I didn’t need a test to tell me what I already knew, bilious, bleary, and puking in someone else’s toilet. But I took one anyway, because that’s what I knew how to do, and what I’d done before. I saw the little blue plus sign emerge instantaneously, as if to say, “Um. Obviously.”
My previous run-ins with pregnancy—a ruptured ectopic pregnancy and then, 10 years later, a miscarriage—had settled like trauma in my body. I had always thought of my uterus as a hard, gnarled thing, twisted with scar tissue, inhospitable to any intrepid embryo that may have the misfortune of ending up there. I developed something my doctors referred to as white coat hypertension, which is a severely elevated blood pressure reading in a doctor’s office but otherwise normal blood pressure readings at home. This, however, was simply the physical manifestation of the real issue: acute medical anxiety. During the nearly 15 years that separated my first pregnancy from the birth of my son, I ended up in the emergency room four times, convinced beyond reason that my body had turned against me, that I was dying. I carried that anxiety with me through my third pregnancy, and it resulted in dangerously high blood pressure that elevated the pregnancy as a whole to high risk and required more ultrasounds, more and more time in doctor’s offices, more and more tests, worry, panic. I thought, surely, that when I gave birth, the experience of hospitalization, surgery, recovery, would be enough stress to actually kill me.
But it didn’t.
On the contrary, the five days I spent in the hospital, those first, precious days with my baby, were some of the most joyful and restorative days of my life, and the anxiety that I’d been carrying around for more than a decade finally melted away.
—–
I was 20 years old the first time I got pregnant. So I was 20 years old when an ectopic pregnancy nearly killed me. This is what it felt like, to be dying: pressure worse than labor pains, like someone was trying to inflate my fallopian tube like a bicycle tire. Searing pain that shot over the expanse of my abdomen like lightning jumping between clouds. Confusion, boredom, exhaustion. Relief when the anesthetist told me to count down from 20 and the pain finally started to abate, like the tide going out.
This is what it felt like, to be dying: pressure worse than labor pains, like someone was trying to inflate my fallopian tube like a bicycle tire.
When I awoke, a nurse looked down into my face and squeezed my hand, the tender pressure drawing me out of the haze of anesthesia. “There you are,” she said gently. “We almost lost you.” I found out that my tube had ruptured on the operating table, and a surgery that was meant to last 45 minutes took over five hours. My surgeon—skillful with a scalpel, but less so with bedside manner—informed me that they’d left the fallopian tube in there, but that it probably wouldn’t work at all because of the scar tissue. “You may never be able to conceive naturally,” he said. “Thankfully, there’s science for that.”
“It’s fine,” I grumbled. “I don’t want kids anyway.” Because this is how I reacted whenever something was taken from me: I claimed I’d never wanted it to begin with. And maybe back then I didn’t, but somewhere along the line, that changed.
—–
At 30, I had just started dating my current partner, and I had a long-established habit of buying a pregnancy test when I was even a couple days late. This was because I knew I was more prone than the average woman to ectopic pregnancies, and I knew that early detection was how I could save my own life. When I found out I was pregnant the second time, I sobbed hysterics on the toilet. My romance was new; the terror I harbored around the very notion of procreation was not. No, my heart said, not this, not now, no. My heart was shouting, and my body listened, because a few weeks later, my uterus cramped like a clenched fist and I miscarried. That was my fifth hospitalization in 10 years. In that time, I’d had countless chest X-rays, EKGs, and a CAT scan or two. Each time, I was convinced I was having a heart attack. Stomach cancer. Brain cancer. Another ectopic pregnancy. But it all ended with an IV of liquid Ativan and a suggestion that I go to therapy and stay there.
“I’m not having a cardiac event,” I explained. “I’m just scared of dying, is all.”
“Your blood pressure is exceedingly high,” the doctor at the ER told me that day. “You may be having a cardiac event.” I sighed, trying to slow the spinning of my own mind, took a few deep breaths, and asked him to take the reading again. He did; it was lower. “I’m not having a cardiac event,” I explained. “I’m just scared of dying, is all.”
“Better get used to the idea,” he deadpanned. “We’re all headed there someday.” The beep of my heart rate monitor sped up. He was right, of course: One day, my body, like all bodies, would give out. I had better get used to it.
—–
When I got pregnant with my son, my heart shouted yes. I knew for a week before I told another soul, and I spent that time sitting quietly and beginning a conversation with that tiny pre-person. Still, my brain was signaling the emergency alert. Don’t get too attached, it said, insidious. My blood pressure skyrocketed, whether because of the pregnancy or because of my long-standing anxiety, I do not know. I had a subchorionic hemorrhage—a bleed between my uterus and my placenta—and I developed gestational diabetes. I barely slept. I threw up so much during my first trimester that I lost about 10 pounds, even as my baby continued to grow. Pregnancy was a horror show and I hated it. I spent the first few months in the grip of a bone-deep terror that didn’t allow me to believe that I would carry to term. My body was broken—a doctor had said as much. So we didn’t tell anyone about the baby. We didn’t want to jinx it. I lost days to googling strange and fleeting symptoms even as my partner kept telling me that I was fine, that the baby was fine. Over and over, until he’d grown tired of the refrain. Eventually, I started to entertain the notion that maybe it would be OK. We tracked the fetal growth week by week on an app that compared it to various sizes of fruits and vegetables. Six weeks—longer than I’d been pregnant when I had the ectopic—a sweet pea. Twelve weeks—just past where I’d been when I miscarried—a lime. A sweet potato. A cabbage. A pineapple. I grew round and wore clothes that hugged my belly. My hair had never been so lustrous, and my skin was completely clear. I looked healthy.
—–
The day my son was born, I expected to be having a C-section, because he was large and in a breech position. But somehow, he turned himself around and seemed to be ready to come out the good old-fashioned way, and I figured, sure, let’s give this whole natural childbirth thing a shot. I labored for 36 hours, never dilating past nine and a half centimeters, and in those 36 hours, I dug deep into a well of untapped resiliency. I listened to my body. My body knew things that my brain did not. My body knew that it didn’t need an epidural, until it did. My body knew that the epidural wasn’t working, that it needed to be re-placed. My body knew, the first time the doctor asked me if I wanted to give up and do the surgery, that it could go a little while longer. And it did. And my body knew when it was time to prepare for another way to usher this baby into the world.
I will not make light of having a C-section, as it’s major surgery. But I will say this: It was an easier recovery than the surgery for the ectopic pregnancy. It was easier than I ever could have anticipated, due in no small part to the rush of oxytocin that flooded my system the second they placed my gooey newborn in my arms. It was easy to be in that hospital, my baby snoozing away in a bucket bed at my side. It was easy to take strolls around the hospital, shuffling slow and hunched, to get my body working after being sliced open. It was easy to be separate from the world for these first few gentle days, where I didn’t have to worry about anything except my body and my baby. The constant chatter in my mind stilled, slowed by sleeplessness and oxytocin, and I just focused on falling in love.
I listened to my body. My body knew things that my brain did not.
Here’s the thing about bodies that’s so easy to forget: They are extraordinary. And I spent most of my life thinking that mine wasn’t, that mine was dying, broken, that mine was simply a way I could get my consciousness from place to place. But after the birth of my son, I looked into the mirror at the bags beneath my eyes, the sag of my tired shoulders, my messy hair, my stomach like a deflated balloon, and I thought, How can I feel anything but wonder for this body? This body that was my son’s first home; this body, a place of nourishment and calm; this body, with its steady beating heart.
Thumbnail photo courtesy of Jonathan Truesdail
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