Something is Wrong

Every night we lay together in our bed. She insists on sleeping with her head nestled firmly where my arm and shoulder meet. She tells me,“I like your arm is my pillow.” I don’t always like my arm as a pillow, especially when that arm goes numb and the crick in my neck feels permanent.

I do not push her away and I know why.

As she drifts into slumber, my mind often wanders back to the night she was born, for I am lying in the same spot where an intangible intuition alerted my sleeping brain that my body was pushing her away, pulling us apart. Why and how I woke myself up that night I will never truly know.

But I know that doing so kept both my daughter and me alive.

On November 25th, 2019, a Monday, I walked into my high school classroom. I was thirty six weeks pregnant and spoke with my students about the significance of the Monday before Thanksgiving break. Two years earlier it had been my first day back from maternity leave. I didn’t know it then, but that Monday would also be my last day of work before the abrupt start of my second maternity leave.

After school I went in for a routine prenatal appointment and left completely overwhelmed. My blood pressure read 130/80, not medically high, but much higher than my normal readings. I mentioned an ocular migraine I experienced the week before to the doctor, but she didn’t seem overly concerned until she put her hands on my belly.

“I don’t want to alarm you, but the baby feels small for thirty six weeks,” she said. In that moment I knew I wouldn’t make it to forty weeks with this pregnancy.

That night I sat around the table with my two year old daughter, Annie, and husband, Nic. I told him what the doctor had said and worried about being unprepared. “I think the baby will be born really soon and nothing is ready at all,” I said nervously. He assuredly replied, “Don’t worry. If the baby were born tomorrow, we’d be fine.”

I went to bed at 10 pm. Annie and Nic were already asleep in the bed we shared. At 11 o’clock I opened my eyes from a deep sleep. I lay motionless for a few seconds, eyes wide open in the darkness. Something felt off, wet. I thought maybe Annie had peed the bed, but when I touched her bottom, it was dry. I thought, well maybe I peed the bed, but when I touched the sheets they felt sticky, not like urine at all.

My heart sank deep into my body at that moment. Something was very wrong.

“Something is wrong, Nic,” I said while standing to turn on the lamp. He jumped up and in the light we both saw the bed covered in blood. “Oh my god,” he exclaimed. I could hear the fear in his voice and I saw it in the way his mouth formed the words. “Should I call an ambulance?” he asked. “No,” I replied, “I don’t want to wait. Let’s get in the car and go.”

At that point a lot of blood started gushing out, including big clots. I thought I was having the baby right then. He grabbed Annie and we drove like lightning in the dark of night through softly falling snow to Bozeman Deaconess. Annie cried most of the way. My eyes were tightly closed, except for the brief moment when I looked back at her and out the window at the white spotted darkness whizzing by.

Both of my arms were wrapped desperately around my belly and my heart begged for the baby to move, begged for a sign there was still life in my womb.

The heartbeat that echoed through the emergency room when they strapped the monitor across my belly was one of the greatest sounds I have ever heard. I must have asked the nurses a hundred times “Is the baby okay? Is the baby okay? But the baby is okay, right?” They hurried around the room, assuring me that yes, for now the baby is okay. For now?

Their voices and eyes and mouths hinted at a nervousness, at a fear of time as they started prepping me for surgery, all the while weighing my pants and the pads that collected the blood hemorrhaging from my body. While logically I knew that there wasn’t a way to fix it and go on with the pregnancy, the thought of birthing the baby was even more overwhelming.

“Is the baby okay?” I asked again. I remember looking to the corner of the room where Nic sat in a chair with Annie on his lap. My mind shifted to ‘Am I ok?’ when I saw Annie’s little face looking at me, her mom, lying in a hospital bed, red everywhere, under fluorescent lights in the middle of the night.

Finally the doctor on call arrived. I looked up to see Dr. Melissa Wolf walk through the door wearing a green hooded sweatshirt. Our eyes locked and she said “Oh, it’s you.” A rush of relief washed over me. I knew Dr. Wolf; she had been my doctor with Annie. I trusted her. Everything was going to be okay.

She placed the ultrasound wand across my abdomen and said “Let’s see what’s going on here...yep, it’s the placenta. Let’s go to surgery.” She was dressed in scrubs when I saw her next. I hugged Dr. Wolf with my whole soul as they prepped my back for the spinal tap. My arms were dead weights upon her shoulders, my head rested next to hers.

I closed my eyes and I surrendered. I leaned into her as I would fall into the arms of my own mother, entrusting her to take care of me and my child.

On the operating table my body took over and the shock of it all caught up to my nervous system. My arms began to shake uncontrollably, they hurt, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.“Oh, hello there,” I heard Dr. Wolf say from behind the blue curtain. Nic held my trembling hand and tried to bring a sliver of joy into the moment. “Is it Mira or Leo, Mira or Leo, we’re about to find out,” he kept repeating. I was too distracted by the shaking and still wrapping my head around not being pregnant anymore.

Looking back, I’m glad I didn’t know what was happening, that my placenta was abrupting, that the sand of an hourglass was slipping away into oblivion inside my uterus as the placenta detached more and more, grains of sand counting down the minutes, the seconds, until the life I’d been growing and loving would be over, over before it even started, before we ever met face to face. Dr Wolf knew, but I didn’t.

And then a baby girl emerged, took her first breath, swatted at the scalpel, let out her first cry. Mira was born, little and mighty, right before the last grain of sand dropped. She whisked by me, and I caught a glimpse of her tiny body out of the corner of my left eye. She was taken away to another room and I didn’t see her again for hours.

Dr. Wolf simultaneously birthed and saved Mira’s life. What does it feel like to save the life of a person unborn? The relief in her eyes told me how close we were to losing Mira.

Women can bleed out in minutes from a placental abruption, and if the placenta fully detaches, the baby's lifeline is cut off, the connection between mother and child is lost. I asked her later what would have happened if I hadn’t woken up. She said “I think you know what would have happened,” and told me not to think about it, not to dwell on it. But when your baby is born moments before dying, when you wake yourself up before bleeding out in bed next to your daughter and husband, it’s hard not to think about it all the time.

I gritted my teeth as they put me back together. Though numb, I felt the tugging, the stitching, the stapling - painless but present. I recall the reassuring pressure of Nic’s forehead against mine, the tight grasp of his hand, the silent relief between us. Exhaustion weighed down upon me and I closed my eyes, blocking out the bright surgical lights. Ironically I could only think of my bed, which now lay empty and covered in blood.

Hours passed before they wheeled me down to the nursery to meet little Mira. She had an IV in her forehead to keep her blood sugar stable. I didn’t hold her. I didn’t kiss her. I touched her little hand, felt her little fingers. Later, when I was finally able to hold her tiny body, I felt clumsy and awkward.

I remember that she smelled so sweet, and I inhaled her newborn scent with abandon, rubbing my cheek gently over her small, fuzzy head.

After five days we were cleared to go home. While I was anxious to return to my house, the idea of it felt foreign and I wasn’t sure how it would be to go into my bedroom again. By the time we left for home it was dark. I didn’t want to drive home in the dark because it took me back to the desperation of the ride to the hospital. I felt my heart tense up as we pulled out of the hospital parking lot. My body was remembering.

We arrived home and walked through the front door, carrying a baby that looked much too small to be in a car seat. And she almost was. At four pounds, six ounces, she was just barely big enough to legally ride in our Chicco Keyfit. My mother-in-law was there with Annie. Flowers were in a vase on the table. I took my shoes off but left my coat on. Nic, his mom, and I all fell to our knees around Mira on the green circle rug just past the front hall.

I don’t remember saying anything. I don’t remember anyone saying anything. We looked at each other and burst into tears. We were home, all of us.

I knew I still had to face my bedroom, to look at my bed, to sleep there. Nic had cleaned the room, spending hours washing blood and bits of tissue from sheets, blankets, and mattress protectors. He had already told me that there was one drop of blood that ran down the side of our wooden bed frame from when I stood up to turn on the light.

He said that he had left it, that it would need to be sanded out if I didn’t want it there anymore. I remember bending down to look at the drop of blood and tracing the trail it left as it dripped down the side of the bed with my finger.

I don’t need him to sand it out, I thought. It can stay.

I don’t look at it very often, but I think about it every night. I picture it as I lay with Mira while she falls asleep. She used to sleep right on my chest, her head under my chin, our hearts beating on top of each other. Now she’s too big, and her head nestles in to find the perfect spot on my arm. I reach over to turn out the light.

Every night there is a moment where my eyes are closed and I think of the trail of blood. I open my eyes in the darkness, but now it is not fear I feel. It is gratitude. Deep, deep, guttural gratitude that I hold my Mira in my arms, sniff her head, hear her breathing and falling into sleep. And so I cannot push her away. Instead we hold on tight, like we have since the beginning.

~Alison Fischer