Amma's blog: "I Am"

Matt and Trey had their way with my funny bone last night - yes, another stellar episode of Southpark; Dancing With Smurfs.

Now in Act Four of Peer Gynt I read - "Playing the fool is a sign of youth!"

Or is it...

I suppose it depends on what foolish act it is you engage in. Fourteen years ago it was November of 1995, time for celebrations, time for a complete and utter lack of city sponsored Thanksgiving decorations and right on to the main event of consumer driven expenditures in businesses both large and small (always good for a city) - CHRISTMAS TIME!!

So there I was, 20 weeks pregnant with a very precious life inside me and a very precious six year old beside me; my not yet born youngest daughter, and my amazing youngest son. The older children were working, though I had urged them not to add to the burden of their teenage years and schooling with working too. I worked more than enough hours to give them the material goods they may have wanted - but all my children have always been determined to do things the way it felt right to them.

Silver Bells in the City was the catchy phrase for the annual lighting of the towering Christmas tree that stands in front of the Capitol. It was a bitterly cold night. My unborn daughter's father was working, as he always does, and I missed his warm arms around me. My arms were there, however, and my young son was so cold - though properly dressed - and I could give him some of my warmth. So I picked him up, just as I have always done with my children - to this day I know I could pick up the biggest of them and carry them if it had to be done. His little feet dangled to my knees, but the warmth of my body, filled with the growing child held him tightly. I held him, and carried him until the glorious tree was lit. 

What I did not realize in the cold of the celebration was that my intestines were falling through a hole in my abdomen. Then they were twisting. It was not until later that night, as the pain became intense that I told my love, now home from work, that we must go to the hospital - something was amiss.

I was kept laughing by my love, it is a talent he has, while I lay in the emergency room of the now defunct Lansing General Hospital (it has been combined into a larger entity of cutting edge health care facilities). The only time I have ever begged for somebody to stop hurting me was when the nurse from the obstetrics department came into the emergency room and tried to fathom where my uterus was by pushing on my stomach. The pain was so extreme I did literally beg, which is beyond unusual. She would not stop. She said she HAD to find where the top of my uterus was, finally the emergency room Doctor intervened. He told her that if I had a strangulated hernia that she was probably adding to the trauma. She stopped.

Up to the maternity ward we went - my unborn daughter, myself (we were indivisible) and her father - my love. I started vomiting stomach acid because it was backing up due to the blockage. I cried every time I threw up. Finally a nurse came in and told me I had to swallow a tube, all the way down to my stomach. Never a quitter, always a doer - I swallowed and swallowed and swallowed the long thick line of plastic tubing. My eyes were wide open, my pain coloring everything a very Christmas like red. I could not finish the process. I grabbed the tube and yanked out the long length I had managed to swallow. The nurse scowled and told me that if she heard me throw up even one more time she would come back with others and I would be forced to take the tube all the way down. It was for my own good. I understood that, but it hurt so badly, and I was already so stressed. 

For the rest of the night I vomited in as much silence as I could manage. My love held the bedpan and stroked my hair and I cried. Talk of surgery filtered through my mind from a Doctor that came to observe my pain. All I wanted was to be rid of it. Please, please, make it go away - I begged. Finally I asked if perhaps they could give me some pain medication. Surely there was something that would not harm my growing daughter, but would allow me to sleep. In sleep perhaps I could relax and maybe the twisted mass of intestines would fall back in to place. I used my logic even in the midst of the torment and offered the suggestion with a pain filled voice. Surprisingly it turned out that that WAS an option, now that I had mentioned it. I had an hour or two of sleep, and then I would wake up to vomit up more stomach acid.

The head surgeon arrived with the eight o'clock hour. He explained that if he performed surgery I could lose my daughter. I surely did not want that. He told me he would do anything in order to prevent a surgery from taking place during the course of my pregnancy. I was willing to do anything too. To save my baby. He came to my bedside and manipulated the bulge of innards that lay over the bulge of the new life I was nurturing. Suddenly he pushed with great force. 

Everything came untwisted. The pain disappeared. I smiled. Everybody smiled. I joked. Everybody laughed.

The nurse that rode down in the elevator with me to escort me to the car my love had warmed for me, she looked at me and said "It must have been the pain. You are so different now." That struck me as funny in an odd sort of way. Are not most people different in pain? Especially extreme pain? Surely this was not something she had witnessed for the first time with me.

My daughter was born in time. For the last five months of my pregnancy I had to bring in a restrictions form to work, a new one every month - saying that until I was no longer pregnant I could not lift more than a certain amount of weight. I tried not to be confounded by the paperwork jungle. Surely it was obvious that I was pregnant and surely it would be obvious when my pregnancy was complete. The baby in my arms would be the last clue, I figured - if nothing else. But I complied because I had no choice - I was not a woman who had the ability to stay home and relax during my pregnancy. 

Now I have a really huge abdominal hernia - my intestines just flop through the hole and when I sit up I can do a spot on impression of a scene from the movie Alien. Sometimes I worry about the lifting at working creating another moment of terrible physical pain. It hurts more when I walk for long periods of time - the simple law of gravity says that something unsupported will catch the drag, and so it is. But I could still carry my children and warm them so they could watch a tree of celebration turn brilliant.

Am I a fool? No, I am just a mother.