Rocking the Pink (10 page)

Then one evening, at age twenty-eight, I popped into the grocery store to pick up dinner after a long day at work. As I waited in line at the checkout stand, shifting my weight from one foot to the other in my stiletto heels, my tired eyes settled on a baby boy sitting in the grocery cart ahead of me. He wasn't wearing any shoes, and his fat toes looked impossibly tiny. I hadn't examined baby toes before. They were darling!
A w.w.w,
I thought, for possibly the first time in my life. When I looked up from those little sausage toes, the baby had fixed his gaze on me. His eyes were crystal blue.
A w.w.w,
I thought yet again. And then he smiled—a big, innocent, goofy smile that sent a thunderbolt zinging through my heart.
Gimme that baby.

At home, I marched through the front door and beelined to the bathroom, calling for Brad to meet me there. When he arrived, a question on his face, I raised my packet of birth control pills into the air, like an Olympic diver about to swan-dive off the high platform. Brad raised his eyebrows at me, not understanding, and just as he opened his mouth to ask what was going on, I plopped the packet of pills into the metal trash can with a
clank.
There was a brief silence as Brad processed what he was witnessing. An instant later, pure joy washed over his face.

For months after my triumphant offering to the fertility gods, poor Brad would pick up the phone at work, only to be greeted by my screeching voice on the other end: “I'm
ovulating!
Meet me at home
right now!”
Two weeks later, I'd sit down on the toilet and pee on a stick, holding my breath and willing a pink line to show up. But it never came.

I continued to rack up the billable hours at work. Every day
blended into the next, except that I had begun to wear a different brightly colored scarf around my neck each day—just like Janice did—though the look was ridiculous on me. (If my fourteen-year-old self had gotten a glimpse of her twenty-eight-year-old self in a fuchsia suit with gold buttons and a flowered scarf tied in a slipknot around her neck, she would have thrown her head back and bawled, “For the love of God, no!”)

I would stand in my office on the twenty-first floor, leaning my forehead against the floor-to-ceiling window, and gaze down at the ant-people below as they hustled and bustled across the crowded streets.
Every one of them exists because a woman got pregnant,
I would think.

Mom had gotten pregnant with my sister the first time she'd ever had sex (with my dad, at age eighteen), and she'd pounded this fact into my head and Sharon's repeatedly, urgently, throughout our teenage years. As a result, my entire life I'd believed, without a shadow of a doubt, that one (itty-bitty) act of unprotected sex would result in pregnancy every single time. It was an absolute, proven fact.

So why wasn't I Fertile Myrtle, like Mom?

I'd heard plenty of stories of vacation-induced pregnancies, so off Brad and I went on a ski vacation with friends. After a day of skiing, I made my way to the hotel's fancy spa, where I drank cucumber water and flipped through
Spa
magazine while awaiting my massage appointment.

“Laura . . .
Rope?”

“Yes. Ro-
pay.
Hi.”

My masseuse, a broad-shouldered German named Helga (actually, I can't remember her real name, but she will always be Helga to
me), led me to a dimly lit room, where I purred like a cat as I crawled onto the massage table. Helga drizzled oil on my back and began kneading my tight muscles. After a few minutes, she graduated to grinding her elbows into my back.

“Your tension is the worst I have ever seen,” she chastised me in a harsh German accent.

Was she serious? The
worst
she'd ever seen?
C'mon.

“So much stress!” she accused again.

Was she expecting me to say something here?

After a few more minutes, Helga grunted, “You are trying to have a baby, yes?”

What?
That got my attention. “Yes.”
How did she know?

And then Helga dropped the bomb: “How do you expect to take care of a baby
when you cannot take care of yourself?”
She emitted a loud hissing noise that ended with “Tsk-tsk.”

I was floored.

I paid for the massage (which, in this case, felt like a punch in the gut) and shuffled back to my hotel room.
I do take care of myself!
Helga's words had cut like a knife.
Am I unworthy of having a child?

Back at the room, I told Brad about what Helga had said, and he told me not to worry about it. “During my massage, she told me I was a merman in a past life,” he laughed.

But I
did
worry about it. Could there be a connection between my inability to get pregnant and the stress I was experiencing on the job? Was my body really the most stressed out Helga had
ever
seen? Her words continued to sting.

At home a few days later, I opened the phone book and scheduled
a month's worth of weekly appointments with the nearest massage therapist.
I'll show you, Helga.

Two months later, having dutifully attended regular massage sessions over the past several weeks, I sat down on the toilet yet again with a pregnancy test—wishing, hoping, and praying for a pink line to appear. And then . . .
oh . . . my . . . God.
There it was.

I ran out of the bathroom and pounced on Brad, who'd been fast asleep in bed, almost giving him a heart attack—which would have been a calamitous turn of events under the circumstances.

“Wake up, Buddy! Wake up!” I shouted, tears springing into my eyes. “We did it! We're gonna have a baby!”

What I didn't realize then was that I'd totally and completely missed Helga's point. I'd been so myopically focused on achieving that little pink line, I'd missed the Big Picture. Helga hadn't intended to enlighten me about how to board the
Baby Express;
she had wanted me to learn to appreciate the glorious views from the slow bus on the scenic route. If only I'd been able to understand what Helga was actually saying—that respect for the mind-body connection was the key to a healthy
life,
and not just a means of achieving my pregnancy goal—perhaps things might have turned out differently for me. Perhaps if I'd been capable of hearing the rallying cry of my knotted-up body, if I'd been humble enough to comprehend that my beleaguered pretzel body was shouting urgently at me, I might have avoided its exasperated, and inevitably violent, revolt nine years later.

But really, even if I'd known way back then that my body would eventually overthrow the existing regime in a bloody palace coup, I
would have thrown my head back and laughed, “Let them eat cake!”—because at that moment, I was in mommy-to-be heaven. I was going to have a baby! And nothing else—
absolutely nothing else in the whole world—
mattered one little bit.

 

 

For the next five months, my violent daily heaving made me giddy, confirming that I was really, truly, not-imagining-this pregnant. Brad and I posted a track-each-day-of-your-pregnancy calendar on the refrigerator door so we could follow the minutia of the baby's development.
The baby is the size of a bean! The baby has arm buds! The baby is the size of a plum!
Brad, a man who never did any grocery shopping or cooking, ever, came home one evening with a raw ginger root to make a nausea-abating tea he'd read about online. At night, he massaged my aching back and feet. On weekends, we shopped for cribs and diaper-changing tables.

In the twentieth week of my pregnancy, we learned from a sonogram that our little bean was, in fact, a baby girl.
A daddy's girl! A Baby Sophie.

I often dreamed about giving birth to our Sophie: Immediately following her birth, the doctor would place Sophie in my arms and I would kiss her little face, crying tears of joy. One night, the birth dream started as usual. But when I looked down to kiss the baby's little face, I was surprised to find I was not holding a baby; instead, I was holding a German shepherd puppy. I was crestfallen.

“Oh,” I said in my dream, disappointed. “I was hoping for a
human
baby.”

“Well, just keep trying,” the doctor reassured me. “You just might get a human baby next time.”

Relieved, and, frankly, still pretty happy—I mean, the puppy was adorable—I proceeded to kiss and cuddle my new puppy. Better luck next time!

When I woke up, I tried to understand the meaning of this strange dream. Did it mean I was ready to love my baby unconditionally? Or maybe I was projecting my love for Crazy Buster onto my unborn child. Or maybe, just maybe, my subconscious was telling me that I was not yet ready to graduate from dogs to babies.

I hoped to God it wasn't Door No. 3.

 

 

Sharon was pregnant, too, though it was her second time at the rodeo.

“I'm so big!” I exclaimed as she and I lay in bed together, comparing our watermelon-size bellies.

“I'm bigger,” Sharon declared, and it wasn't clear if she was boasting or bemoaning.

And she was right. You see, Sharon was a shoo-in to win the whose-belly-is-bigger contest, because, although her due date was two months later than mine, her belly was filled with three times the number of babies.

Yes, Sharon was pregnant with triplets.

Yet the day after my due date had come and gone, I sat at Sharon's hospital bedside—she'd been admitted for regular infusions designed to delay premature labor—and had the nerve to complain, “This baby's never gonna come!”

Sharon—who had been hooked up to hospital machines and separated from her husband and two-year-old daughter—had the grace to laugh and roll her eyes along with me.

“Hang in there,” she said. She looked so tired, but she smiled at me warmly.

When I arrived home from visiting Sharon in the hospital, I called her immediately, ready to heap another stack of complaints on my already rising pile.

But, to my surprise, a nurse answered Sharon's phone.

“Sharon's been rushed to the delivery room. She just delivered her babies.”

I gasped. Sharon's due date was over two months away!

Oh, labor must have come on in a flash! I had been there just forty minutes before. A chill went down my spine.

I waddled frantically back to my car and raced back to the hospital. As I ran through the hospital front doors, breathless and clutching my belly (which had started contracting erratically because of the stress), a crowd of hospital staffers descended upon me, ushering me into a wheelchair.

“Who's your doctor?” they wanted to know. “Do you want us to call your husband?”

“No! No!” I shouted, waving away their helping hands. “I'm not in labor! I need to see my sister!”

I was on the verge of panic.

By the time I got to the delivery room, my sister's triplets—two boys and a girl—were already nestled in Plexiglas incubators, hooked
up to monitors and wires. Born eleven weeks premature and weighing almost three pounds each, the newborns looked like animatronic Yoda-babies. Thankfully, the doctors said they'd all be fine.

Sharon looked pale but beatific.

Mom had already arrived and was talking nonstop, her standard reaction in times of stress.

My sister is a mother of four,
I marveled, gazing at the babies' sixty combined fingers and toes, Mom's yakkity-yakking fading into white noise in the background.

Sixteen hours later, our Sophie made her grand entrance, looking as if she could squash all three of her preemie cousins with one chubby fist, or, alternatively, gobble them up as a midmorning snack.

Now that my diagnosis and treatment plan had been confirmed by an actual oncologist, as opposed to “Dr. Brad,” I decided to do some research online to find out what I was up against. I clicked on an article describing chemotherapy in detail: It is not a “targeted” cancer treatment, the article said. Chemo drugs seek out and destroy fast-growing cells of any type, including cancer cells—but also cells of the bone marrow, oral mucus membrane, linings of the stomach and intestine, and hair follicles. Due to the shotgun nature of chemo, the website explained, a chemo patient may experience lots of side effects, including fatigue, nausea, vomiting, loss of appetite, mouth sores, hair loss, premature menopause, bone loss, low red-blood-cell counts, low white-blood-cell counts, diarrhea, and constipation. And leukemia.

I threw my hands up into the air. And then I put my head on the desk. It was all so doomsday, I just didn't want to know. I didn't want any more information, I decided; what I wanted was support.

I navigated to the only triple-negative website I could find—for an organization called the Triple Negative Breast Cancer Foundation—and was momentarily paralyzed by the shocking array of pink ribbons that littered the site.

I saw a heading for “message boards” and clicked on the link. Wow, there were a gazillion postings.
So many women dealing with this crap.
Women had posted messages to each other covering every aspect of the disease and its treatment—surgery, hair loss, metallic tastes caused by the chemo drugs, nerve damage in extremities, depression. It was overwhelming. My predicament seemed insurmountable.

After reading other ladies' posts for quite some time, alternately biting my lip and wiping away tears from my cheeks, I did something I'd never done before on any website in my life: I posted a message—not to anyone in particular, but more to the universe at large. Was there anybody out there? I felt an undeniable urge to connect with someone else going through exactly what I was experiencing.