Be careful what you pray for. You just might get it.
Cut to Friday evening, me on my knees in my bedroom, begging
God for a sign about whether or not to go ahead with the embryo transfer.
Two-and-a-half weeks post-tooth extraction, my mouth was
still throbbing and I was still popping Advil and Tylenol every six hours. I
had spent that afternoon shuttling my husband to and from a colonoscopy. It was
the final of a trio of appointments he wanted to take care of pre-transfer. The
first, with an ENT for snoring, was utterly unhelpful. (Flonase and a wedge
pillow? Google could have told us that.) The second, with a urologist, got
canceled – after which, his symptoms mysteriously vanished. And now the
colonoscopy, which required a brutal combination of semi-starvation and an
onslaught of laxatives for 24 hours prior – and after all of which, the results
were inconclusive. My husband would have to repeat the procedure in three
months.
The night before all this, my baby had woken up crying. She’d
been constantly congested for two months, which the pediatrician said was seasonal,
then strep. But the stuffiness didn’t subside after 10 days of antibiotics, so
I took her to an ENT. He said her adenoids were slightly enlarged, but because
he generally didn’t operate on babies under nine months old, we should try a
steroid nasal spray instead. That had proved totally useless. Now, she had so much
mucous in her nose and throat, she could hardly breathe. This made her panic
and cry, unless she was upright, so I spent much of the night going back and
forth from the bed to the rocker.
So by Friday, I was overwhelmed and exhausted and just
imagining bringing another human being into the world felt absurd at best and
irresponsible at worst.
My husband, surprisingly, did not feel the same way. When I
picked him up from the colonoscopy, he seemed to not only be back to his
boisterous, optimistic self, he also dropped this bomb as I pulled into the
driveway: “I’m OK with another kid.” He said this from the backseat of the car,
where he was entertaining our restless baby.
Since my tooth extraction, I had felt his enthusiasm for the
next baby waning. At one point, I dared him to say I should cancel the transfer,
but he couldn’t. (I suspect that’s what he’d prefer but he loves me too much to
stand in the way of what I want.) Part of me wanted him to say it because I
have been feeling increasingly ambivalent about – and equally unable to cancel –
the transfer. It was like being in a miserable relationship and waiting for the
other person to break up with you because you didn’t have the balls to end
things.
But, now, he was on board with another baby and I was wary.
Idling in the driveway – because we’re never alone anymore and have no
opportunities to talk about Big Life Decisions – I expressed all my fears,
which are primarily financial and/or health-related.
He said he had those fears, too, plus another one: the deteriorating
state of our relationship. We haven’t had sex in weeks, and even before that, I
can’t remember the last time I enjoyed it (second trimester of pregnancy,
probably). Personally, I’m at a point in my life where I could never have sex
again and that would be just fine with me. The feeling is not mutual, however.
Even if we could set sex aside, we barely have any intimacy anymore. No more
morning coffee chats, no leisurely walks or lakeside runs, no Sunday church services. The closest
we have to "together time" is watching an episode or two of The Office in the
evening while rocking the baby to sleep. And because of his snoring, my husband
has been sleeping on the couch.
“I don’t think it means anything about us,” he said about
our sleeping arrangements. “But I don’t like it.”
I was kind of OK with not sharing a bed with him, because I
was still sharing a bed with the baby. I’m a light sleeper, and I can handle
interruptions from one bedmate, but not two. The sleeplessness had been so bad before he moved to the couch that I'd made worthless threats to get my own room and let the
baby and my husband figure out their own sleeping arrangements.
My husband asked if I’d noticed the distance between us. Of
course I had. I just didn’t know what to do about it. We’ve been in crisis mode
all month. Just making sure everyone is showered and fed and fulfilling their
household and professional responsibilities has been daunting.
“I miss us,” my husband said.
I guess I miss us, too? But more than that, I miss myself.
Somewhere in the pain and aftermath of the tooth extraction, I lost who I used
to be. Now I often feel like a bitter, angry, singed version of myself, just
going through the motions, just trying to get through one more day.
So there I was on Friday evening, on my knees, pleading. “Please,
God, guide me. Speak to me. Let me know what Your will is. If I’m not meant to
go forward with the transfer, make that clear to me.”
That night, about an hour after the baby and I went to bed,
she woke up screaming. It wasn’t a hunger scream. It was a pain scream. I
changed her diaper. I tried a bottle. She wasn’t having it. She wailed and
wailed. I tried suctioning her nose and got some mucus out, but now she was so
upset that the amount of mucus she produced overpowered what I was able to suck
out. She started choking again.
I went downstairs, where my husband was retreating to the
basement to watch a movie with my younger teen, seemingly oblivious to what was going
on. I was going to chastise him for being unhelpful, but when I opened my
mouth, what came out was: “I think we need to go to the ER.”
Which we did. We raced to the closest children’s hospital and
my husband dropped us off at the entrance. I was asked to fill out a sheet with
my baby’s name and her symptoms. I wrote “choking on mucus” in the hopes that
it would get us to the top of the queue, but in the grand tradition of
emergency rooms, nothing was treated like an emergency.
Though a green stoplight on the wall indicated the wait
would be under an hour, I later realized they probably never updated it. The
baby was calm for maybe 10 minutes, but then she saw a young dad and his
7-year-old-ish daughter in face masks hanging around the aquarium and she
freaked out again. The pain wailing ramped up, and by the time we were ushed
to a desk by a triage nurse, the baby was inconsolable. Halfway through the
intake (which was near impossible to do through masks and over the sound of crying),
the baby threw up a ton of mucus all over my coat.
Finally, we were taken to a room. A nurse came in and said
she would suction the baby’s nostrils out. I held the baby’s arms down while
the nurse hooked up a loud, scary machine and shoved tubes in her nose. It looked
like some kind of torture device. I started crying, the tears dripping inside my
mask. When her nasal passages were finally clear, the baby calmed down.
But then we had to wait. And wait. And wait. It was almost
two hours before a doctor arrived, and when she did, she performed the usual
ear, nose, and throat inspection but didn’t have any revelations. She suggested another
nasal spray to dry her up for the night, followed by an X-ray to check how
large the adenoids were.
The X-ray was another round of trauma. My husband and I were
outfitted in lead aprons. (“Any chance of pregnancy?” the tech asked me. Loaded
question.) My husband held the baby’s head and I held her arms. The tech strapped her torso and legs to a plastic board. Then the X-ray tech went behind the wall
and took the pictures. The baby was wailing again, and by the time we
finished the X-rays, she was all full of mucus because of the crying.
Back to the room we went. I paced the floor, bouncing the
baby, trying to get her to calm down. Time moved so strangely. Despite the late
hour, I didn’t feel tired, but my husband kept falling asleep on the couch. This
made me mad, that he couldn’t even be present in the simultaneously terrifying
and utterly bored state we were in.
At the three-hour mark, we still didn’t have a read on the
X-ray or a treatment plan. My husband started roaming the halls and bothering nurses
until the doctor came in. I was unclear on what the X-ray showed, other than the
baby’s adenoids weren’t huge (which we already knew). Still, the doctor said we
should follow up with ENT and schedule an adenoidectomy.
By the time we were finally released, the baby was so
exhausted she started wailing again. She cried the whole way home. I drove as
fast as I could, wondering what the hell just happened. “We sped to
the ER to get help and now we’re speeding home because the ER was of little help,”
I thought. Other than getting the snot sucked out of her, did we just cause her
more upset? Should I have just put her in the bath at home and gotten her to
calm down instead? Why can’t I make good decisions? Why does healthcare suck?
Why do bad things keep happening? When is this fucking awful year going to end?
I silently screamed, “WHERE ARE YOU, GOD?!” at the black sky.
Back at home, I removed the baby from her bunting. Her
onesie was soaked through with sweat from all the crying. I put on her pajamas
and I could sense a shift in her, like, “Oh, I’m home. These are my pajamas.
I’m going to bed now.” She had a few sips of juice and fell into a deep asleep.
I, however, was wide awake, my mind racing. What did this
all mean? Had I asked God for a sign and this is what He did? Practically
suffocated my baby? Why didn’t He just make my endometrial lining too thin? Or
cancel my flight? Or close my clinic due to coronavirus? Why this heavy-handed,
hurting-the-people-I-love tactic?
Before I finally succumbed to a nightmare-filled sleep, I
set an alarm for Saturday morning because I had yet another appointment – to get
my fucking throbbing mouth checked again. I returned to the emergency dentist who
loved trying-to-be-cool country music because he seemed to be the only person
who understood my pain.
His take: my dry socket had been very bad, and though it was
showing signs of healing now, he was not surprised that I was still in pain. “No
one knows how to cure dry socket. We just manage it,” he said.
I explained that I was feeling frustrated and impatient with the pain because I was going through infertility treatment, and had a transfer scheduled
soon. I needed to be off pain medications by then.
“I know this isn’t your area of expertise, but should I cancel the
transfer?” I asked.
The dentist was dumbfounded. He clearly had no experience with infertility.
“Am I going to feel better in a week?” I asked, trying to
phrase my question in a way he could answer.
“I’ve had patients who take up to four weeks to recover
after dry socket treatment,” he said. In other words, I was barely halfway
through the healing process. “Can you wait a few days and see how you feel and
then decide?”
Well, sure, I could. But at this point, the pain feels like
a part of me. I’m afraid it is never going to end.
A hygienist walked me out.
“Good luck on your transfer!” she said. “I hope it all goes
well!”
“Thanks,” I mumbled, feeling more and more convinced that the
transfer wasn’t going to happen.
“Do you have any children now?” she asked.
For some reason, I said, “Yes, two. They’re older.”
I don’t know why I said that. It just came out. I guess I
thought if I said, “I have three,” she would look at me like, “It doesn’t sound
like you need infertility treatments!” or “And you have to have another one?!”
It struck me that maybe I was being greedy, that no one “needs”
four children. And yet, in my head, I’ve conceived of it as: I have two
daughters, and now I am going to have two more. In my mind, they come in pairs,
not all at once.
That night, the baby once again had trouble sleeping. She
kept waking up crying, which made me cry because I was so exhausted. I tried a
new electric nasal aspirator and it was useless. My husband ended up rocking
the baby to sleep as I lay in bed, worrying. Then I constructed an elaborate
pillow arrangement so the baby could sleep with her head elevated but without
putting her at risk of suffocation (I hoped). As I lay there, wondering if I would ever
sleep again, I said, “Fine, God. You win. I’ll cancel the transfer.”
But then we all slept. And morning came. And here I am –
torn and conflicted and arguing with reality again.
On the one hand, adding another kid to the mix right now
seems insane. On the other hand, I’ve come this far, my lining is likely raring
and ready to go, my travel is all booked, so why not just go ahead with the
transfer? It might not work anyway. And if it does, I guess I have nine months to
figure out how the hell I’m going to juggle everything?!
If I do back out, what is my excuse? The tooth or my baby’s
adenoids? Am I postponing? Or canceling and asking for a refund? I don’t know
if I can tolerate the ambiguity of just putting it off until I feel better.
Because who knows when that will be?
Do my emotions matter here? Because if I cancel, even if my
brain “knows” it’s the right thing to do, I will be devastated.
One more question: Is faith in the fearless plowing ahead or in the thoughtful pause?
And how the fuck do I get any answers?