The doctor looked down at my stomach then looked up at me and said, “No. That’s a contraction.” She hooked me up to a monitor and determined that I was in labor. “We need to stop this. We need to check you into the hospital. You’re the size you should be at nine months, but it’s too early to deliver, and since we didn’t do the amnio, we have no idea what we’re dealing with.”
“If there’s something wrong,” my husband said, “it’s God’s will. Not because we didn’t prepare.”
“I told you months ago—there’s something wrong.”
“I’m taking her home.”
“Sir, you’re not letting me do my job. She needs to stay in the hospital.”
I lay there trying to breathe as their voices got angrier and louder. I wasn’t in pain, exactly, but there was a tightness that wouldn’t stop.
“Let’s go,” he said to me.
She was right behind him saying, “She can’t go.”
“She’s free to do whatever she wants!”
“That’s right. Mayte, this is your body. You don’t have to go.”
“Please, let’s not—”
“If you take her,” the OB said to my husband, “she’ll need to sign a release saying that she’s going of her own free will—against my advice—saying that you understand she’s in danger.”
“I’ll sign,” I said, in tears because I didn’t want to upset my husband who clearly needed me and our unborn child out of that room. He wasn’t used to someone standing up to him like that, and the more disrespected he felt, the more scared I was of the jangling, negative energy swirling around us in that little box of a room.
I signed, and we left, but in the car, I begged him to take me to another doctor. We went to the closest ER. He waited in the limo so there wouldn’t be a scene. I walked in alone and checked in under the name Marlene Gong and said as little as possible.
“I’m seven months pregnant. I’m having cramps.”
They hurried me back and hooked me up to the same machine with the same results. I asked for a second opinion. Another doctor came. I asked for a third opinion. My husband came in. He knew people would see who we were, and it would raise a hassle, but he couldn’t stand waiting out there any longer. He wasn’t happy because they weren’t telling him what he wanted to hear. I wasn’t happy because he wasn’t happy, but the third doctor was a petite red-haired woman who had a better way with him. She seemed to have an instinct about how to deliver information and make recommendations in a way that didn’t make him feel that he didn’t have a voice in all this and his faith wasn’t being disrespected. She didn’t just tell him, “There’s no way she’ll deliver vaginally.” She showed him the measurements and said, “This is why it will have to be a C-section.”
“The body can do remarkable things.”
“Yes, but sometimes it needs help.”
He must have been well and truly terrified by now, because he agreed to have me stay in the hospital on a magnesium drip. I checked into a room under the name Mia Gregory. My husband stayed with me for a long while, singing to Amiir, watching for kicks and hiccups. He put his cheek against my stomach and whispered, “You’ll be okay.” I drifted off to sleep, and when I woke up, Mama was there. Then she left, and I was alone with Amiir and the soft pipping and beeping of the monitor. I stroked my belly and sang to my baby.
… You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me happy…
Days turned to weeks. Weeks stretched to a month. I’d forgotten how hairy my legs could get—not to mention the unmentionable bits that require landscaping. I tried to go take a shower and ended up on all fours in the bathroom. I watched with longing as other mothers checked in, delivered healthy babies, and checked out again. Lying there like a beached whale, I saw on TV that Madonna had a brand-new baby.
A nurse had to come and help me struggle to my feet. I don’t remember her name. I’ll call her Angela, because she always brought this positive, loving energy into the room. She came in every day and said, “How’s our sunshine?” and then she’d put her stethoscope on my belly and smile when Amiir kicked at the pressure of her hand. Every day, she tried to get me out of bed and into a wheelchair so we could go out and get some air. She tried to coax me into the pool, but she only ever convinced me to leave the room once, and it was such a weird feeling. I didn’t want to do anything but hibernate and sustain the child inside me. I felt fate balanced like a sword on top of my head. I didn’t want to do anything to tip it one way or the other.
My husband came every day and tried to be supportive, but he was horribly uncomfortable with the idea of me being there week after week. It was actually a relief when he had to go to Japan for a few days. He called me several times a day, and we talked for hours sometimes.
I told him, “I like this. It’s just like when I was sixteen.”
He laughed and said, “Yeah.”
Those hours were an oasis in all this. A reminder of who we were to each other.
While he was gone, the doctors came and told me that there was an injection they could give me to help the baby’s lungs mature faster.