There it was, what I had always been afraid of, what I must have known since I was a child I needed to prepare to defend myself against, and what it would take me years to accept was beyond my control. After making plans for how we would handle her remains, the nurse turned to me and said, “Just so you know, there was nothing we could have done, because you did not tell us you were in labor.”Įverything about the structure of trying to get medical care had filtered me through assumptions of my incompetence. I held my baby the whole way, because apparently that is what is done. The nurse wheeled me out of the operating room to take me back to recovery. When I awoke I was pushing and then my daughter was here.
Thirty seconds after the injection, I passed out before my head hit the pillow. Just as a contraction crested, the needle pierced my spine and I tried desperately to be still and quiet so he would not leave me there that way. He glared at me and said that if I wasn’t quiet he would leave and I would not get any pain relief. After three eternities an anesthesiologist arrived. At one point I awoke and screamed, “Motherfucker.” The nurse told me to watch my language. I was wheeled into a delivery operating room, where I slipped in and out of consciousness. “You should have said something,” she scolded me.Īfter several days of labor pains that no one ever diagnosed, because the pain was in my butt and not my back, I could not hold off labor anymore. Eventually a night nurse mentioned that I had been in labor for three days. The doctor turned to me and said, “If you make it through the night without going into preterm labor, I’d be surprised.” With that, he walked out and I was checked into the maternity ward.
The other two were tumors, larger than the baby. The image showed three babies, only I was pregnant with one. They asked again about my back, implied I had eaten something “bad” for me and begrudgingly, finally decided to do an ultrasound. By the end of three days, my butt still hurt and I had not slept more than fifteen minutes straight in almost seventy hours. I tried that for all the next day and part of another. The nurse said it was probably constipation. Just behind the butt muscle and off a bit to the side. When the doctor arrived, he explained that I was probably just too fat and that spotting was normal and he sent me home. The nurse looked alarmed, about the chair, and eventually ushered me back. After I had bled through the nice chair in the waiting room, I told my husband to ask them again if perhaps I could be moved to a more private area. That day I sat in the waiting room for thirty minutes, after calling ahead and reporting my condition when I arrived.
0 kommentar(er)
