I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(26)

I say: Listen, there’s so much light on the other side of that darkness, too.

The way a diapered newborn rump fits into a cupped palm? Perfection. The smell of a toddler’s clean neck—wondrous. And there may be no greater entertainment than taking a child to the zoo and watching him see a zebra for the first time. A zebra!

A baby’s arrival gives us adults the closest thing we’ll ever get to magic. There’s no person there; then there’s a person. You witness the opening of the window between whatever other dimension there is and here. Where did this new soul come from? Who else is over there? It’s mind-blowing, because that window must have been there all along, but you’re just now noticing it.

That magical time doesn’t last, of course. Babies turn into people who walk and talk and eat grilled cheeses, and you think only sometimes—instead of constantly—about how one day they weren’t here and then they were and one day they won’t be again. Sometimes you don’t think about the time machine thing at all.





Me Real


When my daughter was about two and a half, she did something to annoy her brother. I don’t remember what—probably committed the heinous crime of tipping over a tower of blocks—but I can still picture how his little cheeks flushed and he clenched his fists as he struggled to express his sudden outrage.

“You!” he sputtered. “You . . . are temporary.” It was the worst insult he could conjure in the moment, and, to him, a very grown-up one, because it used a newly acquired vocabulary word. (We had recently discussed the difference between a temporary tattoo and a real one. The real one is here to stay; the temporary one isn’t.)

Indignant, she bowed up and yelled back, “NO. Me real!”



* * *



Poke.

Plunge.

Every time I jabbed a needle into my belly to inject myself with fertility drugs, I felt like the injection should make a sound. My skin should pop open, the liquid should swish around the barrel and whoosh down the needle into my flesh. I pictured the adrenaline-injection scene in Pulp Fiction, with Uma Thurman playing the role of my reproductive system. The physical, financial, and emotional toll of this process deserved a little palpable drama. Like many things, this daily act occurred silently, without a soundtrack commensurate to its importance, though its lack of fanfare didn’t mean it wasn’t actually happening.

No doctor ever determined any official diagnosis for my failure to ovulate regularly (so I named it myself: deviled eggs). In attempting to conceive our second child, John and I again took the necessary measures to shock my lazy ovaries and uncooperative uterus into behaving normally. Each month, as we decided, “Okay, yes, one more go,” the lengths we went to grew increasingly dire: higher dosages, more shots.

This time, however, my body didn’t react as well as it had before to the massive doses of hormones, and I ended up with a wicked case of ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome. The condition itself is not uncommon in women who have undergone fertility treatments; the severity with which I experienced it, however, happens in only 1 to 2 percent of cases.

Here’s the not-too-technical explanation: While I had fertility drugs surging through my system, I successfully became pregnant. Then, the combination of the drugs and the natural pregnancy hormones reached a level that scrambled my brain into pulling some real nonsense moves, like sucking all the water out of my blood and dumping it into my abdominal cavity. Over the course of a weekend, my belly ballooned from its barely pregnant pudge to a beach ball. I knew I’d gone from feeling fine on Friday to feeling huge and out of breath by Saturday; what I didn’t know was that my blood, now thickened by a lack of water, wasn’t flowing properly.

If your blood can’t circulate to your organs, your organs stop working. I didn’t realize I was in danger of multiple organ failure, but I did make several calls to the nurse advice line over that weekend, in which I insisted something felt “not quite right.” (Apparently good manners prevented me from saying “super fucking wrong.”) The nurses told me to put my feet up and come into the office after the weekend.

I waddled into the clinic on Monday morning. When I sat down and opened my paper gown, the doctor looked at my stomach and I saw alarm flash across her face for a second before she composed her features and looked back up at my eyes.

“Okay, let’s get you across the street now,” she said.

At first, I thought, To Burger King? because that was across the street, but then I realized she meant the hospital.

When I got there, I had an IV line placed in my arm to replace my lost fluids; a hole poked just under my ribs; and a drainage pipe inserted through it. A bag attached to that pipe filled drop by drop with liters—LITERS—of liquid that looked like what comes out of rusty old bathtub pipes.

I stayed in the hospital for a couple of sleepless days and nights, with a constant parade of medical professionals coming in to check my vital signs. Then I got to go home, complete with a bag of needles, several vials of blood thinners, and a newly installed portable tap in my side, like a human keg.



* * *



In the chaos of that hospitalization, I didn’t cry. I never said, “I’m scared.” In fact, part of me was intrigued. When you grow up in a family of physicians, you develop a comfortable fascination with medical details. In a typical dinnertime conversation at our house when I was growing up, my dad might have discussed which patients that day had pus oozing from their surgical sites. I’m not grossed out by blood or frightened by beeping monitors or people wearing stethoscopes like scarves. I feel at home around people in white coats.