By Beth Davies
PROMPT — If only ...
I tried to write about these events thirty-three years ago, but the words were elusive
back then. The hurt too deep, the cut too fresh. A recent writing prompt in a workshop
called up the memories and my fingers suddenly couldn’t type fast enough.
It was a warmer than usual April evening, one that felt more like early June. My
husband Artie and I were watching television after dinner, and I placed my hands on my
belly and did my usual kick count at 39 weeks of pregnancy. During late pregnancy,
mothers-to-be were instructed to put their hands on their bellies and count the number
of times the baby kicked within a certain time frame. This night was the first time I didn’t
get the minimum number of kicks.
An hour or two later after phone calls to my OB practice, I was instructed to go to the
hospital for monitoring. It was a Saturday night and I lay on a hospital bed with the lights low, watching monitors display the baby’s heartbeat (steady and strong), and my vitals (within normal range). The nurses were kind enough, checking on me every now and then. After a few hours, and assurances that everything was ok and that either the baby had “moved down the birth canal” or that I just had a “sleepy baby,” Artie noticed activity at the door and got up to see what was going. He came back and sat next to me.
“They’re trying to get a doctor to the room.” The doctor never came. I was sent home,
told to eat a big breakfast in the morning, and come back for further monitoring.
I did as I was told. Still wasn’t getting the right kick count. The baby felt like it was
retreating deep inside my womb. What movements I could feel seemed further away
and less strong. Back at the hospital, I was placed on the same monitors with the same
results. Since I had been there for hours with no signs of being released anytime soon, I
made a phone call to my sister cancelling my attendance at the brunch I was due at.
“Tell them to get that baby out!” she practically screamed at me. I looked at the numbers
on the monitor. “Nothing’s wrong”, I assured her. “The heartbeat’s strong.”
I was sent home again, with an appointment the following day at the hospital to have an
ultrasound. I left work anxious and worried. I knew something was desperately wrong
because what little kicks I had felt the day before were no longer. Artie met me at the
hospital. After running the ultrasound wand over my belly for a moment, the technician
left the room and came back with my OB. He peered over the technician’s shoulder as she ran the wand over my belly one more time. He turned to me and said, “there’s no
heartbeat.” The doctor instructed us on the next steps for inducing labor. We were in
such a state of shock, I had to call back later to get the instructions a second time.
I called my mother, who was traveling with my father who was attending a conference
in another state. “You’ve got to hold that baby!” she wailed. She told me later she
immediately left the hotel room, waded through the throngs of conference attendees to
find my father. They got on the next flight home.
I was in the hospital again, later that night, still in shock. I remember riding up in the
elevator to the maternity ward. Another couple was in the elevator with us. “You’re
having your baby!” they said with excitement. I looked away. It was a painfully long ride
to the maternity ward, with the couple’s eyes now fixed on the elevator buttons.
They started the induction process -- a long, painful ordeal. After a night drugged to
ease the labor pains, going in and out of sleep, Artie watched the monitors as my heart
rate at times raced to almost two hundred. Sometime that morning, it was time for
delivery. The baby was hard to deliver. The head nurse came to see what was taking so
long. “She’s not even trying to get it out,” she said with disgust, and left the room. Sarah
Elizabeth Davies was delivered using forceps. She was wrapped in a blanket, and they
put a newborn hat on her head. My family came to meet her. My father brought a
daffodil from his garden. My father-in-law came, without my mother-in-law. She was on
vacation in Florida and told my father-in-law to let us know she would be “toasting us
from the beach.” She did not cut her trip short, and I’ve never forgiven her for that. All
our brothers and sisters came.
While recovering in the hospital after delivery, my parents told me they bought a burial
plot for themselves, so that Sarah could be buried at the head of their plot. I will never
forget their kindness in doing what needed to be done when we were in no position to
know what to do.
When I left the delivery floor and got to my room in the hospital, the nurse encouraged
me to go home. “You’ll be more comfortable at home,” she said. I felt they were trying to
get rid of me, but I was dealing with so much blood loss, I couldn’t imagine going home.
The next day I did go home but experienced the most painful hemorrhoids. It hurt every
time I breathed. I called my doctor begging for painkillers so that I could walk and attend
Sarah’s funeral. I thought back to the head nurse telling me I wasn’t pushing hard
enough. Wish she could see me now.
Images and conversations are engraved in my brain from that time. I remember visiting
my parents. “How are you doing?” my father asked. “I don’t want to go back to work and
face everyone.” He said, “You’ve been through the worst. You’ll be ok.” He was right. I went back to work just two weeks later. I had to get back to work to have enough sick
time saved in case I got pregnant again.
One co-worker asked how I was doing. I told her we were waiting for the autopsy results
to hear what happened. Then I said, “I’ll keep you posted.” “That’s ok,” she said. “I don’t
really want to know.”
“I don’t use a microwave in my house,” another said. Clearly, the microwave and I were
at fault.
“Thank God my lake house got sold,” said another co-worker. “God was really looking
after me.” Got it, I thought. God cares more about selling your lake house than the
health of my baby.
“I’ve heard that this loss really hasn’t affected you,” said my husband’s good friend to
me. Artie had gone to pick up pizza and I was left alone in our home with him. I was so
stunned I didn’t even know what to say. Who had told him this?
I let go of the friendships that no longer served me, and I kept the ones who stood by
me and let me cry, blabbering endlessly as I tried to process what had happened. I have
those friends to this day.
I went for my follow-up appointment with the doctor who was on call that first night, who was not my primary OB. I asked what he thought could have happened. My legs were splayed in stirrups, he was sitting on his stool examining me. “Some women just make shitty placentas,” he said.
Months later when the autopsy came in, we asked for another meeting with him, and
were scheduled for the last appointment of the day. He sat behind his desk and said,
“What word in the report don’t you understand?” When I asked him why he didn’t order
an ultrasound in the hospital, he said, “you’ll find fifty doctors who say I didn’t do the
right thing and I’ll find fifty more who say I did the right thing.”
After that appointment, in the parking lot of that OB’s office, I said to my husband, “He
fucked up.”
“You’re pregnant again?” my mother asked, with such an exasperated tone I was confused. “So soon?” It was four months after I lost Sarah. If I didn’t get pregnant then I
didn’t know if I ever would.
“He sent you home?” said my new OB who was affiliated with a different hospital, after I
told him the series of events of my pregnancy loss. He then proceeded to tell me the
protocol at his practice. Within an hour, a decision is made, he said. The nurses are
influential and relied upon by the doctors to help decide the next steps.
My second pregnancy was emotionally difficult. I kept my distance from the baby
growing inside me. When asked my due date, I’d snap, “whenever it comes.” Thankfully,
Alexander Arthur Davies was born healthy, and the distance I felt melted the moment I
held him.
The disparity between my first and second pregnancies made it clear medical
negligence occurred. We filed a lawsuit and settled eventually. It was only then, some
three or four years after I lost Sarah that I was able to move the events that I replayed
multiple times a day every single day to a figurative box that I imagine is stored over my
left shoulder. My grief, though never ending, was not at the forefront of my every waking moment. It now had a place.
I found that time doesn’t heal all wounds. Time did allow the healing process to begin
and the wound to close in, but it will never be covered over by a scar. The rawness, the
missing part of my soul, my daughter who should have been here with us, died because
the doctor who could have changed her outcome, didn’t. If only he could have taken
take time to visit me that first night in the hospital, if only he had called in a portable
ultrasound machine to properly diagnose me, the trajectory of my life would have been
different.
The wound I am left with has defined much of how I have been able to handle life’s
other challenges. After my mother died suddenly in a hospital post-surgery, I held my
father’s arm as we walked the streets of Boston at three in the morning to go to her
room to see her in death. I watched him bend over and kiss her cheek to say goodbye. I
got the strength to be there for him from my experience with losing Sarah. When I
turned fifty, I was diagnosed with Endometrial cancer. Bring it on, I thought. I can handle
this. When my father died, and then my father-in-law a few months later, I was okay. I
thought back to my father’s wise words after losing Sarah. You have been through the
worst, he said.
He was right.
Beth Davies writes fiction and personal essays. Her short fiction has been published in Sad Girl Diaries and she is currently nearing the end of the first draft of her novel. She is a member of the Charles River Writer’s Collective and Sisters in Crime. A travel enthusiast, she often writes from the road while RVing around the country with her husband and dog. She lives near Boston, MA.
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