The blue-eyed nurse ran the Doppler over my belly. Nothing. She asked me how far along I was. "Thirty-seven weeks, five days," I answered. The longer she tried to find the heartbeat, the sicker I got. I knew already. I just couldn't believe what I knew. Someone went to get the ultrasound machine.
"Oh my God, I can't believe this," I said stupidly, the way that every person in shock has ever said it. "I should have come in yesterday," I said to my husband. For a second the nurse with the Doppler thought she had a heartbeat, and I started to cry in relief. But it was just my own heart.
I saw his empty chest on the ultrasound machine. "There's no heartbeat," I said.
"His hand is in front of his chest," someone said hopefully. But I'd had six ultrasounds. I knew this baby. The last time I'd seen him, four days before, he'd been playing with his cord. His hand had never hung limply by his side like that.
My baby is dead," I said to the doctor. It was not a question.
"It looks like it," she said. She made eye contact with me, but she looked more worried than anything else. Was she afraid I would throw myself on the floor and start tearing at my hair and clothes? I don't know how other people react to this kind of news. I suspect that, like me, a lot of them just shut down. She told me they were going to bring in a special machine to check for a specific form of prenatal arrhythmia. We waited. They checked. It was not an arrhythmia.
"What's next?" I said. "Induction?" I wanted to do something, anything. Get me to the next room, the next place, the next step. Anywhere but in that room where I had found out that my son had died.
The doctor nodded. "But you can go home and come back, you can take some time, talk about things..." I shook my head. There was no way I was leaving that hospital, knowing what I knew.
Jonathan was crying, but I told him he had to call our friend Gwen and let her know so that she could pick up Jasper from school and take him to her house for the night. I don't know how he managed to make that call, but when he came back in the room we all trooped down the hall to a labor and delivery room. It was a little after noon.
After that it was almost like any other labor. Except that there was only one monitor, on me. A couple of Korean nurses came in and chatted with each other while they tried to extract a lot of blood out of the vein on the top of my forearm, for all the tests they were going to run in an effort to find out what happened. I said "Ow!" rather pointedly when they painfully poked and pushed on my forearm, but I didn't say "Fuck!" until another nurse came back and told me that the other nurses hadn't gotten enough blood and she would have to take more, from the inside vein of the other arm.
Mostly, though, it was extremely important to me that I be polite to everyone. I said thank you to everyone. I did not cry.
Jonathan called his father. "Zimbo's dead," he said. I called my brother. "I have some bad news," I said. I asked my brother to call my parents and tell them, and also let them know I'd call them the next day, after the labor was over. I just couldn't talk to them, knowing what I had to get through.
I got a dose of Misoprostl. We ordered dinner. I seem to remember that we ate it somehow. I have no idea how those hours passed, but six hours later I got another dose of Misoprostl that finally brought on the heavy contractions. In fact, they were the strongest I had ever had, stronger than I'd had with Jasper, who was also induced. The nurse shot me up with Fentanyl, and we tried to watch the 40 Year-Old Virgin, but I couldn't focus on it. I felt high as a kite, but the pain was just as strong. I asked for an epidural, which was done carefully in between contractions. When the doctor came to check me after the epidural was in place, I was 7 centimeters dilated.
I was shaking uncontrollably, so they piled blankets on me. We watched The Voice, which I had never seen. I had a conversation with the nurse about Christina Aguilera, how everyone picks on her for being fat but she's really not fat all.
When the nurse took my temperature, I had a fever. I'm going to die too, I thought to myself. I have a raging infection and it killed my baby and they won't be able to control it and it will kill me too. I didn't feel much about it one way or the other. But when she took a bunch of the blankets off of me my temperature went back down to normal.
Much sooner than I expected it was time to push. Now I was scared. Did I remember how to push? Would it go on for 2 hours and 40 minutes, as it had with Jasper? What would my dead baby look like? I was terrified to see him.
I don't know whether it was because it was my second baby, or because he was dead, but three pushes and he was out. It was just after 10 pm.
"He's perfect," the OB said. "Just perfect."
And then I did cry. For my husband this was the worst moment, worse even than finding out he was dead, hearing my cry of anguish. I cried from the effort, the exhaustion, the relief of being done with the work, and the grief of the absolute futility of it all.
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