Authors: Claire Bidwell Smith

The Rules of Inheritance (30 page)

BOOK: The Rules of Inheritance

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It was more than perfect.

But six months later, as we sit in this exam room looking at the glowing darkness on the ultrasound screen, that day seems impossibly far away.

WHEN I RETURN to the exam room, the nurse has been replaced by a doctor, a signal that there is officially something wrong with me.

Hmm, he says, pressing the wand into my abdomen. Do you have any pain when I do that?

I shake my head.

He moves the wand, and the baby comes back into view, a little figure smaller than the dark mass beneath it.

Well, it appears to be a very large cyst, the doctor finally says. Dermoid. Filled with fluid. It's likely benign.

Each sentence he says floats out of the room, echoing down the hallway, past all the rooms where other pregnant women smile up at their normal ultrasounds. I try to pay attention but I am disappearing into the blackness on the screen.

The doctor doesn't notice. No one does.

It looks like it's growing on your left ovary. We can assume that its unusual size can be attributed to the pregnancy hormones.

Greg is nodding, his hand tightening over mine like a wrench. I continue disappearing.

The doctor pushes the wand around the perimeter of the cyst as he talks, taking measurements, rattling them off to the nurse, who writes them down.

It's going to have to come out, he says finally.

IN THE CAR my tears come in torrents. At home I throw myself into a corner of the bed, my coat still on, sobbing.

Everything I've done in the last few years, all the work I've done to find peace and stability and hope, is crashing to pieces around me. I'm shocked by how easily I am being demolished by this. I squeeze my eyes shut, rocking back and forth, calling, pleading in my head for my parents to come and get me.

Mom, Mom, Mom.

In the ultrasound room the doctor explained that these types of ovarian cysts are incredibly common but because mine is so large it will have to be surgically removed. The chances that it will rupture otherwise, an event that would probably cause me to lose the baby, are high.

The surgery will take place three weeks from now, when I am eighteen weeks pregnant. The doctor wants to wait until the baby is a little bigger and stronger, thus upping the chances of it surviving the procedure.

He explained that they would sedate me, possibly using general anesthesia, and then open up my abdomen with a deep incision in order to remove the cyst. I listened numbly as he went on to warn me that there would be a chance my ovary would have to be removed along with it.

If all goes well, I will be in the hospital for a few days and at home on bed rest after that.

It sounded so simple. The doctor even patted my leg reassuringly. Greg nodded at me hopefully.

But I had left the room already.

I fled through the blackness on the screen, and I ran and ran and ran until I was fourteen again. I ran all the way back to the time I learned that both my parents had cancer.

I WAKE UP on the morning of the surgery surprisingly calm and rested. Sometimes I am most at home in the face of utter disaster.

Greg's mom has come from Ohio to be with us, and we all drive to the hospital that morning together. Greg kisses me sweetly, and I hand him my wedding ring to hold. It's the first time I've taken it off since the day he put it on.

And then I'm alone, in a hospital bed, being wheeled down an empty hallway. The sun cuts wide, warm swaths across the linoleum floor and I stare out the window at the snow and the parked cars. I am suddenly thinking about my mother and all the times she was in this exact place: in a gurney, in a gown, on her own.

Mom, I whisper, I'm so sorry.

Suddenly the orderly jerks me backward, swiveling and then pushing me forward into the operating room. It's lit up like a football stadium, and everywhere there are little tables covered with neatly arranged rows of gleaming, surgical tools.

It's like a nightmare.

I want to hop off the gurney, push my way past everyone, scattering scalpels and suctions everywhere, and just run away. But instead I do as the nurses tell me and sit on the edge of the surgical table so that the anesthesiologist can insert a giant needle into my spine.

Before I was even pregnant, I knew that I wanted to have a natural birth, to be as present to the experience as possible. But here I am, having an epidural before it's even time to give birth.

I am eased back onto the table at the same moment that the drugs flood into my lower half, turning my legs and hips to cement.

A nurse straps my arms down and out to my sides.

Another nurse fits an oxygen mask over my nose and mouth.

Someone fits a strap across my chest.

Someone else raises a curtain, separating my body into two parts.

Tears slip out of my eyes and fall to the table beneath my head.

Mom, Mom, Mom. Where are you?

ON MY FIRST DATE with Greg I told him that I wasn't sure if I ever wanted to have children. Having corresponded for a long time before we actually met, I knew a lot about him, and one thing was certain: Greg wanted to be a father.

We were walking across a bridge in Millennium Park when I told him. It was late May and summer had officially descended upon Chicago. We were holding hands, and I felt like everyone we passed could tell that we were right in the middle of falling in love.

I'm not sure if I want to have kids, I said.

I can't remember what we'd been talking about before I said it. Maybe nothing. But there had been a shift, the kind where you suddenly know that there is an entire path opening up before you with this person, and I just had to tell him before we took another step down it.

He looked at me and smiled. Squeezed my hand.

I think he knew then that I would change my mind. In the beginning it seemed like he knew everything.

I'm scared, I would say sometimes about how fast we were moving.

You'll be fine, he always said back.

And I was.

He said it this morning too, just before we parted ways.

You'll be fine.

I think about this as the doctor begins her incision. The lower half of my body feels like dead weight, like something that isn't mine, but as she continues I begin to feel a fierce pushing and tugging. It's as though my abdomen is a suitcase and someone is angrily unpacking it.

I try to take deep breaths and I stare up at the ceiling. I want to wrap my arms around me, but they are strapped down. My vision goes in and out, blurring darkly at the edges. When I tell the anesthesiologist this, he spins a dial.

You need more fluids, he says.

The room comes back into focus.

I go in and out like this, and the surgery takes longer than I imagined it would. I'm having trouble concentrating on any one thing but I try to keep coming back to my breath.

Claire? Claire?

I can hear someone calling my name from far away. I finally realize that it is the doctor.

Yeah? My voice is garbled and slow.

We're calling in an oncology surgeon to help remove the cyst. It's a little larger than we expected.

More shoving and tugging.

It goes on forever.

I'm in a daze. Breathing. Breathing.

Breathing.

Claire?

The doctor's voice again. They are finished.

We're just sewing you up, she calls over the divider.

A nurse comes around and holds up a pink kidney dish for me to see. Resting inside is my cyst. It is the size of a grapefruit, smooth and pink.

Is the baby okay? My voice doesn't sound like mine. It sounds like my mother's did the first time I came to see her in the hospital: rough and disoriented.

The baby is just fine. Can't you hear the heartbeat over the monitor?

I listen, tuning out the other sounds in the room.

Flump, flump, flump.