Emptied
That late-February day I checked me and the triplets into labor and delivery, it snowed six or seven inches, the world outside our room on the high-risk floor like a green screen, blank and full of possibility. Chad and I paid little attention to it—to its icy chill and constant shower of white—once we were inside the clinical ten-by-ten square room where we’d become parents.
That morning, at my regular checkup, my doctor had told me my blood pressure was dangerously high and that I had protein in my urine. “Pre-eclampsia,” she’d said. “Go now to labor and delivery. Your husband can bring your things.” I drove myself across the street to the hospital thinking I’d deliver that very day. I waddled down the long hall to the elevators, forgoing the wheelchair offer, because I thought walking would be faster. I didn’t stop to eat the last-minute meal every mother suggested. I hadn’t showered for the last time or taken that last anti-contraction pill that would allow me to sit on my backside for hours without constant tightening and pain. I didn’t know I’d sit for days in the same position, four fetal monitors—one for each baby, plus an extra for good measure—glued to my stomach, a blood-pressure cuff forever strapped to my bicep, an IV stuck into the flesh above my hand. I didn’t realize I wouldn’t be fed a single thing for more than three days.
“My bladder’s full again,” I told Chad as we waited, he on a cushioned bench beside my bed, his laptop open to study for an MBA final he’d take at two a.m. the night before I delivered. He rang a nurse, who unstrapped the monitors and let me waddle to the bathroom, dragging the IV cart behind me. Sitting on the toilet, waiting for pee to trickle through the cluster of my insides, I heard his laptop snap shut and land on the wheeled bed table.
“I’m going to grab something to eat,” he said, peaking in at my boulder-shaped body wrapped in in a Pepto-Bismal colored hospital gown. He half smiled in pity. “Can I get you anything?”
I focused on urine refusing to fall from my body. I tried to will it out. I looked back up at Chad, still leaning in the cracked door. Behind him, doctors and nurses passed by our door every few seconds. Anyone could’ve seen me there, this mountain on a potty, but no one looked.
“Don’t think I’m allowed.”
I couldn’t eat, the nurses had told me repeatedly, because I might deliver at any moment, though I was beginning to think this promise a lie. One of my doctors wanted to treat my pre-eclampsia with delivery; the other wanted to keep the babies cooking longer, each hour critical for their lung, immune, and gut development. God help me, I begged for the former, wanting more to end my pain—lungs pressed into flat discs, gallbladder pinched against inflamed stones, hips splayed wide and open, overstretched uterus irritable and impatient, stomach tying into nauseating knots, ankles swelling into unrecognizable logs—than see my children grow large and fat, the guilt of this desire weighing heavier on me than the sixty pounds I had gained for the babies’ sake. I questioned my parenting abilities. I wondered what kind of mother placed her own comfort above her children’s health. I tried to convince myself these survival instincts were normal, that to save my children, I’d first need to save myself. The babies, too, wanted out, I told myself. They, too, must’ve been growing tired of being kicked, smashed, prodded, starved, woken. The question wasn’t about mom versus babies. We were in this together.
On the second night of lying on my back in that hospital bed, Chad stood over me, holding my hand as the contractions came and went, each time climbing to delivery levels. I’d only slept in minute-spurts since being admitted. Pain, tightening, swelling, shallow breathing, heart thumping, nurses taking my blood pressure and moving monitors woke me each time.
“Please, can I have something to eat? I feel weak,” I begged a nurse as she checked the fetal monitors.
“No, you might deliver in the morning,” she said, tearing off a large strip of cardiotocography paper.
I tried to lift my backside from the bed, feeling the ache of my belly’s weight, now so large its sides touched the fitted sheet as I lay on my back. I was careful shifting like this because the monitors lost a fetal heartbeat each time I did, forcing the nurse to spend twenty minutes finding it again.
“Maybe just Jell-o?”
The nurse stopped gathering tape and gazed at my face. I’d seen the last pictures Chad had taken of my pregnant belly, which revealed my pallid skin and heavy eyes, dark with circles. I knew what that nurse saw in me. “Let me see if I can sneak you a popsicle,” she said and patted my arm, just above the needle pumping me with fluids. She slipped away and re-emerged moments later, handing me a popsicle orange as summer. If pleasure is the absence of pain, for that hour at least, I was one-hundred-and-eighty pounds of family—fifty-weeks-worth of gestation—floating on a bed of rose petals. But that hour didn’t last. Soon, the room grew starry and dim again. My hands shook.
So, I breathed—energy in, pain out—and focused on the expanse of belly popping through the impossibly small hospital gown, at its stretched, itchy skin, at the veins spread across its surface like a river map, and said, Come out, come out, wherever you are. Just then, a small roundness—a rump no bigger than the blossom end of an apple—poked out near my sternum and rolled along the underside of my skin. There’s Baby C, wee Gwenny, I thought, sleeping on her stomach with her bottom in the air. A thing so sweet I almost cried. Yes, yes, I could do one day more.
Finally, late that night, a nurse poked her head into our room. “You’ve been added to tomorrow’s surgery schedule,” she said as though cheering for me. She walked to the whiteboard and wrote Triplet Delivery, Friday, 5:30 p.m.
Though I saw my time written on the white board in our room the next morning—though logically, I knew I’d deliver—I convinced myself I’d be released any moment and driven home, where I’d lie in pain some more. I’d been through this routine only three weeks before when, after waking with low, period-like cramping, painful contractions every two minutes, and vomiting, I’d driven myself to the hospital. I’d walked the long halls to check in, been admitted, had Chad race home from work, was told I wasn’t dilated and then starved for two days in case I actually was, and sent home with a new contraction medication, a steroid shot to develop the babies’ lungs, instructions not to anger my irritable uterus, and a migraine from not eating for three days.
This time felt no different, all of it repeating like some purgatory sentence for my selfish desire to be done with it all. After all, no one had given me a due date. No one knows when triplets might come—perhaps at twenty-four weeks, or thirty, or thirty-four, even thirty-six. How was this day, at thirty-three-weeks-and-three days gestation, any different than the last?
“The delivery shouldn’t hurt,” the anesthesiologist said in slow, fatherly tones as I sat on the operating table, my legs dangling over the side, my belly sitting on my thighs as I leaned over, trying to create a C with my body, little feet poking my bladder, ribs, stomach. He loaded a long, thick needle with the spinal block and motioned for me to look down at my toes, which I couldn’t see. I held my breath not because I was afraid of moving but because no space existed then to breathe. “But you should feel lots of pressure. If it hurts, say so.”
I leaned as far as I could over my overlarge belly, showing hardly enough stretch of back for the doctor to find a vertebra. I felt a pinch and then hotness throughout my lower extremities. The anesthesiologist began counting down, his words now quipped and sharp. Ten, nine, eight, seven…here we go, people. Hands—many hands—grabbed for me and laid me down on the operating table, my feet feeling like strangers’ feet in strangers’ hands, the room no longer a jovial, slow amble but a hurried blur of numbers and calculations. A blue sheet emerged to shield my head from my body—that once lean, athletic one soon to be but a bloody bag of flesh, a horrific Santa bag spewing babies into the world. Doctors and nurses rushed to my side. My hands shook. My teeth chattered. Cutting, I heard my obstetrician say. A hand on my belly. Pressure. Bodily smells: rust, iron, feces, sweat. Chad’s voice in my ear: You’re doing great. The glint of stainless steel and sheen of glazed tile. So many nurses, doctors, assistants in this operating room. So many hands on me, in me, above me. So many machines beeping and voices counting swabs, babies, toes, nurses, breaths, heart beats. My own life-drum in my ear, chanting stay awake, stay awake, stay awake.
I honestly don’t know how my obstetrician did it—cut taut layers of skin with a sharp blade, through whatever muscle and fat still existed in my lower abdomen, slice open my stretched uterus, so crowded I’m sure she considered for a panicked moment she might nick a baby. I don’t know how she saw me splayed open, my cut slightly larger than the average caesarian so she could reach all the way in, all that blood and loose tissue framing wiggly new lives, the head attached to that body she’d cut still awake and talking. How did she then lean over, reach into that fleshy cavern, up to—what seemed from the shifts in pressure—her shoulder, grab for a pair of feet and pull? What kind of nightmares did she have that night?
Chad says he stayed above the curtain, seeing no more than I could see. His pictures—the ones he snapped with his phone—show only tiny, waxy, discolored babies, bloody gloves and sheets. Sometimes I wonder what he thought glimpsing the crimson rags coming from me, knowing his wife was being cut for the sake of his children. Had he, if even for a moment, placed my life above theirs, or had the babies already become preeminent?
As promised, the surgery wasn’t painful, all done in a mere half-hour, the actual delivery done in ten minutes. It wasn’t comfortable, either, my head swarming, the pressure odd and disorienting, my stomach retching. I tried to remember it all—tried to focus on my babies and take a snapshot of their wet bodies dangling before me. I can still feel the doctor’s two hands spelunking in the depths of my body, rooting around for babies and the negative pressure when a baby was pulled free: first Patten, two minutes later, Ainsley, two minutes after that, Gwen. I saw each one held above the gown cover, her tiny, gray body shivering in new air, hear her spring-kid bleating—only a second or two before she was handed to one of the six nurses in the room who passed her to yet another. I couldn’t hold my premature triplets myself. I couldn’t set them against my chest and cry like other moms could, though that first contact is supposed to be so essential for both mother and newborn to regulate the baby’s temperature and inspire the mother’s breasts to produce milk. The babies needed CPAP machines to breathe, IVs to get fluids. They were whisked away and warmed in incubators, monitored for signs of heart failure and lung function, watched over in case they should crash. None of us was fully stable. None of us seemed truly alive.
From the corner of my tear-soaked eye, I tracked movements: tubes going up each baby’s nose, lights warming, monitors tracking heart beats and instruments measuring straightened legs. I heard my doctor counting surgical swabs as she stitched me up. The nurses’ hurried orders echoed in my ears. They swarmed around the room tending to babies, sliding past me as they collected instruments and information, careful not to brush against my needled arm. I felt the anesthesia itch and nausea setting in. Once, I think (I can’t be sure—I could hardly keep my eyes open), a nurse wheeled an Isolette over to my operating table and let me glimpse a baby. Time halted in those seconds. The din of the room blended into white noise. I craned my neck and peered at a blue skeleton in a sagging diaper, a beanie draped over a diminutive head. I wanted to reach out and touch the plastic between us, but my hands had been tied down so I couldn’t reach the surgical field. The nurses wheeled that baby and the other two away to the NICU and Chad followed, leaving me cold and alone with a team of doctors, nurses, medical orders, and endless blue gowns. This wasn’t the defining moment of motherhood I’d always pictured. It wasn’t the happy scene of parents surrounding their new life, defining their new family. As stitching pulled at my gaping womb, I wondered when I’d hold my children, if I’d remember any of this to tell them some day. The now-mother of an entire brood, I hardly felt like a mother at all. I felt hollow, like all four hearts had been pulled from me instead of just the three.
Hours later, when I proved I could move my legs and my blood pressure had dropped, when the anesthesia itching had subsided, two nurses wheeled my bed down the hall from recovery into the NICU. There, I found Chad sitting among the three Isolettes lined up like orphanage cribs. From my bed, I watched the tiny spot of a baby’s exposed chest full of blue veins go up and down.
“Go ahead,” a nurse said, pointing to a rubber-looking glove attached to one of the Iisolette’s side. “Reach in and touch Gwen. She needs encouragement.” I didn’t stop to question whether I needed encouragement, too. I didn’t pause to wonder what I had left to give her. Gwen was the smallest, the least formed and stable of them. She looked fragile, her skin purple, her eyes sealed shut, as though she might not make it through the night. I reached over, slipped my hand inside that glove, and held my pinky under her tiny arm, realizing it and my finger were the same size. How strange, I thought, that she and two others had fit inside me only moments before. How baffling it was my body had formed them: babies weighing three, four, and four pounds each—large for triplets—all wearing CPAP masks that covered most of their faces, gastronomy tubes that would feed them, and intravenous wires pumping them with fluids and medicines. Their skin hung from their bones like oversized pajama onesies; their faces sunk in at the cheeks; their perfect caesarian heads, covered by full heads of dark, birdlike hair, rounded at the top. They seemed so helpless without my body protecting them. If only, I thought, my body could’ve held on a few days more.
“I have to go,” I said, after holding Gwen’s tiny hand. My eyelids were heavy. The room spun. “I don’t feel well.” The nurses wheeled my bed toward the door, where I vomited all over my white gown and robe, all down the side railings and all over the white hospital blanket, the orange of that beautiful popsicle now like dog’s urine in new snow.
“No sleeping,” a nurse said, wiping me down like a mother would her toddler. “You still need to pump.”
-Jody Gerbig
Jody Gerbig lives in the Midwest, where she is raising triplets and a writing career. Her essays have been published in Columbus Monthly, VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts, Mothers Always Write, and elsewhere. She is currently penning a memoir.