I was put on a regimen of baby aspirin and I was all, “Seriously? Fucking baby aspirin?” But my doctor assured me that it would thin my blood enough to stop having miscarriages. And that’s when I had another miscarriage. Coincidentally, this is the same time when I screamed, “FUCK BABY ASPIRIN,” and my doctor agreed to prescribe a heavy-duty treatment of expensive blood thinners, and I was all, “Hell, yeah.” Then she said, “Here’s your giant duffel bag of syringes so that you can inject the medication directly into your bloodstream,” and I thought, “Oh. I have made a terrible mistake.” But by then it was too late to back out, because I’d read all the Internet horror stories about women having strokes because of this blood disease, and I thought that perhaps all the blood thinners would help the polio that I’d also diagnosed myself with, and so I took a deep breath and I started giving myself injections. In the stomach. Twice a day. Awesome. It’s basically like getting the treatment for rabies, except instead of five shots you have to get seven hundred.
And after many, many months of shots I found myself pregnant again. This time I was getting further along than ever before. By the second trimester my stomach had become a patchwork quilt of bruises, and when I would pull up my shirt for checkups the ultrasound techs invariably gasped in horror, until I quickly assured them that I was not being pummeled repeatedly in the stomach. They still gave Victor the stink-eye, though, which was actually a nice distraction, since every time we had an ultrasound I would wince in terror, certain that the baby would be gone. But it wasn’t.
I kept my appointments and adamantly insisted that none of them fall on the unlucky-numbered day. I took to calling that number “twelve-B.” As in eleven, twelve, twelve-B, fourteen. People thought I was insane, and I was. (Still am.) But I wasn’t taking any chances, and curing my worsening OCD wasn’t as important to me as the possibility that asking the cats to wish me luck was keeping the baby alive. Once, as Victor drove me to work in the morning, I realized that I’d forgotten to ask the cats to wish us luck and I demanded that he turn around immediately. He tried to logically explain that the cats didn’t actually have the ability to give me good or bad luck, but it didn’t matter. I knew that the cats weren’t in charge of good luck. These were the same cats who would stand inside the litter box and cluelessly poop over the side. Of course they weren’t controlling my destiny. I was controlling my destiny. I was just doing it by following all the little OCD routines that I’d picked up that had made life keep going. They were, of course, all the bizarre little routines that made my life incredibly complicated as well, but it was a mental illness I was willing to live with if it kept my baby (who we’d just been told was a girl) alive.
When I was seven months along, my coworkers decided to throw me a shower. I’d vehemently insisted against it, because I knew it would interfere with all of my secret little rituals, but they were adamant and decided to throw me an involuntary surprise shower. One that just happened to be on the unluckily numbered floor. I got into the elevator, expecting to go to a budget meeting, but I couldn’t bring myself to press the unlucky-numbered button, so I did what I always did, which was to ride the elevator until someone else got on and pressed that unlucky button for me. Except that no one was getting in the elevator to go to that floor. Because they were all already in the conference room waiting to surprise me. Twenty minutes later someone came looking for me and found me sitting helplessly in the corner of the elevator. I told them I was just dizzy and resting, but I think it was probably pretty obvious I was more than slightly unhinged.
By the eighth month my stomach was huge and tight, and I didn’t have any extra folds of fat to pinch away that I could stick the syringes into. My doctor insisted that although the needles were quite long, they were not long enough to actually reach the baby, but I was terrified that I would end up injecting blood thinners into her head, and so I would yell, “MOVE, BABY. GO TO YOUR LEFT OR YOU’RE GOING TO GET STABBED.” Then Victor would point out that most fetuses don’t speak English, but I’d been talking to her a lot and I felt sure she’d picked up a few basic phrases. I did worry, though, that she didn’t know which direction “left” was, and so I’d yell, “My left. Not your left. Unless you’re facing my belly button. Then it’s your left too. If you can see my liver you’ve gone too far.” Then Victor looked at me worriedly and I was all, “You know, you could help,” and he was like, “What the fuck can I do? You have obviously lost your mind.” Then I glared at him until he finally sighed resignedly, walked around me, leaned down, and shouted at the left side of my stomach, “THIS WAY, BABY. MOVE TOWARD MY VOICE!” And I smiled at him gratefully, but after I finished the shot Victor muttered, “If this doesn’t work out we’re just getting a puppy,” which was kind of a crazy thing to say, because we already had a puppy. Clearly Victor was losing his mind and it was up to me to keep our family together. Me and the cats, who were granting me luck only when I specifically asked for it, that is. So, yeah . . . there was a lot riding on me.
One of hundreds of injections. Ah, the simplicities of motherhood.
Time crept by until it was finally time to induce. We went to the hospital maternity ward, and Victor quickly turned the television up to drown out the woman across the hall who was enthusiastically screaming, “JESUSGODKILLMENOW.”
“She’s praying,” Victor said unconvincingly.