The Girl He Used to Know(54)
29
Annika
THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN
1992
I awakened fully from a fitful sleep around 6:00 A.M. Jonathan slept soundly beside me, one foot touching mine. I’d been waking up off and on since shortly after midnight, because a persistent dull ache in my lower abdomen made it impossible to stay asleep. I’d shifted position, closed my eyes, and done everything I could to relieve the discomfort, but nothing had helped. My period had arrived the week before, lighter than normal and a slightly darker color, but the pain in my back had finally gone away. The discomfort I’d felt from the backache paled in comparison to what was happening in my stomach now, and the pain seemed to have intensified significantly in the last fifteen minutes.
Around seven, I walked to the bathroom, hoping that might solve the problem, although I really didn’t feel like I had to go. My shoulder hurt and I felt strange as I walked, light-headed, almost like I might faint. I held on to the wall and gripped the doorjamb hard as I flicked on the bathroom light. I was wearing a pair of cotton bikini underwear and a T-shirt of Jonathan’s that I’d appropriated for my own. Now that I was upright, gravity had taken over and the blood soaked my underwear and trickled down the inside of my legs. Maybe I was having another period, and the pain was due to cramping. Dark spots appeared before my eyes, and I managed to scream Jonathan’s name as the floor rose up to meet me.
I didn’t think I’d been out for more than a few seconds, and when I came to Jonathan was on the floor next to me. “What is it? What happened?” he yelled. He tried to help me sit upright and I felt him shift my legs a little as he gathered me into his arms, my back against his chest.
“Oh Jesus. Annika, tell me what’s wrong!”
I couldn’t answer him with words because the pain ripping through my abdomen made it impossible to speak. Instead, I screamed.
Jonathan laid me back down on the floor and ran.
* * *
I regained consciousness as the paramedics were putting the oxygen mask on me. “Annika, I’m right here. Everything’s gonna be okay,” Jonathan said somewhere off in the distance. I turned my head in the direction of his voice and spotted him next to the door, his hands covered in blood. He was wearing a pair of shorts and his legs were bloody, too. I thought for sure they would drop me as they carried the stretcher down the stairs on the outside of Jonathan’s house, but I felt the thump as the wheels hit the pavement and they rolled me toward an ambulance waiting with its back doors open. A wave of pain hit me then, so severe that I began sobbing hysterically. As they loaded me inside, I tried to tell someone I thought I was dying. I tried to tell them how cold I was because it felt like my blood had been replaced with ice water, and that it was running through my veins in a miserably cold loop, but I must have only thought I’d spoken, because no one answered me. Once the stretcher was all the way in, they slammed the doors and we left, sirens wailing.
* * *
At the hospital, a nurse kept asking if I knew how far along I was. I was having a hard time focusing and there were so many people surrounding me, cutting off my T-shirt and underwear, taking my blood pressure. I tried to say no, that I wasn’t pregnant because I was on the pill and had recently had a period, but I drifted in and out as they brought in a machine and ran a wand over my abdomen. Later, I would find out that the ultrasound was inconclusive because there was so much blood in my abdominal cavity they couldn’t see anything.
Everyone seemed to be shouting. The nurses were giving instructions and Jonathan was trying to give them the information they wanted. I faded in and out as my pulse and blood pressure dropped dangerously low. Then they made Jonathan leave and I tried to yell, to tell them I wanted him to stay, but I was so cold and so tired.
They wheeled me into the operating room, where they performed emergency surgery to stop me from bleeding to death. I had most definitely been pregnant, and the period I thought I’d had wasn’t a period at all, but rather the first sign that things had started to go wrong. The embryo had implanted in my fallopian tube and when it grew too large, the tube burst, more than likely right before they loaded me in the ambulance.
The doctors were unable to save it.
30
Annika
THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN
1992
My parents and Jonathan were at my bedside when I woke up. I had been gravely ill and required a blood transfusion, but by the time my parents arrived at the hospital, my condition had stabilized. Because my tube had ruptured, I had a more invasive procedure than I would have had the ectopic pregnancy been caught sooner. The doctors had to cut me open instead of going in laparoscopically, and because of this, they said, I would need to stay in the hospital for several days and it could take up to six weeks before I recovered fully.
Janice was there, too. She wrapped her arms around me and cried so hard, I asked her if she was okay.
“I was just so worried when I got the call from Jonathan. I’m so sorry.” She said it over and over.
I didn’t know what she had to be sorry about, because I was the one who’d caused this. Jonathan had had the forethought to grab my purse before following the paramedics down the stairs. He’d assumed my wallet would contain my insurance card, and it had. But my birth control pills were also in there, and it didn’t take the hospital staff long to piece together that I’d missed taking quite a few of them. I had been almost certain that I took one every day, because my intentions were to take them exactly the way I was supposed to. I hadn’t forgotten on purpose, and I did not want a baby, because I could barely take care of myself. I’d simply forgotten in the way I sometimes forgot to brush my hair, or eat breakfast, or take out the trash when it was my turn.