Chapter 2
The sailors said to each other, “Let’s draw lots and find out who is to blame for getting us into this danger.”
Jonah, Chapter 1 verse 7, Good News Bible
Slow hours passed, and I was well into the territory of Troubling Thoughts. It occurred to me that I had never before been closely involved with any sort long term hospital stay. For me the situation hadn’t yet arisen for any close friend or immediate family member. Thinking about this kind of thing led to all sorts of unhappy thoughts about the inevitability of this situation: waiting out the clock at the bedside of someone you care about, generally useless but present and ready for duty, whatever it may be. Time passes in a particular way, a waiting anxious slow and dragging yet blank and deceptive way. Minutes drag, hours slip away. This will happen again. It will probably be worse. I know exactly how it works, from the outside: a pastor’s kid gets an unusually rich vicarious experience of other people’s experiences in the hands of Medicine. Knowing and sharing these experiences was a significant part of Dad’s job and so of my early life.
These thoughts are depressing and, in the context, worse than pointless, but hard to avoid. Still: whatever experience I was having, Jennifer was having a worse one, being who was actually confined to bed, hooked to a magnesium sulfate drip, having been diagnosed with blood pressure high enough that they are talking about preventing a stroke or seizures, scary talk. Not anymore, I told myself, being bedridden, being on the drip, makes her safe. I told her everything was going to be fine. I told myself everything was going to be fine. Because you see: all those dark thoughts about the illness and death of those close to me that lay in the future, bad as they might be, were still things that lay ahead, they were imagination, they weren’t happening. Better than thoughts of what was happening, and the fear that lay in that contemplation. Because everything was not fine. Fine was being at work, and Jennifer being at work, a routine and uneventful visit to the doctor completed without unforeseen event. The ship had sailed on fine many hours ago.
And meanwhile there was nothing to do but wait, and do any little thing that might need doing. I fetched ice when Jennifer wanted it. I fetched ice when I thought she might want it at some point in the future. I fetched whatever was wanted, but there weren’t nearly enough things to fetch to pass the time. We watched basic cable. The weird hypernormalcy of television struck discordant chords with memories of days long past spent in perfect aimlessness, killing six or seven hours trolling channels, in between or in avoidance of periods of gainful activity. Those times seemed like nothing in memory, blurred and compressed by time and repetition. Not like this, not at all like this. But the superficial sameness caused a cognitive vertigo. As if somehow those blank days of my bachelor days were to blame for this, those wasted hours come back to haunt in, transformed into this vivid and intent parody of sloth. This hospital time.
A seeming open-endedness to our situation contributed to this sense of temporal limbo. This impression was an illusion: Jennifer and I were talking about the possibility of her going home, the possibility of a long period of bed rest, what the logistics of the future might be. Worse, a long stay for her in the hospital. The baby (we didn’t know it’s gender at that point, the ultrasound had been inconclusive and we hadn’t had another) wasn’t done yet, it needed to stay inside. At least another five weeks. As far as I can tell this was utter fantasy. My impression now is that from the moment the nurse in the doctor’s office had taken that blood pressure measurement that morning, the course of the next several days were set. They would stabilize Jennifer enough to give her a couple of shots to stimulate the baby’s lung development and then they would induce labor and our extremely but not radically premature baby would head directly to a significant stay in the neonatal intensive care unit. The ship on a “normal” birth and infancy had sailed as well, but of this we had no idea.
It is hard to say that this was the plan of the hospital at the outset, because a modern hospital (particularly a teaching hospital like the one we were in) is a hive of circulating interns and nurses, efficiently responding to the basic needs of the patient and ready to intervene effectively in the event of medical crisis, guided by protocol. Decisions that protocol can’t define must wait on the scrutiny of a Partner, individuals who are by nature important, busy, and scarce. It would be a couple of days before we saw one and all would be made clear. For the moment we were suffering from a serious failure of information: as is usually the case in these circumstances, we were utterly oblivious to the fact.
And so we dragged through the day, as it gradually became obvious (without anyone exactly saying it flat out) that Jennifer wasn’t going anywhere that night. We decided I would go home, take care of the cat, pick things up for her, get some sleep. I wanted out of that room but leaving was terrible, I hated leaving Jennifer behind with her drip and her television remote/call button and her pitcher of melting ice with noone to properly tend it. I knew she must want out of that room much more than I did and the impossibility of it made it seem wrong to go. I was exhausted in the way only a long and unwanted span of inactivity alloyed with worry and unarticulated fear could make me, a hyperactive and befuddled fugue. A horn blared from my blind spot as I merged into traffic on my way home: a vaguely registered datum far too inconsequential to raise my hackles. There was a CD by Niamh Parsons that Jennifer had put on the stereo that morning, traditional music, quietly and hauntingly sung. I will listen to it half a dozen times in days to come until I become intimately familiar with the melodies and stories of the songs, which I will hum and sing incessantly in every moment of quiet solitude, which will become bound inextricably with all my memories of this time.
I ended up awake until late in the night, muddling through getting things together for the next day, scaring myself by looking up preeclampsia on the internet, writing a long and probably alarming email I sent to nearly everyone on my contacts list about what was going on, trying not to think of Jennifer alone in her hospital bed, and lying to an exceptionally vocal Tiny the cat that I would be done in just a few more minutes and finally pay some attention to him. In the small hours of the morning, now too completely exhausted to do anything but collapse, I finally made good on my promise and cuddled him up to sleep in the unhappy shadow of the bed’s conspicuous vacancy. The alarm rang four hours later.
-=-
I barely registered the drive in, though usually driving myself someplace for the first time would be an event in itself due to my almost absurdly bad head for directions. I’d shored up whatever erosion the previous night’s loneliness and silence had wreaked on the brave face, the stiff upper lip, the inviolate party line that everything would be fine.
In truth my attitude wasn’t all just a front. Later I told several people that one of the themes of this experience for me was “therapy works.” I don’t talk about it a great deal (though I’m not at all bashful about the topic) but I spent several years doing weekly sessions with a therapist, the good old fashioned “talking cure,” and at this particularly stressful time I could feel the benefit. Put simply, I was just living in the moment more, and not dwelling as much as I would have been prone to in the past on things, real or imagined possibilities, that I couldn’t control. As tired as I was I was in better spirits walking into the hospital that morning. Of course, at the time I still thought there was a possibility of getting out of that hospital without leaving our baby behind.
And my buoyed spirits didn’t last long when I entered Jennifer’s room. There had been no break for her, no time apart for fresh perspective. The wear of what she was going through was visible, and with it my sense of helplessness.
And this is where the experience starts to fragment for me, and I have trouble tracking what happened when. It’s hard to believe we were only there for four days until the birth. It seems like a time apart, a main era of life. Distinct memories come in parcels, particular events that stand out of fog of general monotony of the hospital days.
Because it was monotonous. It was boring, frankly. Stressful, yes, frightening, yes, intense. But boring, for me, and I can only imagine what it was like for Jennifer, who couldn’t get out of bed and take a walk.
Adjust the baby monitor. This was strapped over Jennifer’s belly soon after she was confined to bed and the fast, steady beat of baby’s little heart was a constant counterpoint to everything that went on in that room. It was comforting, to hear that strong steady heart beating out the time, proof of the life inside. It took me back to the prenatal appointment when the doctor found the heartbeat for the first time, with some gadget that looked like a little microphone attached to an old transistor radio. Hearing that heartbeat was the first time the pregnancy really gave me a jolt, an electric realization of this miraculous thing that had occurred. But then again, it was also a reminder that things were not normal. You don’t constantly monitor a heartbeat unless you’re afraid that you might hear something wrong. More immediately, the monitor they put on in the hospital constantly got off kilter. When Jennifer turned over, sat up, fell asleep, or when (presumably) the baby wiggled out of the sensor’s path. Loss of signal made an alarm go off. This was well, alarming at first. Then routine. Then just another part of the endless rounds of monitoring and adjustments that defined the rhythm of the time. Adjust the monitor, track down that heartbeat again. Change a bag or adjust a setting when the IV stand starts beeping. Take the blood pressure, take the blood pressure, take the blood pressure, nervously watching the numbers, which are never good, sometimes requiring another dose of medication be added to the IV line. There was no real rest, not even a simple hour of just being. If the surroundings weren’t enough to impress our condition on us, the constant intervention of medical necessity would. It’s hard (and unpleasant) to imagine being in that situation for a truly long period of time.
Which was probably for the best, in our particular case, because on day two we also started, though still in a relative dearth of real, specific information, to get The Vibe. The vibe that while perhaps noone there was quite qualified to outright tell us then and there (or, I suppose, more correctly ask us, since the final decision was technically ours), but any ideas of getting out and having Jennifer take a long period of bed rest at home, indeed any scenario involving the baby staying inside her for any real length time, were not really on anyone’s radar but ours. We could have been quicker on the uptake, I suppose, when they injected the first shot of the hormone to accelerate the development of the lungs. But we were distracted, and still very reluctant to accept the reality of a seriously premature birth. So time went on, monitors were adjusted, the IV stand beeped, more basic cable was watched, and we waited for someone to come and tell us what was going to happen next.
this is what is up with this.
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