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Tuesday, December 14, 2004
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The last thing I remember is a small green room. Three strangers circumnavigate me as I lie flat-backed on a hard gurney. They wear blue scrubs and move in a blue blur, stopping occasionally to slap a sticky electrode on my skin, give me a tense smile if they catch my eye.
Here's some morphine for the pain, the anesthesiologist says in his crisp British accent. Enjoy it, he jokes, and there's a movement by my arm. But I don't like morphine, the way its heat surges to the tips of my fingers and toes, pulls my spine stick-straight, seizes my stomach, grips me so tight I'm afraid to move.
Now this will make you go to sleep, he says, and there's another motion to my right. Think good thoughts.
I picture the boy. Sneak in a mantra. (Please let me keep this ovary please let me keep this ovary please let me keep this one I need this one. Please.)
And then, for a long time, the world goes empty.
It was a secret, our delicious little secret. For a while now we'd been talking about trying to get pregnant. A few weeks before I'd gone to the doctor, got a rubella test, received the a-okay to start trying whenever. I'd been worried: three and a half years ago, just before we got married, I lost my left ovary in an emergency operation. There was a large cyst that had twisted, cutting off the blood supply to my little eggs, till they were all dead and the ovary was no good. You can still have children, the doctors assured me; one was all you really needed. But my right ovary had a cyst too, relatively small, lurking. We'll keep an eye on it, my doctors said, and for three years I dutifully went in for regular ultrasounds. It's doing fine, they kept saying. Wait until you're ready.
The boy finished grad school; I got a book deal. And in October, I turned thirty. We're ready, we decided.
Friday I went off the pill. Today is Monday.
Get some sleep, my husband says, squeezing my hand. And because I'm so tired I don't even remember where I am at that moment, I smile a little, nod drowsily, close my eyes.
Later I remember. I open my eyes to the dark hum of a hospital room at night. The boy still watches over me.
Sleep some more, he urges, smoothing my hair. But there's something in the way he says it that sounds like pleading. It snaps me back And I know the answer even before I whisper:
What happened?
I'm sure he tells me they couldn't save the ovary. But the last few words are swallowed by my husband's crying, as he climbs into bed next to me still holding my hand. We cling together like one body and we sob and we sob, the bed shaking. And when my IV comes loose and the blood soaks my sheets, the blanket, my faded pink hospital gown, we don't even notice at first: blood and tears, tears and blood, our whole world's gone watery, and it feels like drowning.
# posted by y @ 10:19 AM
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