Spelling It Like It Is (14 page)

But when Dr. J arrived, he checked the pad and said that we weren’t close to that point yet. He said, “Sometimes I think with celebrities the residents panic more.” Now Dr. J took the time to explain all the steps we would take to stop the bleeding without ending the pregnancy. But he said, “I’m not going to put your life in danger. The baby is not viable at this point. I’m going to save you over your baby.”

Then he said, “You know you’re not leaving here, right? You’re here for a good long while.”

And that was how Dean and I celebrated our sixth anniversary. In the hospital. I was five months pregnant, and I would spend the next two and a half months in the hospital.

The Glamorous Life

B
ed rest, which had seemed so relaxing when I first heard about it, took on a whole new meaning. I wasn’t allowed out of bed. I lay flat on my back. At first I wasn’t allowed to walk to the bathroom or to take a shower. I peed in a portable potty that stood next to my bed (but I insisted on doing my number twos in the bathroom—I tried to preserve a shred of dignity. No way was I crapping in a commode). They drew blood every other day so that there was always fresh blood on hand in case I needed a transfusion.

A rotation of nurses came in to take my vitals, check my baby monitor, and clean my commode. I’d only been there a couple nights when one of my night nurses said, “Do you like this room?”

“I don’t know anything different,” I said.

She said, “Well, a couple of the rooms across the way are better. The configuration gives you a little more space, and there’s a nicer view. It seems like the woman in one of them went home tonight. Want me to see if that room is available?”

I wasn’t sure. Even moving across the hall seemed dangerous for the baby. But this night nurse was on the case. She took pictures of the room with her phone and brought them back to me. It did look nicer! (In that dubious, incremental way that one hospital room can have a leg up on another.)

At two
A.M
. the night nurse came back into my room. I was sitting on the commode when she entered—this quickly became fairly routine, that I’d be sitting there when the nurses came in. I was already used to peeing in front of Mehran and showing my poops to Dean. It wasn’t a huge transition. Anyway, the nurse told me the new room she’d scouted for me was available, and I could move right now. When I looked hesitant, she added, “It’s a good-luck room. Lots of A-list people have stayed in it, like Julia Roberts.”

“Julia Roberts stayed there?” I said.

“I can’t really say,” she said.

I knew Julia Roberts’s babies had turned out just fine. Maybe it
was
a good-luck room. Besides, it would be yet another thing Julia Roberts and I had in common. We both thought the paparazzi should back off . . . and one day, I hoped, we both would have babies who had gestated in room one.

So what if it was the middle of the night? Day and night have less meaning in a hospital. My bed was on wheels, so the nurse pushed me straight into the other room. I rolled into the new bed, and that was it. Upgrade complete. It was the hospital version of my compulsive house-hunting and moving.

THE NURSES KNEW that I was in the hospital for the long haul, and soon they started asking when I was going to start decorating. They told me that a lot of long-term moms with high-risk pregnancies decorated to make the hospital feel more like home. We moms-to-be could do anything that wasn’t permanent. The nurses had seen our show and read my blog and knew that I loved decorating, so they said, “We can’t wait to see what you’re going to do!” They told me about one mom who had turned her room into a chic New York apartment, complete with an area rug, a standing lamp, curtains, lights, and wall art. The gauntlet was thrown. If I was going to be holed up here for the rest of my pregnancy, I needed something to focus on. I decided to go for it.

In my decorating life I had gone from the feminine pastels of shabby chic, to a white leather and grass-green modern palette (it was a moment), to Regency black lacquer and peacocks. I grew up in a room my mother had decorated in plum florals. I’d never had the chance to live in a bright pink girly room. Now was my opportunity. I wanted the room to be bright and happy and poppy and girly. Time to call in the gays! Much as I loved him, I couldn’t work with James on this. I knew James—who was my partner in crime for the wedding shows—would want the room to have leather club chairs and old rugs from England. What I wanted—James would kill himself first. But Bill and Scout have great taste, and they like midcentury modern with pops of color. I enlisted them to help.

Their most amazing find was temporary wallpaper that basically peels on like contact paper. It was turquoise with a gold pattern on it—kind of midcentury meets Regency. Dean agreed to hang it, and we put it on the wall facing my bed. It was a very bold color and pattern. I worried that I’d get sick of it. But every morning when I woke up, that paper made me happy. I’d look at it and smile.

We replaced the hospital curtain that surrounded my bed and put up a shower curtain I’d found that looked sort of like a modern white doily. There was a hot-pink metal table, a white love seat, and framed photos of the kids on the wall. On the floor was a rag rug made of turquoise, pink, and canary yellow. There were brocade pillows and gold accents. By the time Bill and Scout executed my vision, my room looked girly dorm room meets chic Parisian apartment. James walked in and grimaced.

“I know you hate it. You hate the color. I know. I just wanted something different. This is what I wanted. Fun. Happy. Girly.”

James said, “No, it’s great,” but I knew he was vomiting on the inside.

DEAN CAME ALMOST every day and stayed with me for hours. He slept over every Tuesday night—that was our “date night,” and boy, was I a hot date. After all, I spent all my time horizontal.

Stella, Liam, and Hattie only came to visit once or twice a week. They were still in school in the deep Valley, with karate and ballet after school. I didn’t want to disrupt their lives. I never got a sense that they missed me too much. All I had was time to miss them all day long, but they were so young. Moments happen, then are forgotten. They were always happy to see me—or at least the cupcakes I’d been given—but as soon as they left, they were on to the next fun thing.

For the most part I didn’t want any visitors beyond my immediate family. Usually I want to entertain my friends, but now I was lying there, too scared to move. A monitor showed that whenever I had visitors, like Mehran and my mother, my contractions increased, putting the baby at further risk. When the doctors saw me having contractions, they would tell my guests that I had to rest. I didn’t mind when they left—the truth was I barely had the energy to talk.

Eventually I settled into a routine. Every day for breakfast I’d order bacon, a bagel, and cream cheese. If I was feeling frisky, I’d get scrambled eggs to go on the bagel. Some weeks I switched to yogurt parfait. Once I shocked the hell out of Joyce in Food and Nutrition when I spontaneously opted for a croissant with butter and jelly. Breakfast came at eight, but as the nurses got to know me, they realized I liked to sleep in and they’d bring my breakfast last, at eight thirty.

Dr. J checked on me every day. It was often the bright spot of my day. We’d talk about his love life, and he’d eat all of my crispy bacon and bring me fun treats like Sour Patch Kids.

When I didn’t have visitors, I watched a lot of TV.

Every night for dinner I’d order a fully loaded baked potato and corn with butter and salt on the side. Sometimes, to mix it up, I’d get the apple pie for my dessert instead of my standard berry pie. Dinner arrived at seven, and afterward I’d do a little web surfing, either picking out vintage teacups on Etsy for Stella’s fourth birthday party, blogging for my website, shopping on Gilt, or posting images on Instagram. I even changed the default shipping address for my online purchases to Cedars-Sinai, care of the Maternal-Fetal Care Unit. Nobody knew I was in the hospital, but if you look at my Instagram postings from that time, all the photos are super-close-up images of my hospital dinners, the nail art I did on myself during the long hours in my hospital bed, cupcakes or flowers that people brought me, and lots of pictures of doughnuts. You can see my hospital tray and bits of the room in the background. There’s a shot of me wearing a rhinestone headpiece that I made, below which I wrote “2 much to wear to the grocery store?” The truth was that at that point a trip to the grocery store would have been super exciting. It’s hard for a body to know when and how much to sleep when it spends all day in bed, so I often fell asleep sitting straight up with my glasses on and my hands suspended above the laptop keyboard in the middle of buying yet another glamorous maxi dress on Gilt. They may take my mobility, but they’ll never take my caftans. (
Braveheart
, anyone?)

There were breaks from the routine. One night a nurse came in, took one look at me, and said, “I’m going to wash your hair for you.” She was right. I needed it. I had limited shower privileges, so I had tried using dry shampoo. My hair came out terribly. So now the nurse used a bowl to wash my hair in the hospital bed. Then she brought in another nurse and one of them used a blow dryer while the other flat-ironed the part that was already dry. While they worked, we watched Kardashian reruns, gossiped about Kim Kardashian’s rumored ass implants, and giggled. Then one of the nurses pointed to an unopened box that had arrived from Gilt days earlier.

She said, “What is that? It’s been there forever.”

I said, “I did a little shopping, but I can’t get up to open it.”

She said, “Well, let’s open it right now.”

The nurses took out about ten maxi dresses and caftans. The two of them held them up and sashayed across my room. This was midnight on a Sunday night. It was a total slumber party. I wanted to suggest playing “light as a feather, stiff as a board,” but I didn’t want the fetus to get a complex.

EVERY TUESDAY AT noon Patti, my Reiki therapist/practitioner, came to see me. I looked forward to our sessions, not just because they were a break in the monotony of the hospital, but because Patti changed the way I saw myself and my situation. Reiki is a kind of alternative healing practice. Patti would put on calming music and I would close my eyes. She would hover her hands above me. It was like a massage, but with no actual contact. An energy massage. Afterward, Patti would tell me things like, “The baby wants avocados.”

Whenever Patti thought the baby wanted a certain food, I would call right down to the hospital chef, Darrell. For my birthday, my mother had generously upgraded me to the “special menu” at the hospital. This meant that instead of the regular hospital fare, I got a slightly better menu. Every day I was supposed to call down to put in my order.

Darrell was the voice at the other end of the line. He and I would never meet, but we had a very special phone-kitchen relationship. If I ran late placing my order, Darrell would call and say, “It’s Darrell. It’s seven thirty and I haven’t heard from you. What can I make you?”

I’d say, “I can’t decide on anything right now.”

He’d say, “Let’s go off-menu. What do you like, Chinese food? Chicken? Steak? Do you want fried rice with steak in it?”

“That sounds amazing!” I’d say.

He’d ask what vegetables I wanted mixed in the stir-fry. Whenever the kitchen staff brought up my food they’d say, “Darrell says hi.” It made everything a little more personal.

Maybe it was the sensory deprivation of the hospital bed, but Darrell sounded cool. I always wondered what he looked like. And I wondered if he knew who I was or just bonded with me because of our phone rapport.

Another time Darrell had made something special for me. The kitchen staff seemed to be all female, but this time a guy brought it up. He was cute, Asian, maybe in his thirties. I was on the phone when he came in. He put the tray down and said, “Have a great day.” I thought I recognized the voice. Was it Darrell? I couldn’t interrupt the call to find out, and so I never got to meet my phone friend face-to-face.

Anyway, one Tuesday Patti came in and started working. She told me that the placenta previa had happened as a wake-up call for me. I go, go, go and don’t know my own limits. The baby wanted me to focus on the pregnancy. He wanted my complete attention. This was why I was on bed rest. So I could focus on him. Also, he wanted a steak.

Again, we hadn’t let Dr. J tell us the baby’s gender, but Dean and I and everyone else was again convinced that we were having a boy. Patti reminded me that she’d felt baby male energy radiating from me before Hattie was even conceived. She said that the baby in my womb was supposed to have been Hattie’s twin but he missed the portal. That was why he slipped in at the first opportunity, right behind Hattie.

As Patti spoke I was visualizing the baby and Hattie, and his little soul’s determination to live and be close to his sister. Images of Hattie flashed through my mind, and I envisioned sharing them with the baby. I know it sounds weird, but I felt as though he liked seeing her. The three of us were connected.

Patti and I worked through some of my biggest fears. That I would lose the baby. That the kids would lose their mother. That Hattie was so young, she would forget she’d ever had a mother. Patti told me that worry does nothing but manifest things.

“You have to tell yourself that the baby is safe because it’s in you. All of this”—she swept her arm out, indicating the hospital, the room, and me in the bed—“through all of this, the baby has succeeded in getting your attention. Have faith. That’s all you can do at this point. It’s not about God or religion. When I say ‘have faith,’ I mean that you have to believe in yourself.”

It was hard. I thought about a visit I’d had with Stella and Hattie. It was a sweet, all-girls afternoon during which Stella sat on a tuft and, using a box as a makeshift table, painted a little birdhouse. But when it was time for them to head home with their nanny, Paola, Stella didn’t want to go. Crying hysterically, she said she wanted to stay and sleep with Mama. I felt completely helpless. It had taken Dean getting on the phone with her and promising that he’d bring her back the next day to calm her down. My hospitalization was definitely the hardest challenge Stella had faced so far in her short life. Taking Patti’s advice meant rising above my own feelings of helplessness to help Stella see that this was a journey for all of us, and that we would come through it together.