Baby Lost Read online

  I was carefully flippant in replying: ‘Oh, I’m always in love with at least one person at any given time.’

  She hopped into bed with the bowl of noodles on her lap, and patted the space next to her. I squished in and stole some noodles with my fork, acutely aware of the warmth of her leg parallel to mine on the bed.

  ‘Really? So you’re in love with someone now then? Who?’

  I imagined a voice bubble that said, ‘You, silly!’ then carefully dismantled it and said, ‘Oh, no one you know.’ She pressed me further, and I came up with a boy in one of my law classes who I strongly suspected was gay. ‘Anyway, he doesn’t seem interested. What about you—have you ever been in love?’ She said no, she didn’t think so.

  Before we finished the noodles, I asked, ‘What would you do if your brother or sister were gay?’

  ‘But they’re not. You know them—there’s no way either of them are.’

  ‘No, but just say—what if one of them were?’

  ‘But they’re not, and they never would be.’

  I sighed. I couldn’t tell whether she was being stubborn or misunderstanding me. ‘No … I mean, just imagine a hypothetical brother or sister, not J or C but another imaginary sibling, who was gay—how would you be?’

  She got up and crossed the room to find her toothbrush. ‘This is a stupid question—who knows how I’d be with a hypothetical imaginary sibling, anyway? I’m tired; I’m going to go to bed.’

  It was a few months later, when I woke up alone and disorientated in bed after a big night out with no memory of how I’d arrived there, that I realised no amount of drinking was magically going to turn her gay, or make me brave enough to make a move. It was time for me to face up to the heartbreak, move out of college, and find a woman who might actually be interested.

  The other factor, apart from my cowardice, that had prevented me from coming out was the knowledge in my gut that I wanted to have children. I was tortured by the thought that I had an impossible choice before me: to be true to myself, or to have the children I longed for. But other women were already challenging that impossible choice. In the Queensland Anti-Discrimination Commission, in early 1997, a lesbian couple had succeeded in challenging laws preventing them from accessing assisted reproductive services, as had several de facto couples in Victoria.1 I walked through campus with this revolutionary information rattling around my head. Maybe I didn’t have to choose. Maybe I could be with someone I loved and desired and have a child with them. My heart felt as if it had grown wings and was flapping through the sky a few metres ahead of me, and I smiled a big, goofy smile to myself.

  •

  The emergency workers surrounding me—levering the car open, cutting metal, lifting me out—were so diligent in their work, it was as though I were some ancient Etruscan vase being extracted from an archaeological dig. A screen like a photographer’s reflector was fitted around the shattered windscreen so the glass didn’t hit me while they prised the car open. The world folded in around me, narrowing to this small space and the faces that came into it. I held their solid arms while I was lifted, like a circus girl being passed through a hoop, letting my eyes focus on the heavy blue cotton weave of their overalls. I was strapped to the smooth plastic of a spinal board and slotted into the ambulance, a paramedic still holding my hand.

  While we travelled, sirens blasting, I asked the paramedic whether he could try to find a fetal heartbeat. There was no Doppler machine in the ambulance, but he tried with a stethoscope. Things were hazy but I clearly remember the number—155 beats per minute. It confirmed what I thought I knew: Haloumi would be okay. I repeated that number to the doctors when I arrived in emergency—155, 155.

  •

  Before that little heart started beating, there was just a tiny dot—a scarcely believable little thing somewhere below my belly button. And before that, the sticky plastic cup our friend, and sperm donor, Jorge left on our dresser on a Tuesday night at the beginning of May.

  ‘We’re having ice-cream; do you want some?’

  We were all a bit awkward. This was the first time we’d tried a fresh donation—all of our previous eight months’ worth of attempts had been at the hospital, using his frozen samples.

  ‘No, I’d better get on home; this isn’t a social visit this time.’ Jorge smiled sneakily, kissed us and left, his magazine under his arm.

  •

  When we arrived in emergency, I was parcelled from ambulance to examining table in a series of clicks, rolling wheels, and an efficient one-two-three. Cool surgical scissors slid under my bra straps and up my trouser legs, slicing through fabric and elastic so that my clothes fell away, creating a clear workspace—my damaged body—for the nurses and doctors who moved around me. My limbs were distant, faces moved in and out of focus. I was asked my name, my age, today’s date, what had happened. I repeated these facts diligently. But, like Alice wondering ‘Do cats eat bats, do bats eat cats?’, I started to wonder whether I was thirty-three years old and thirty-four weeks pregnant, or thirty-four years old and thirty-three weeks pregnant.

  I could hear the doctors talking over in the corner. They had wheeled the ultrasound machine in, after every man and his dog had tried to get a heartbeat with the Doppler machine, and then another Doppler with new batteries. I knew that if they’d seen a heartbeat, there would be reassurances, smiles. I was still waiting.

  ‘Okay, so that would be the explanation …’ was the only bit of the conversation I caught.

  I still had my hand on my belly, now sticky with ultrasound gel. They’d had to move my hand during the scans. They did it gently, and I edged my fingers back each time, feeling softly for those little heels. Come on, Haloumi, now is your moment, my beautiful one. You weren’t so shy at your last ultrasound, four days ago. I didn’t want to hear an explanation, only a heartbeat.

  A doctor came to me and introduced himself. He had thick white hair, a bow tie, and worst of all, a concerned look. ‘I understand you’ve been told?’

  ‘No, I haven’t.’ Don’t tell me. Don’t tell me.

  But I found myself saying helpfully, ‘You haven’t found a heartbeat, have you?’ It mustn’t be easy to have to break this kind of news to women. I felt sorry for him.

  ‘No.’ There were words after that, coming out of his mouth like a speech bubble—about being induced, about labour—but I couldn’t match them with any meaning.

  Someone had called my mum; I could hear her voice coming from the phone held to my ear. ‘We’ve lost our Haloumi,’ I said into space.

  Rima had been sent to a different hospital. Finally, I could speak to her on the phone. ‘Hayet, Haloumi didn’t make it.’

  I could make these words come out of my mouth; I knew I had to say them, but that doesn’t mean I believed them.

  Once they’d established they only had one life left to save within my body, they started rearranging the various cords and tubes attached to me, so that I could be wheeled away for a CT scan. I asked, ‘Is it okay to have this scan when I’m this pregnant?’

  ‘It’s okay now,’ I heard.

  I was arranged like a posable doll on the narrow table, still tilted so that the full weight of my womb and baby didn’t cut off the blood to my legs. My belly sloped downhill—I asked to be strapped onto the table because I felt as if I could roll off at any moment. And then, suddenly, everyone left the room, and it was me and the futuristic white donut of the scanner. The table buzzed into motion, and took me slowly in and then out again, making silent and invisible slices through my marbled flesh.

  •

  When I’d done the pregnancy test the first time, I’d been a bit too enthusiastic and flooded it, so that it was impossible to get any reading from the test. ‘You’ll just have to be patient, and wait until you need to go again,’ Rima laughed. I was working from home that day, but she had to leave to catch her train.

  In the nine months that we’d been trying, my period had never been this late. After that many attempts, I�
�d tried to discipline myself about obsessing over possible symptoms, but this time felt different. When I’d played hockey the night before, I’d gagged with nausea when I put my mouthguard in.

  With the second pregnancy test, I made little rules for myself. No sitting here and staring and staring at it. I would put it on the side of the bath and come back at the designated three minutes, not a moment earlier. Within two-and-a-half minutes, I was back in the bathroom. I stared at the test and then stared at the wall. Oh man! Wall, this looks like two lines. Two lines! What a beautiful piece of wall was in front of my eyes, and I’d never noticed it before.

  I couldn’t get through to Rima, who was in a meeting. I left a hyperventilated message, and called my best mate from high school, Penny. ‘I think it’s positive!’ She squealed, while I caveated my joy: ‘I know this doesn’t necessarily mean anything, I know it’s early days, but it looks like it’s positive. We’ve never had that before.’

  Finally, I got Rima on the phone. ‘Hayet—I think there are two lines!’

  I knew what our odds were at that early stage. We breathed out a little when my blood test came back positive; and exhaled properly a fortnight later, when we had our six-week scan, and saw a tiny, pulsing jellybean of a creature. I curled my neck up to look, and then looked at Rima. ‘It looks like Yoda!’ I said.

  She grinned. ‘Yep. And it’s saying, “Pregnant, you are!”’

  2

  The second-best blanket

  Where my memories of the immediate aftermath of the accident are acid clear, those first hours in the emergency department are morphine-clouded. Things jump from scene to scene. Suddenly, I was back from the CAT scan and my mum was washing blood from my face. ‘I knew your dad would be coming soon, and he didn’t need to see you like that,’ she told me weeks later.

  They had stapled my head wound, but it was still bleeding. ‘She’s lying in a pool of her own blood,’ my mum said, matter-of-factly. ‘Can it be re-stitched?’ They re-stitched it twice before it stopped bleeding.

  By the morning, my hair was bright red from the blood, and stood up in stiff curls where the blood had caked. It looked as if I’d been to some demonic hairdresser. Penny later confided that when she came to see me the next day, her first thought was that this was a bit of a funny time for me to be dyeing my hair.

  I was reassured when a midwife, Jen, arrived and introduced herself. Here was something I was prepared for. ‘At least I can give Haloumi a good birth,’ I said. No tears had come yet. I still couldn’t imagine this baby’s face, alive or not. Everything was in the abstract until this child was born. I had been given a prostaglandin gel to start the induction process, but had no sense of how long it might take. While I waited, I thought of my friend Brigette.

  •

  Brigette was a family friend who unexpectedly fell pregnant when she was nineteen and got married. That alone was surprising enough, but then we got news that her daughter was stillborn at full term. I didn’t send a card or call because I didn’t know what to do. We’d always conducted our friendship in person, when we met up at the beach once or twice a year as kids and teenagers. Once we were adults, and she had moved interstate, I was unsure how to keep up the friendship and even more clueless about how to respond to her loss.

  I made contact again about six years later when I was living in Sydney, and she came to visit me. She’d since had another daughter, had broken up with her husband, and was facing an acrimonious family law battle. I asked whether she sometimes wished she’d never gotten pregnant that first time. And she said, ‘No. No, I’m really glad we had the time we had with Sacha—I’m glad she was my daughter.’ I was surprised, because I had imagined that stillbirth was like a mathematical equation—plus one, minus one—leaving you more or less where you were before. She gave me an inkling that there was something completely unquantifiable about the loss, and the gain, which a stillborn child brought.

  •

  ‘This may be a silly question,’ I said to Jen, ‘but can I play the relaxation CD from our birthing course?’ She nodded, and, without any fuss, my beautiful, practical sister, Erica, drove all the way across town and back to bring me the CD and CD player.

  Rima and I used to joke that the key relaxation technique the birthing CDs provided was the giggle we got from hearing the hippy windchimes and the woman with a corny accent drawl out the word ‘Aaaaaaffirmations’. I think of it now, and wonder that the medical staff were happy for my sister to plug the CD player into sockets used for lifesaving equipment, and to let the softly spoken platitudes of hypnobirthing wash across the hard surfaces of the emergency room. People humour you when death is this close by.

  And, somehow, the affirmations worked. Somehow, I unzipped myself from the hospital drama scene, from all the tubes, monitors and bandages, and I was back, floating in the Coogee sea baths, cupping light-filled water softly in my hands, the salt water and sunlight washing against my belly. Haloumi was big then—it was only a week or so before we left Sydney. I remember thinking at the time, ‘I need to hold onto this; this will be my good place to come back to when I’m in labour.’ Not complicated, not difficult, just light so bright I could close my eyes and still feel it all around me, as though it were the water I floated in.

  •

  I first discovered the Coogee baths when I was staying in Sydney for an internship; before I had graduated, before I had torn away from Melbourne. Even then, I ached for a baby. That was the whole point of the internship—to get a graduate-lawyer position, so I could save up for a baby and, hopefully, find a partner in the process. I had ducked under the water and surfaced with new knowledge: that I would swim here pregnant. That knowledge latched tightly somewhere in my belly, pulling me towards Sydney and back onto that plane. I’d felt so vindicated when it came true, when I immersed my rounded body in the same salt water and felt a beautiful squirming that was not my own—a small swimming body within my own swimming body. It was an odd sense of infinity, of being one small bit of this Mandelbrot universe—a pattern within a pattern, with another, smaller, pattern inside.

  •

  The calm of the impact was still there, but now everything really hurt, especially my hardened womb. Jen was trying to monitor my contractions, which were lasting over six minutes each.

  After the CT scan, and after the possibility of spinal injury was ruled out, they released me from the neck brace, which had been starting to feel like a sarcophagus. I immediately wanted to turn over, to rest on all fours, and my mum and the midwife started to help me, but I quickly realised that my body wasn’t responding the way it used to. I couldn’t move smoothly into the yoga poses I had practised every day, and that I had hoped would help me deliver this baby. My body was heavy, tight with quickly appearing bruises, and when I tried to bend my bandaged left knee, there was a queasy pain. I managed to sit on the edge of the bed and swing my legs down, but was afraid of collapsing forwards. Gently, Mum lifted my arms, with their vines of tubes and monitors, and ducked under them, so that I could hug her and melt into her shoulder.

  I was so thirsty. I kept asking for water, but all I was allowed was chunks of ice from a polystyrene cup. I would roll the ice in my mouth, choke slightly, spit it out; or, if I was feeling particularly gutsy, crunch it into many small icebergs. Erica held the cup for me, quietly and calmly. This was a pain I needed to hold in my gaze, with my full concentration. I wanted to deliver this child, to see him or her for myself, before accepting any bad news from a fuzzy ultrasound machine. This pain would get me there.

  ‘Hannah.’ We’d been relatively unprodded for an uncountable number of hours, while I crunched ice and worked my way, hand over hand, through the pain. It was the obstetrician, back again. ‘We’d like to do an internal examination again and check your progress.’

  I was startled. ‘The midwife did one not so long ago and she thought I was at about 3 centimetres.’

  ‘I know, but we need to do another one, to see how things are going.’ />
  It hurt, and he wasn’t impressed with my progress.

  ‘The problem is, with all your other injuries, this needs to happen pretty quickly. I think we’re going to need to do a caesar.’

  •

  ‘The problem,’ the obstetrician explained six weeks later, ‘was that we were concerned about you going into a state called DIC—disseminated intravascular coagulopathy. It’s when you’ve got a big bleed—like the placental abruption—which pulls in all the clotting agents in your blood, so that the rest of your blood loses its ability to clot.’

  ‘Which is a bad thing,’ I added helpfully.

  ‘Yes, particularly when you have other wounds. No matter how much blood we transfuse in, you can still bleed to death. We were testing your clotting factors to monitor you for DIC, and by about 3 a.m. they were starting to fall, which meant you were starting to go into DIC. Those six-minute contractions were probably not contractions. It’s more likely that they were an indication of Couvelaire uterus—bleeding into the wall of the uterus. If I was dealing with your case again, I would send you straight for a C-section.’

  •

  Suddenly, I was being prepped for surgery.

  ‘This is very unlikely, but there’s a possibility that we may need to do a hysterectomy.’

  He saw my face, and moved from disclosure into reassurance mode.

  ‘We’ll try to do a lower-section caesarean, but if we have concerns about the liver and spleen bleeding, we may need to embolise them, and that would require a bigger incision. At this stage, we’re hoping we can conservatively manage the liver and spleen bleeding, and not operate on them.’

  ‘I only have one kidney,’ I announced to the obstetrician. I’m sure I’d already told that to someone in the emergency room, but I wanted to make sure he knew now, so that he didn’t just have to guess from my silent, scarred body.