alone at last

this is the first time we have been completely alone since we learned johannes was dead. we have always been in someone else’s presence for the last 19 days, even at night after we came home from the hospital, when my mom was asleep downstairs in our little 1500 sq ft interior-door-less house. i think justin is a little spooked at being home alone, but i confess i feel newly normal, or at least the way i would like normal to be, i.e. neither of us going to work and just hanging out around the house, me in my t-shirt and rash, justin in his homer simpson slippers, listening to patsy cline and elvis costello.

our son, johannes christian (aka hans), was stillborn on 17 February 2005, although he probably died two or three days before that day. on the morning of the 16th, we got up, ate our toast and drank chocolate silk, and went to the fetal diagnostic center for our weekly non-stress test. and when i got up on the table and the nurse put the monitor on me, they couldn’t find our son’s heartbeat. and i couldn’t stop sobbing, because i knew he was gone. they rushed us into the ultrasound room (if only we had known that thinking your baby was dead was the way to get in fast, we could have saved the hours and hours of our lives we have lost sitting in that waiting room!). as soon as they put the transponder on my abdomen, i saw the flat lines at the bottom of the screen, and the technician said, “i can’t find anything.” and then it was real. that was the single most horrible moment of my entire life (and there have been a few truly horrible moments in the last 35 years). i must have scared all of the other mothers whose fetuses were still alive with my screams, and a nasty, small, spiteful place in me kind of likes it. i remember clinging to justin and howling the word “no” over and over. justin alternated between holding on to me and rubbing his face into the ultrasound gel on my stomach, shaking with sobs.

if there is a hell, that was it.

i just realized i have not woken up in the night reliving that horror the last couple of nights; what a relief. but writing it down makes it raw all over again.

justin called his mom and said “there’s no heartbeat” and “get [laura’s mom] here” and called his work and said “i’m not coming in” and “don’t ask”. the radiologist came in and asked if i had noticed any fluid leaking, which i hadn’t, because there was almost no amniotic fluid left. fortunately, my ob’s office is in the same building, on the same floor, and they got his exam room cleared and took us over through the winding halls that connect the offices, for which i am thankful, because at that moment i could not have walked through the waiting room of women with bellies full of throbbing, galloping heartbeats.

my ob is the kind of person who really thinks about what he says before he says it and doesn’t feel obligated to fill a silent space just because it’s there, for which i love him. he came in prepared to give us lots of space in which to freak out (maybe he had heard my howls 15 minutes before from across the building), but what i needed most at that moment was to know exactly what the plan was and in particular how he planned to extract this dead baby from my body. so he gave it to us straight: they would induce labor, the best case scenario was that i would deliver in as little as 12 hours but 24 was probably more like it and it could take longer than that. i had expected (in the flash of a moment i had had to generate any expectations) that it would be more like an abortion, where they would sort of disseminate the fetus and extract it semi-surgically; at the very least, i assumed they would do a c-section. But my ob felt that there were too many unnecessary risks with a c-section. with the hindsight of 20 days, the day i spent in labor gave me a little time to begin to process everything that was happening (and everything that wasn’t going to happen) and for my mom and justin’s dad to get to us. but at the time i was horrified that i was still going to have to go through labor and deliver a dead baby.

the weird thought i’m having today is that for once justin and i weren’t snickering in the doctor’s office. months ago i had a dream of a somewhat intimate nature involving my ob and certain, shall we say, “adult” behaviors of the variety that i do not normally prefer in my waking hours. (i feel the need to defend myself and assert that i am a pretty open-minded individual, but there are some things i like, and some things for which i do not care, and i’m over that need now.) when i woke up, i found the dream so funny that i had to tell justin; consequently, at every subsequent check-up, we would at some point look at each other and have to suppress our giggles. the week before we found out johannes was dead, the ob was examining me manually to determine if my cervix was at all dilated, and justin plead ed with him to give us something, even a centimeter. and for the next week we kept cracking up at the absurdity of my husband watching another person, about whom i had enjoyed an erotic thought or two, feeling me up, and begging him to give us something, anything.

so i guess you had to have been there.

after we had gotten an idea of how things were going to go, my ob examined me and found that i was dilated about 1 ½ cm and that the membranes around johannes were still intact, which at least explains how i wasn’t aware of the loss of amniotic fluid.

my ob went to get the nurse’s aide with hair even shorter than mine to walk us over to labor and delivery, justin and i held on to each other, and cried a little, and i think i asked him more than once to assure me that we were going to be all right. walking over to l&d was difficult when we got to their entrance with all of the beautiful black and white photos of parents and babies together. i had been enjoying those photos for months, going all of the way back to when i was only about 4 or 5 weeks pregnant and we weren’t sure if he/she was going to make it, and i had to go to l&d for blood work on a Sunday afternoon. the babies in these pictures are beautiful and homely and perfect in their imperfections; they were just the most incredible, breathtakingly-honest baby pictures i had ever seen. i felt from the first that the photographer really loved these babies. now i felt like these pictures mocked me.

we had to wait a few minutes while they got their most-private birthing room ready for us (translation: if we put her in the most remote room, she will be less likely to scare the women with real babies with her howling). justin’s mom and brother got there 30 seconds later; i have always told anyone that would listen that i hit the jackpot in the in-law department, but i loved my mother-in-law more than ever at that moment. she called my office for me and then sat with me and held my hand while justin and his brother went to get the suitcase we had packed so carefully and had in the back of our station wagon for what seemed like an eternity, anticipating hans's birth. i was glad that i had packed johannes's things in a separate bag; at that moment i could not have handled seeing his little alpaca sweater our friend mike brought him from peru that we had planned for him to wear home. they also put the car seat and his bag in my mother-in-law’s car, for which i was grateful. i did not want to drive home with an empty car seat.

in the first moments after i stopped howling in the ultrasound room, my immediate thought was that i wanted someone to go through our house and strip anything remotely baby-related from it before i went home. thankfully, before i asked anyone to do that, i had a change of heart and realized i wanted, needed to go through his things myself.

justin’s stepfather got to the hospital, and he could barely speak. not to take anything away from justin’s dad, with whom he has a great relationship, but his stepfather was as much johannes's grandparent as anyone else. My in-laws and i bonded a little further when they came into the birthing room to see me after i had gotten into my hospital gown; when they moved to the side of the room to get out of the way of the anesthesiologists, they were treated to a prime view of my big, blindingly-white behind. Later, my mother-in-law insisted they didn’t notice, but i think they were just trying to spare my feelings.

the outside world invades, but it’s a welcome invasion, because (1) it’s matt and sara, who (like my ob) are people who think about what they say and don’t feel obligated to speak to fill in the conversational gap and therefore can be trusted to mean what they say when they say it and (2) this has become the world’s longest blog entry and i’ve spilled about all of the guts i can stand to spill right now and could frankly use a therapeutic margarita. oh, and also (3) continued contact with the outside world motivates me to bathe daily, which i must go do promptly.