Bringing in Finn (15 page)

I twisted in the bed. I looked around for someone who could tell me this was a mistake. The doctors' faces were grim.

“Is there anything we can do?” I asked.

“There is one procedure we can try. It's called a cerclage.” The attending physician with the hairy knuckles was speaking. “It involves trying to stitch up your cervix and push the babies back up into the uterus.”

“It's a risk,” Dr. Baker said. “We'd have to have a large needle right up close to the sac. If we burst the bag, the twins have to be delivered. There's a high risk of infection.”

“If we don't do it?” I asked.

“You'll probably go into full labor and deliver them anyway.”

“When would that happen?” Bill asked.

“Probably in the next forty-eight hours,” Dr. Baker said. She looked down at her clipboard, avoiding our eyes. “An emergency cerclage like this one has about a 6 to 8 percent chance of success.”

I noticed the clock on the wall, a generic circle with a white face and brown rim, reminiscent of the ones that were mounted on the walls of my junior high school. I watched the red second hand glide around the face.

“So, our only chance is the cerclage,” Bill said. His teeth were clenched and his voice came out in a strained tone.

“I can give you a few moments,” Dr. Baker said, moving toward the door.

Bill looked down at me on the bed. I couldn't imagine what the doctor thought we would need to discuss. I experienced the same tunneling sensation I'd felt in my kitchen.

“Order the cerclage,” I said.

 

“Dr. Eagen is
the best in the hospital,” Dr. Baker affirmed, as a surgical team prepared me for the procedure. We'd signed papers absolving the hospital of any responsibility if our twins did not survive. An anesthesiology team joined the growing party in the room. They told me that to protect the babies, I would not be able to have general anesthesia. Instead, they would administer a spinal tap to numb the area below my waist. I'd be strapped to a hospital table that they would maneuver to a steep incline, so that my legs would be up high in the air and my head would hang below.

“You'll have to lie very still,” the older of the two anesthesiologists said. She spoke in a soothing voice and looked like an old hippie, with long hair that was just starting to gray.

“We'll use gravity to help us out,” said a younger Asian anesthesiologist. He had a kind face, and I forced my mouth into a weak smile.

I turned my face away from the doctors. I could see my reflection in a glass cabinet opposite the bed. My hair was covered with a blue surgical bonnet, and I was still bleeding between my legs into a pad. A nurse started an IV in my arm. Someone else drew blood.

Sometime around 3:00 PM, Dr. Eagen's team assembled and two orderlies wheeled me into the operating room. The anesthesiology team rolled me onto my side and inserted the spinal tap. I was afraid to move. I was afraid of the rotating table. I was terrified that Dr. Eagen would not be able to save our babies.

Please let us be the 6 to 8 percent,
I prayed silently as the table started to tilt.

Dr. Baker came into the room for the procedure. All I could see of her were her brown eyes, looking attentive and concerned through her scrubs and face mask. The head anesthesiologist inserted the needle into my spine. I closed my eyes but then opened them. Whatever was going to happen here, with my babies, I was going to be present for it. The younger anesthesiologist rolled me onto my back and secured me to the table with straps around my arms and across my abdomen and chest. I couldn't move my arms to my belly, so I said silently, over and over,
I am with you, babies. I am your mama. I have loved every minute with you. See if you can go back up inside. I love you so much.
I prayed that the highest good would unfold and then began to meditate. It was the only thing I could think to do.

The operating table started to move. The head anesthesiologist reminded me again to remain still. As my legs rose, I counted my breaths. I remembered a meditation I'd learned, the one about appreciating people and wishing them well. Silently, I thanked the two anesthesiologists for being kind, I thanked Dr. Baker for coming into
the OR with me, I thanked Dr. Eagen for doing the training he'd done to allow him to perform this procedure. I wished good to the nurses and the lab technicians and the spinal tap that was numbing me, sort of, from the waist down.

Dr. Eagen centered a light between my legs, which were now high above me. I could see a large mirror on the ceiling. “It's there so the doctors can see what they're doing,” Dr. Baker whispered, following my gaze. I remembered stories from Catholic school of upside-down crucifixions for people who had committed the most unconscionable crimes. I focused my attention inward, on the babies, on my breath.

I felt tugging and a light pulling sensation where Dr. Eagen worked. The energy in the room intensified. I thought the procedure might be working; the stitching had been going on a long time. Then I felt something gush and heard Dr. Eagen yell, “Shit!” I looked up into the mirror. Water and blood spilled onto the floor. I pulled at the straps at my arms. I wanted to push the babies back inside. I wanted to hold them there with my hands.

I put my attention back on the twins, the way I had each day since I'd learned we were pregnant. I'd always felt the warmth of their life, even imagined them giggling and talking to me. Now my belly was cold and I felt a void. The babies weren't inside me anymore. It felt as if they had fled, my womb had become an abandoned building in a state of emergency.

I heard a rush of sound near my ears and felt a hovering sensation around the sides of my head. I wasn't allowed to move and couldn't see anything except the ceiling mirror, a narrow strip of my body, and the tops of the doctors' heads. Dr. Eagen and his team were still active at the end of the table. I could feel fingers and metal instruments touching my thighs even through the gauze of numbness. The hovering continued for another few seconds, and then it
was gone. Dr. Eagen pulled off the American-flag do-rag he'd been wearing and threw it onto the floor. He looked angry as he paced around the room. “Shit,” he said again.

Dr. Baker approached the side of the bed, her palm outstretched like a marble statue of a saint. No one had to tell me what had happened. The sac had burst. The labor was irreversible now. I thanked Dr. Eagen and the anesthesiologists for trying. I started to thank the orderlies and the doctors for their attempt, but my words caught in my throat. I began to weep.

Dr. Baker began to cry as well. I wondered if she did so every time someone lost a baby. Now I understood the grooves around her eyes that seemed premature for age forty. She told me later that she cried because I was thanking people, because she'd never seen anyone do such a thing. The thanking didn't seem special to me, though. These people did their best to help us. Nothing I could say could change anything for the babies now. I felt as if their spirits were already gone.

 

Bill ran to
the door as two orderlies rolled me into the room we'd been admitted to earlier. The strong men lifted me from the gurney to the bed in the middle of the room.

“What happened?” he asked.

“The cerclage didn't work,” I said.

“So now what?” Bill said. “Now what!”

I stared at the wall clock, and then at the tubes and machines hooked up to the bed. I felt numb and strangely dispassionate. I would later learn about a form of trauma in which a person often does not feel the full force of the emotion during the event; the feelings emerge sometime later, like the pain of a sunburn that is not felt until the next day. I heaved once, drawing a craggy breath, but no tears came out. Dr. Baker arrived and told Bill I had been amazing in the operating room.

“The air was so still. I can't explain it.”

I didn't bother mentioning that it was my meditation she had felt, a momentary balloon of some kind of grace hovering over the room.

“Your wife is one strong woman,” Dr. Baker said.

“It doesn't matter,” I said, more to myself than to the doctor. “It didn't save them.”

Staring at Dr. Baker's face, I began to feel the first physical sensations of devastation. It was as if the outer perimeter of my heart were being singed by a tiny flame, the center still numb and exposed from the smash, like the pulpy core of a peach.

“We need to decide what to do now,” Dr. Baker said. “The best thing, I think, is to attempt a D&C” (dilation and curettage). It dawned on me that this was the procedure used after miscarriages and in abortions, to remove the fetus. “You're pretty far along, but I think we can still accomplish this.” I watched Bill's face crumple. His hand felt limp in mine.

“Your only other option is to deliver the babies,” Dr. Baker said.

“You mean as in, going through contractions and pushing?” I asked. I couldn't imagine this scenario. Laboring for hours to deliver dead children. It sounded unendurable.

A therapist told me later that delivering stillborn babies can be a powerful healing experience and that she wished I'd been more informed at the hospital. But both then and later, I was grateful for the lack of explanation. The trauma of delivering sounded worse.

“I recommend the D&C,” Dr. Baker said. Bill and I gave our consent.

“The earliest we can get you in is nine o'clock tonight.” She left the room to consult with the surgical team. The wall clock read 5:00 PM. The four hours loomed like a chasm.

“I called your mother,” Bill said.

“You what?” I asked. I wasn't sure Bill had ever placed a call individually to my mother. I would not have thought to call her. My mother was all the way in Alexandria, Virginia. I didn't want to worry her.

“She's on her way,” Bill said. I felt confused. I knew we were reeling, but things must be really bad for my mother to jump on a plane. I started to whimper. My skin was damp with sweat, but I felt chilled. I pulled the cotton blanket on the bed up around my shoulders and neck.

My sister Ellen appeared at the door. Bill had paged her after he had called my mother. She was in the middle of her year as chief resident at Northwestern and had driven from Lake Shore to the South Side as soon as she'd received the page. When people saw us together, they commented that we looked like film negatives of each other: almost identical faces with wavy hair, mine black, hers blond. Her face was splotchy and swollen. She came to the side of the bed and grabbed my arms. She shook with tears. I pressed my face into her hair, which smelled faintly of almond from her shampoo.

She stayed and watched vigilantly as the doctor who was assigned to our case briefed us on the D&C. He was a middle-aged man with mousy brown hair and a thin, hungry face that reminded me of a greyhound's.

“You'll go under general anesthesia during the procedure and be in recovery for a half-hour or so. We'll aim to discharge you by 11:00 PM. You can go home and sleep in your own bed tonight.”

He delivered the detail about our going home to sleep in our bed as if it were a special treat. As if it mattered where we slept tonight. Our children would still be gone.

I turned my face to the wall. The thin sheets scratched against my legs; the fluorescent lights hurt my eyes. The image of blood and
water gushing from my splayed-open legs flashed over and over in my mind. I wished I could go under the anesthesia now.

By eight thirty, when a surgical team came to prep me for the OR, I was grateful we'd be leaving the hospital that night. The monotony of the room, the
blip
of the blood pressure machine, the Pepto-Bismol-pink walls—it had all grown unbearable.

Bill and I said little in the hours leading up to the procedure. When Dr. Eagen stopped in to check on us, he gave us the technical name for what had caused the premature labor: incompetent cervix. This single hospital in Chicago saw a case of IC about every nine days. I opened and closed my mouth soundlessly, like a fish. I had thought what had happened was some kind of freak occurrence. The statistic and its clinical name enraged me.

“It's biological,” Dr. Eagen said, as if this would reassure us. “Nothing you could have done to bring it on or prevent it.”

“And there's no test for this?” I asked, when I found my voice. I wanted to rip the IV out of my arm and start screaming. We'd had a hundred fucking tests since we became pregnant. We knew our babies didn't have Down syndrome, or cystic fibrosis, or nine hundred varieties of genetic mutations. We had satellites in space that could take the temperature on Mars, but we couldn't find a way to check the capabilities of the cervix in a way that would prevent how many deaths a month at hospitals across the country? Around the world?

“No.”

I couldn't accept this reality or bear the looks of compassionate but passive acceptance of the doctors who delivered these facts. I clawed at the sheets on the bed with my fingernails. Dr. Eagen left Bill and me to wait out our time. When we were alone again, I kicked and pounded my feet.

When the orderly came to redress me in a surgical cap and gown, Bill stroked the side of my face.

“I'll see you when you come out. You're so strong and brave,” he said, his voice breaking. I remembered Sam, the technician from my MRI several years before, saying I was strong, that I looked tough. I wanted to offer Bill some of that courage. I set my hands at my side and lifted my chin. I would be strong.

 

I woke in
a haze of yellow light, aware of a dull thud of pain in my lower-right abdomen, down under my ovary. The thin-haired doctor was leaning over me, and I heard female voices in the room. “She's coming around,” he called out. “Sara? Sara? Do you know what year it is?”