Life and Death

I lay in bed on my back in the dark, unable to sleep.  I close my eyes and see black so I squint to see something that is in-between life and darkness.  I calm my mind, readying to talk to God, an unknown force of which I don’t know how to conceptualize. I am gearing up to beg for my daughter’s life.  I feel unworthy, lost in the space separating a modern world and the stories of the bible.  Why?  I scream in my head silently, Why are you doing this?  I wonder if I’m in hell.

Take me! Take me instead if you need a life. I plead, My baby is so young…her babies need her…take me!  I hear nothing and I struggle with believing anyone discerns my desperation, feeling my thoughts are ineffectual and useless.

I yearn with the deep part of my soul that I can connect with an unseen spirit to help me.  But a part of me knows I will not see an angel, I will not see God, I will not see Dean and I know that she will die. Maybe my faith is not strong enough, therefore my pleading goes unanswered.

I cling to the hope that the energy of my husband is next to me.  I can’t see him but I sometimes feel him laying next to me, touching me, kissing me.  Where are you? I ask, but the answer is always silence. I am frustrated that everything I need and want is intangible.

Thirty-three years before, I lay on my back in a bed, only that one was in the hospital.  I was very sick, having been driven to see a doctor in the middle of the night, my body shook violently and my head pounded with a severe migraine.  It was a month too early for me to be there, but I was too sick to worry, only scared.  I was barely twenty-one, fully pregnant, carrying my first child suffering from full blown toxemia, now called preeclampsia.  My OBGYN had told me to stay off my feet, because my blood pressure was too high and my urine protein levels were off the charts.  I did not understand how severe my condition was, I had to earn a living so I kept working not slowing down for a minute.

 

The ER nurse could not find a vein once I was admitted and stuck me over and over with a needle while I lay in pain writhing on the gurney.  The doctor came in and said my condition was dangerous for me and the fetus, that I needed to deliver early.  But what about the baby?  I asked.  They said she would be ok, she was developed enough.

For three days and nights, I lay in that bed, frightened for the unknown and the baby inside me.  They amped me up with Pitocin, forcing my baby to get out, but she fought hard to stay and my already battered body that was exhausted and weak, grew weaker and sicker, helpless to the doctors that acted like God. I wasn’t allowed food in seventy hours, only IV fluids, it was no wonder I was almost delirious with hunger and exhaustion. I listened weakly to another woman’s ungodly screaming from another room. It seemed to go on for hours and I wondered how she was still alive with that much verbal pain spewing through the walls.

My ex-husbands family waited patiently outside my door, laying on the stairs, in the hall and out in the waiting room. On the third day, my mother showed up and I received her with emotional detachment more focused inward as a very sick person does. She was there and then she was gone. I heard later that my ex father in law had called her, shamed her for not coming. Later, I heard whispers of my ex mother in law yelling at a doctor to do something. There was an underlying anxiety that hung in the air like unseen fog, but I was too sick to feel it.

Finally, I had dilated to nine and a half and they said it was close enough, time to start pushing. I dredged up what strength I had to bare down and followed the verbal commands by sheer will to live. Finally, all the nurses and doctors stopped and stood, scratching their heads, and decided she would not fit. My hips would not open up wide enough and they had to rush me to an operating room.

Fear and relief flooded my mind, I could not visualize pushing her out of my vagina and the pain was excruciating.  I just wanted her out of me and the pain to be over and as they wheeled me into surgery.  I scrambled to see my ex-husband’s whereabouts wanting some comfort that I was not alone.  A swat team of doctors poured into the room and the bright lights blinded me.  I could feel the frenzied movement of the people in the room and I became more panicked with the unknown.

 

Icy cold narcotic flooded my spine, where a needle had been inserted for an epidural.  I screamed I was going to be sick and someone handed me a kidney shaped plastic bowl to throw up in.  All I could see was a temporary screen put over my chest so I could not witness them slicing my abdomen open.  I quickly leaned over and vomited up bile, since there was no food in my stomach and weakly fell back onto the table, staring up at the lights and feeling somewhat disembodied from the events happening around me.  I braced myself when I cautiously felt the tugging on my stomach near my abdomen in a weird invasive non painful way; and I smelt the burning flesh as they cut my skin apart to access my insides.

Finally, I heard a baby cry.  Grateful, I asked to see her but they were rushing around her, testing her blood and making sure her lungs were clear.  I did not know this and the fear continued to course through me until a nurse swaddled her in a blanket and propped her up to where I could see her across the room.  She would not open her eyes, (not for the first week of her life), but she was so tiny, velvety with a huge purple lump on her forehead from being stuck in the birth canal. I cried with relief but shortly blacked out. I don’t remember why, unless it was from sheer exhaustion. 

Light flooded my eyes for the first-time hours later.  I don’t know how I slept, I think I was drugged. The next seven days I floated on the morphine dripping into my veins and I finally realized how drug addicts become addicted.  All I wanted was for everyone to leave me alone, to sleep and fall into the drug induced world of dreams.  The visions were vivid and real and I preferred them to real life.

After ten days, I left the hospital with my tiny, precious human life I had created wrapped in her pink baby receiving blanket.

Now, I had to watch that same lovely, wondrous baby, slowly die a horrible death and I could not save her.

Eighteen months before, my beautiful, vivacious first born daughter was diagnosed with Metastatic Melanoma Stage IV cancer. At the young age of thirty two, she should have had so much more life to live. I tried to reconcile how she became so sick so quickly.  Why were there no signs? Did I somehow give her cancer? Was it genetic, toxins or hereditary disease passed from my blood to hers? I blamed myself. First my husband, then my daughter died an eerily similar way. They both suffered brain tumors, Dean’s being one large primary and my daughters from fifty seven smaller ones covering her entire brain.

For months, my mind cycled over and over if I had somehow brought this upon myself.  Did I cause their deaths? Was It Karma for past or present life? If so, what heinous thing did I need to amend for that deserved losing the love of my life and my oldest born daughter in my physical lifetime?

It is true, that I will never get over it, that I have had to learn to live with it. The waves of grief still wash over me, ebbing and flowing like the sea, the pain bigger than ever, just like some waves roll in larger and harder than others. And just like the sea, there is no control of the strength and power of the pain and water, washing over the earth…my body, leaving behind bits and pieces of debris.