CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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We Thought We'd Lost the Baby

Friday, June 05, 2009

this entry brought to you by pomegranates, "sail (away with me)"


It was around 6:30 am last Wednesday, two days ago, and I was at work. The day should've been winding down, but today we were having a big walk-through by the vice president of the company (which, in all honesty, seems to happen every other week-- perhaps not the Vice President, but it's always Vice something or other), and our boss was stressed out. I heard on the overhead that I had a phone call, and as I walked over to the front desk my boss glared over at me and said "You can't leave yet." I nodded and said to myself, "Yeah, whatever".

I picked up the phone and before I could even say anything, I heard my mom's voice saying to someone in the background, "...Yes, and that's when I called 911."

A jolt rushed up my spine. "What's up?" I asked with urgency. My mom later told me that I sounded happy-go-lucky, but I wasn't, I was dead-eyed and concerned and wanted to get to whatever was happening.

"You need to come home," my mom said, calm. My mom has always had a knack for being calm in emergency situations, and that's probably where I get it from.

I'd initially feared that it had something to do with my daughter, but when I asked what happened, my mom said "Michelle is bleeding." It's strange when you expect one horrible thing and get another. For the record, I love my wife dearly, but there's something parental inside you that always fears something is going to happen to your child, and when you find out your child is fine you're relieved for just a split of a split second, and you're immediately hit by the feeling of Oh God, it's not my daughter, it's my wife.

"Where?" I asked. The first thing that had popped in my head was that perhaps Michelle was cutting something for breakfast and had accidentally cut her arm open-- scary, but not quite as scary as the answer I got.

"From between her legs," my mom answered.

My wife is currently pregnant; 11 weeks along, as we would learn in a few hours (our initial estimation was around 10 weeks). Our first pregnancy went on without a hitch, so I hadn't even really considered the possibility that something might go wrong with this one. When I heard that she was bleeding from down there it seemed like something out of a television show.

"How much?" I asked.

"A lot," she answered. "The ambulance is here and taking her to the hospital."

I hung up the phone and rushed over to the aisle where I was last working to gather my things. My boss had been standing between m,y stuff and the phone the last time I saw him and expected him to be within eyesight now, but when I didn't see him, well, I wasn't going to look for him. I did find it oddly ironic and somewhat rebellious. A moment ago he was telling me I couldn't leave, and now a moment later I couldn't give a shit if he even knew if I left or not. I told my coworkers that I saw as I was leaving and bolted, on foot. I would later learn that one of my coworkers dashed after me to ask me if I wanted a ride but I'd already left. Frankly, however, I was glad I didn't have a ride. The 10 minute walk home gave me enough time to clear my head.

We'd lost the baby, I thought, accepting it. I wasn't as bothered by it as I would think. Maybe I'd be bothered by it later, I thought, but at the moment I was more concerned with Michelle. The baby was only 10 weeks along, so it wasn't as if she was 8 months and fell down the stairs and the baby was killed. These things happen, and sometimes there's nothing you did to make that happen. I could accept that. But people die, even to this day, from blood loss when these things happen, and I don't know what I would do if that happened. I was glad we live only a few files from the hospital.

I started thinking, alright, what do I need. I needed to make sure I had money on me for food-- I'd be getting real hungry, real soon, because it had been hours since I'd last eaten. I had a box of Cheezits on me, I'd take that to snack on until I had the opportunity to get real food. Pen and paper to write things down, a pencil in case I'm there all day and want to draw while I waited in a room or something. A drink. I was halfway home and considered to myself that I'd just left a grocery store, and could've gotten something substantial to eat, then thought how weird it would be if I'd stopped what I was doing to buy something at a grocery store in this time of emergency. I thought of Elaine in a late episode of Seinfeld. She's at a movie theater and gets a phone call that tells her the man she's seeing, and who she'd been at the movie theater to meet up with, was now in the hospital. But before rushing out the door, she sees that there's no line at the concession stand, and quickly asks for a box of JuJu Bees. When she gets to the hospital and is snacking and her date asks, incredulously, how she could've stopped to buy JuJu Bees when told that he was in the hospital, she replies that you can't just buy them at any store, they're only there at the theater.

When I got to my bedroom to change pants very quickly, to use the bathroom, I was taken aback by the blood all over the sheets. My mom had told me when I walked in that the EMT had mentioned that he'd seen more blood than this with other pregnancies, and he was right-- it wasn't a horrible amount of blood. But it was still a lot of blood. More than a girl should have if she were on her period and simply forgot to wear a pad at night. Enough that I thought, without a doubt, it's a good thing the ambulance was called.

It was kind of surreal when, a few hours later, the doctor was telling us that the baby was fine. It was as if I hadn't even considered that the baby would be fine. I of course had considered it, but I'd already accepted the fact that we'd lost the baby, that, in several months, when the doctor says it's okay, we'd actually start working on another one-- something we weren't actually trying to do for the previous two-- and that if, worse came to worse, we couldn't have more children, I would be perfectly happy with the tall, beautiful, extremely bright daughter we already have. (She's skipped a whole grade and is still the best reader in her class despite being the youngest!) They didn't know what caused the bleeding yet, and we'd need to see our OB/GYN for the complete analysis, but in the mean time, Michelle is fine, the baby is fine, hormone levels are healthy, baby's heart rate is healthy. It was such a weird feeling. It was like watching a loved one get run over by a truck, only to get up, dust themselves off, and say "Did you just see that? I got run over by that truck."*
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 incidentally, i saw this happen in the third grade. but that's a totally different story.
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with love from CRS @ 5:39 AM 

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