This description of a cesarean and a stillbirth is so accurate with how I felt after Teddy's birth, when he was so sick, we thought he would die. I cried at the kitchen table yesterday, reading it. Especially the feeling of being "husked" with no bassinet beside your bed. The lurching sobs and the jolting pain in your stomach. Waking up to remember the dread. In another part of this book, she writes, "suffering demands witness." To see such an indescribable experience described so beautifully felt like a gift.
"This isn't how it is supposed to be. It doesn't match any of the prior slowness. The indolent growth...the thick long days. I wake up in the dark. The air is stale. Used up...I take a deep breath and exhale and realize that there is no knifing pain in my ribs. No sharp twisted muscles. No thick ropy feeling in my stomach. No pressing of hard head on bladder. No pinch and shift of internal organs. I feel open and bare and stretched, like an abandoned carcass. Big pieces of sky between each rib, stripped clean and gleaming. I touch my stomach and it is nothing but soft loose skin, not round and hard. My breathing comes rapid and shallow. All the months it took to get used to the steady growth and in one quick moment, everything gone. The mind does not work this way. This fast. The baby grows and slowly displaces you from your own body, and then tosses it back to you in an instant.
Beside my bed there is no bassinet. I feel husked. I panic, try to get up. A jolting pain in my stomach. I slide off the bed, attached to an IV, its heavy metal shackles. It isn't as light and smooth-rolling as I expected.
Where is the baby.
Sit down or you will rip your stitches moving like that.
Tell me, I scream. Tell me.
My eyes claw at the walls. Torn, aware in the stillness. But everywhere there are obstacles, the reluctance of my limbs, my mind.
I hear a woman singing in a soft voice to a baby in the corridor and feel my own heart recoil. There is no lullaby capable of singing a baby who dies to rest. My body begins to shake. Each lurching sob sending a ripple of pain. Then the metal tray on the floor with a clatter. A child created and cancelled as though for my punishment alone.
When I wake up I remember the dread each time, though each dread is nothing compared to the newest. I try to find the attending doctor. No one knows. No one seems to know. I have moments of clear thinking and then others where I remember nothing.
I am told that my own tragedies are small against the greater tragedies that exist right now in the world but tragedy doesn't calibrate that way. It isn't dwarfed by the whole. Tragedy is not general. How do we possibly compare tragedies?" And later, when she is beginning to recover from the cesarean, she writes--
"The pain in my body is present but fading, though I want it to stay. I want it to match what remains unbearable." I felt that way too. Teddy was still in the NIcu and I wanted the cesarean to keep hurting with a deep intensity until he was safe in my arms. -Heidi Sopinka, The Dictionary of Animal Languages