of tea.
•
On the Monday morning after my hospital visit, Rima was driving me to work when my phone rang. It was one of the pathologists from the Women’s. They’d tested the ‘products of conception’ from the miscarriage and there was a chance it might have been a molar pregnancy, a disorder with the placenta. ‘We don’t know yet whether it was molar, but testing will take about four weeks, so it’s a good idea to make sure you don’t get pregnant in the meantime.’ No chance of that, I assured her.
At work, I googled ‘molar pregnancy’; the Women’s Hospital had a helpful fact sheet. This type of pregnancy involved a genetic defect with the embryo, which meant that it was all placenta, no baby. And worse, in a science-fiction twist, sometimes it could develop into a mole-like growth that burrows into your uterus, cells dividing and multiplying and, all the while, pumping out more and more of the hCG hormones that make blue lines blithely appear on pregnancy tests. Undetected, a malignant molar pregnancy could become cancerous and spread to other organs, though it apparently responded well to chemotherapy.
‘Chemotherapy’. This was not a word I was expecting to come across in the process of trying to get pregnant. I took deep breaths, and made a cup of tea. ‘All they’re doing is further testing. And the results will take four weeks. The most likely outcome is that I don’t have this.’ Exhale. I would worry about this if and when I was diagnosed. In the meantime, I had work to do.
On the Thursday, I was working from home. There was a staff seminar scheduled for lunchtime that I would go in for but, meanwhile, I had teaching prep to do. My ‘work space’ wasn’t ideal. The secretaire in the hallway had a small drop-down desk, so I sat there, on a folding chair. The doorbell rang, and it was the postie holding an enormous brown-paper parcel the size of a small TV. I wasn’t expecting anything, so my heart lifted a little—I thought it might be from a friend. The label was typed, though, and the parcel wasn’t nearly as heavy as its size suggested. When I tore away the paper, I discovered first one empty 4-litre plastic bottle with a medical patient ID label; then another; then two more, along with a heavy letter from the Women’s Hospital. It was addressed to me, but was a form letter referring to my ‘recent diagnosis’ of a molar pregnancy.
Here was a helpful pamphlet on the different kinds of molar pregnancies. Here was a flyer for the molar pregnancy support group. Here were detailed instructions on how to collect all your urine in one of the 4-litre containers over a twenty-four-hour period, and a little map showing the location of the hospital pathology unit where the samples needed to be dropped off within twenty-four hours—one each week. I had visions of wandering nonchalantly through the hospital sliding doors, lugging a sloshing container of my own wee. I backtracked to the letter—diagnosis? ‘What? I’d only had the call from the hospital pathologist a few days ago. I thought it was going to take four weeks to get a result?’
My stomach dropped. I frantically dialled the number on the letter. I needed to sort this out—had I been diagnosed? The first number led me to an answering machine, as did the next two, so I tried going through the switchboard and searching the hospital website for clues. An hour later, I was none the wiser but flicked back into my email account to discover an increasingly frantic series of emails from the co-convenor of the seminar series.
The seminar. The floor suddenly seemed unsteady beneath me. I’d completely forgotten about the seminar, leaving my co-convenor to somehow locate the guest speaker and chair the event in my place. I called and left a breathless message, apologising for not being there and letting her know that I’d had some upsetting medical news.
I didn’t hear anything until I received an email from my head of school, indicating that my colleague had spoken to her about my worrying news, and that they had decided to employ a casual to cover my teaching for the rest of the semester. For the third time in one day, things crumbled beneath my feet, but this time I had an overwhelming sense of shame and stupidity. They were collapsing not because of a medical problem, or an administrative error. This was a crumbling I had created directly, from my own blind panic. I wanted to disappear, to shrink into a tiny ball and roll underneath the couch. Yet there was also a small, burning fury with myself and the situation. I wanted this job, I didn’t want to be sidelined.
•
Despite the cool autumn morning, I was in the sweat of an energised panic when I arrived at work just after 8 a.m. the next day. The afternoon before, I’d done what I could to repair the damage, and had set up a 9 a.m. meeting with my boss, to plead my case to continue teaching for the semester.
I’d slept fitfully, resisting further consultations with Dr Google on molar pregnancies and what they could mean, and furious with myself for taking my work for granted, for letting these medical dramas cloud my work. Where my body had felt slowed for weeks, as the possibility of the new pregnancy leached out of me, now I was suddenly taut with tension. Nothing concentrates the mind like threat.
I bounced up the lino steps two at a time, silently punching out the lines of my reasonable email to my boss from the afternoon before. As I touched my hand to my office door, my mobile rang, and I answered it with the same efficiency. It was Penny.
‘You have a nephew!’
‘What?’
‘You have a nephew—he was born at five-fifteen this morning!’
I let myself into my office, locked the door behind me, and stepped over to the window. ‘Oh, Pen, wow … wow.’ I looked at the calendar. I knew Penny’s due date was any day now—I’d been on stand-by to be there at the birth for her and Kent. ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t there for the birth—did you call me? Did everything go okay?’
‘Yes; it was all too late, and then too quick, to call you. It was intense—the worst bit was being separated from him for an hour while I waited on a trolley for a doctor to come and do some stitches. I was in a hospital gown, and didn’t have my glasses, and I think they forgot about me. I had to go wandering up to the nurses’ station to see what was happening—half-naked, blind as a bat—and then they sent me back down to the birthing centre for the stitches, anyway.’
‘Oh, love; ouch. That’s not good. But you’re back in the birth centre now? Can I come in and see you? And meet your son—your son—oh, wow. I’ve got to see my boss at nine, but can I come right after that?’
‘Yes, come! Is stuff okay with your boss?’
‘Yeah, yeah; it’s all okay. I should be there before ten.’
Gratitude rushed over me. He was here, he was okay, and he was a boy. I could love him, and I could congratulate Penny and Kent wholeheartedly, clean of the sadness and conflicted feelings that I feared might have come with a baby girl.
And, despite all my brokenness, I met with my boss, apologised for missing the seminar and negotiated my workload. Then I drove over to the same hospital where we’d had Z’s last scan, a few days before the accident, and met my tiny new nephew, awash with love for him and his parents, and the honour of being his Aunty Hannah.
That night, with two seemingly impossible things already under my belt for the day, Rima and I went with friends to a Melbourne Comedy Festival show, and I laughed so hard I bumped my front tooth on the seat in front of me, chipping the cap the dentist had so carefully used to repair my teeth after the accident. My laughter morphed first into sobs at another thing gone wrong, but then into a deeper laughter that stretched the entire space between the utter devastation and sheer ridiculousness of my situation.