Control
Dodging the hula hoops and basketballs on a crisp morning in Los Angeles at my son’s pre-school, I knelt down to my five-year-old’s level. “Have fun and be kind,” I whispered. “I’ll see you at pick up,” and I gave Milo a kiss. Then all of a sudden, a familiar bronchial spasm began to flare up, and like so many times in the past month and a half of having to deal with acute bronchitis during my pregnancy, I could no longer control it.
I quickly excused myself out of the temple’s pre-school playground with a hurried goodbye to Milo’s preschool teacher. As I coughed into my arm, I felt a rush of liquid go down my worn-in sweatpants and headed to the pre-school bathroom to sit on the miniature toilet, sized for a 3-year old’s tush. My phone buzzed. My best friend, Stacy, who was pragmatic and also had three kids, was on the other end. She could talk me through this.
“Maybe I just peed, myself?” I told her.
“Is it still coming out?” she asked. “Can you control it? If it’s still coming out and you can’t control it, it might be amniotic fluid.”
The fluid continued to come out, for what felt like a few minutes.
Deep breaths. A mitzvah perhaps? Was the baby on its way? Except I was only 30 weeks and 2 days along.
My adrenals kicked in and my fight or flight instinct manifested in an awkward, hurried waddle through the parking lot, amniotic fluid dripping down my leg to my car. I passed a teacher along the way. “Hi Sara, I think my water broke so I’m heading to the hospital.” I feigned casualness and smiled as I held my breath. At that moment, I needed connection. I needed to feel a sense of control. As if conscious shared-eye contact could alleviate such anxiety.
Over the course of eight years, I had been through enough to know how to breathe through chaos, to know how to white-knuckle situations, to get through things one moment at a time. In 2011 and again in 2012, we deliberated and researched and ultimately made the gut and heart wrenching choice to terminate two wanted pregnancies for medical reasons. In 2013, my body was cut open under the fluorescent lights of the operating room during an emergency c-section where I birthed my son. In 2016 and 2017, I suffered a miscarriage in Hawaii and then another miscarriage while parenting our four-year-old who was home for a week with double ear infections. In 2018 I endured all of the pokes and prods and procedures and uncertainty of IVF. If the movie What About Bob had taught me anything, it was how to do baby steps. In this case, not baby steps to 4 o’clock or to the elevator as Bill Murray’s character, Bob, managed. But more like baby steps to, well, a baby.
So, as I passed that teacher in the parking lot with amniotic fluid running down my leg, I knew I just had to put one foot in front of the other and try to breathe. It’s all I could control.
I sped through West Hollywood. “It’s probably no big deal?” I told my husband who had just landed in Las Vegas for work as he hesitantly hopped into a cab to the office. I called my mom, who answered her phone in spite of being in the middle of a workout. “I think my water broke so I’m heading to the hospital,” I told her. Ready to drop everything, my mom offered to come meet me at the hospital. “No, finish your workout. Shower. Then maybe head over?” Fifteen minutes later, unsure of how I actually got there, I pulled into the E.R. driveway. “Can I park my car myself?” I coughed out the window. “I think my water broke,” I coughed again.
“No, just leave the keys,” the valet instructed as he wrote up the time on the ticket.
Fluid still running down my leg, soaking my pants, I waddled through the automatic sliding doors.
The valet followed me inside. “Your seat is wet,” and he held up my keys.
“I’m sorry. I know. Does the hospital have a towel we can use?” I wanted to help him. But also: Was my baby going to fall out onto the floor of the emergency room waiting room?
A nice older man in a pale blue jacket with a red volunteer badge clipped to his pocket guided me into a wheelchair immediately and was told by administration to take me upstairs to the maternity ward.
I preemptively apologized to him for leaving the wheelchair wet.
***
“It’s a full rupture,” Dr. K said, looking at the nurses while I lay there, feet in stir-ups. And then he turned to me and asked where my husband was.
I told him he just landed in Vegas for work.
“He should come back. Now. You’re not going home.”
I wanted to scream at him. “Why didn’t you take me seriously these last few days when I called you telling you my cough was causing contractions? And that they were speeding up and that something felt off? You told me I could go away for the weekend just three days ago and to ‘eh, just turn around it if it got bad.’ WHAT IF I LISTENED TO YOU AND ACTUALLY WENT AWAY AND THIS HAPPENED IN BIG BEAR?”
It was only one of many occasions that I felt dismissed by my doctor over the course of this pregnancy. He had been with me through most of my challenging and traumatic reproductive history and yet could somehow only hold onto the fact that I had some generalized anxiety. Constantly feeling doubted, I stopped trusting myself. Until now. I needed to take back some control.
Instead of screaming, I just looked at him. “So now do you believe me?” My voice quaked with anger and sadness, mostly directed at myself.
I called my husband. He landed back in Los Angeles in time for ultrasounds and school pick-up.
***
We had one goal in the Maternal Fetal Care Unit: to get to 34 weeks one day at a time. Those days are now a haze in my memory. There were magnesium doses that caused my body to feel like it was on fire, leg compressors that caused full body shakes, chills that required heat packs, hot flashes while the thermostat was set to 55 degrees, antibiotics, steroid shots, beeping machines, IVs, morning visits with my husband and son, after-school visits and evening visits with my husband and son, incredible nurse care, bad salty hospital food, visits with friends and family, crystals because why not, beeping machines, visits with therapy dogs, visits with a rabbi chaplain who had seven kids, visits with a social worker, more beeping machines, deep levels of panic attacks, a hospital pedicure, and a total existential crisis. There were nights where I was unsure either of us was going to make it out alive.
When it all felt too much, I zeroed in on the sound of my baby’s heartbeat on the monitor. It was the soundtrack that got me through those nine days and those eight very dark and scary nights.
But on night nine, as much as I tried to ignore it, as much as I tried to deny it, as much as I tried to control it, the contractions sped up. The nurses told me that I could no longer keep my baby in my body safely. An emergency C-section was scheduled for 7am.
***
Our bodies hold onto things. And since I had experienced some version of life being taken out of my body five times in the past eight years, my body freaked out. (Also, not for nothing, I had been severely phobic of blood and needles since I was a child.) This was truly a version of my living hell and I could not escape. I had to lean in. I literally leaned into the nurse. And then she apologetically told me her shift was ending at 7am. My husband arrived in the operating room along with what felt like the entire NICU department.
I tried to weigh my options. Did I have any options? Was there any possible way, I could just not do this right now? Keep him in my body? Like forever? It turned out I had no choice. I truly don’t know if I had ever made contact with fear so deeply. But, like so many times over the past eight years, I was not in the driver seat. It was time.
On the table, before they numbed my bottom half, the anesthesiologist gave me a very little something for my massive anxiety.
But it took a while for the meds to kick in. I started feeling terror down to my numb toes and I cried. I wailed. I wanted an out. Dr. K tried to calm by yelling, “Jessica, Jessica, JESSICA. Listen to me…just stop…STOP. STOP. STOP IT.” I not so calmly let him know that his tone didn’t quite work for me. My husband plugged in my playlist and I scream-sang off-key from the top of my lungs as he held my hand, held my eye contact, and showed up as a rock, a role he had mastered over the last eight years of trying to grow our family. I belted In my Life by the Beatles, Tiny Dancer cover by Florence and the Machine and After the Storm by Mumford and Sons as they cut open and removed my stomach in order to take out our baby.
And then I heard him cry.
“He has so much hair!” my husband exclaimed.
In a semi-drugged, partially-physically numbed stupor, I got to see our baby’s 4lb-4oz body at a distance before they whisked him away to do hours of preemie stabilizing treatments.
Five hours later, I was lucid, I could feel my legs again and our son was stable. My husband wheeled me up the NICU to meet our baby in his incubator. I was able to put my arm through the plastic window on the side of his temporary home and put my hand on his belly.
He was perfect. We named him Oz, meaning: strong, courageous and powerful.
The next evening, a very compassionate nurse let me do skin to skin in the NICU. As his doll-sized body rested on my chest, I felt Oz’s tiny, but strong heart, beat on mine, the heartbeat that had been my solace. In that moment, I finally allowed myself to surrender. He was here. On me. Alive. Not how I had planned. Not when I had planned. And not where I had planned. Emotion flooded my body as I held him. It was otherworldly. And I finally understood. We can never really be in control.
~Jessica Wright Weinstock
