Chapter Thirty-Five
Trey
I wear a tread on the linoleum in the hallway. I can’t bear to be in the waiting room. I can’t sit and fidget, and check messages on my phone like half the people in there are doing.
Debbie and Robert are there too; Debbie’s spent most of the time looking at her watch. But I’m in the hallway, and yeah, I’m looking at my phone, but I’m not texting, that’s for sure.
I’m researching.
And I’ve just learned how f*cking awful preeclampsia is. I learn it can show up silently.
Check.
That its symptoms often masquerade as symptoms of other conditions.
Check.
That it can go to hell quickly.
Check.
Check.
Check.
But the worst part I learn is this: that HELLP syndrome is life-threatening. Those two words blare at me like a neon sign.
Life-threatening.
It can damage the liver. Some moms and babies die from HELLP. I read words like bleed out and renal failure and hemorrhage, and I want to shout, Make it stop!
My entire body is tight, coiled with tension. I want to hope so badly that everything will be fine, but I don’t know how anymore. Because all I can feel is the possibility of the end, and it’s fraying me inside.
Maybe I’m the curse. Maybe I bring bad luck to people I love. Maybe there’s no such thing as lightning only striking once, twice, three times. There is only things happen. And so many things are happening that it’s feels like I’m dodging blocks of concrete being dropped from windows in a cruel cartoon.
Everything I learn about HELLP is a canyon of awful. I open page after page, desperate for information, for a fact, a piece of data that can somehow soothe me. But even if I find it, how could a statistic reassure me? I am a statistic of one. One family—mine. And I have no idea how the hell my wife is doing. Or why this C-section is taking so long. Or when I am going to see her and the baby. Or if the baby is even okay. If my kid survived. Or if I am going down the route of planting another tree, and the prospect of that makes me feel as if a limb is being amputated.
I am existing in a black hole of information as life goes on around me, as nurses walk down halls and check on patients, as technicians roll on by with machines, as doctors make their rounds.
All the while, my Harley—the only woman I love, have ever loved, and will ever love—is unconscious with her belly sliced open, and her blood pressure rising, and her platelets falling, and I don’t have a clue what happens next.
Then I hear the tiniest little cry and I know.
Don’t ask me how.
Don’t ask me why.
I just know the sound of my own kid, and it stills all the jittery nerves inside me. It is like a balm to my aching heart.
I turn around to see a ruddy-cheeked nurse with wide shoulders and big hands walking toward me. She’s wearing Snoopy scrubs and carrying a baby wrapped tightly in a white blanket with blue and pink stripes.
“Mr. Westin?”
I nod.
“This is your daughter.”
The world slows to this moment; all time has become this second as she hands me my baby girl, and I hold her in my arms for the first time. Everything in me shifts, the terror fleeing my body as my heart starts to jump wildly, pumping joy and wonder through my veins.
She’s perfect in every way. Her face is still red, and she looks like she’s been screaming, but her eyes are wide open and gray, and she has little tufts of blond hair from her mom. I lean in to plant a gentle kiss on her soft baby cheek, and she feels like a complete and absolute miracle, and already I can feel—deep in my bones and my cells—that sense that she’s mine. And I don’t know where it comes from, how you can go from never having met someone to loving them in the blink of eye, but here it is. It’s happened to me.
I love her. “I love you, little girl,” I say, the first words she hears from her dad. “And your mom does, too.”
When I glance up, with a tear streaking down my cheek, the nurse is still here, a grave look etched on her sturdy features.
And I know too—in the blink of an eye—that something’s wrong with Harley.
“How is my wife?” The question tastes like stones in my mouth.
“It was a very rough delivery. Her liver nearly ruptured, and she’s lost a lot of blood, and she’ll likely need a transfusion.”
“Do you . . . do you need some?” I hold out an arm, as if she’s going to stick a needle in me and take whatever she needs for Harley.
She flashes a brief, but kind smile. “We have some.” Then she sighs. “But I want to let you know she had a seizure during the delivery.”
I stumble against the wall, clutching the baby tight as my back hits the bricks, and I sink to the floor.
“A seizure?”
The nurse bends down. “It happens with HELLP,” she says trying to reassure me, but there is nothing reassuring about a seizure. “The doctors are working on her now. They’ve dealt with this before. She’s in good hands.”
“Is she going to be okay? Is she going to live?” I choke out.
“We’re doing everything we can.”
* * *
But they don’t know if everything is enough. How can anyone know? Nobody can. One minute you are here, the next minute, gone.
One moment you are unborn; the next you are loved.
Life is strong, and life is fragile. It is beauty, and it is pain. I have both, so unbearably close to each other right now that it feels like a cruel game that some wicked master puppeteer is orchestrating.
Not once, not even in the overactive far corners of my mind, did it occur to me that I could lose Harley. I only ever believed I could lose a baby. That’s all I ever worried about. That was the fear I had to face every day, the fear I had to learn to live with every second. But never, in all those moments of staring that fear in the face, of walking past it and through it and by it and over it, did it ever dawn on me that I could have my child safely in this world, healthy and whole, and with a strong beating heart, all while Harley lies bleeding out, unconscious on a hospital table somewhere nearby, and I am helpless to do anything.
But click.
The nurse takes the baby back to the nursery for monitoring, and I pace the halls, hunting out more info. I can’t stop looking at site after site, and I don’t know why I’m doing this, sticking my finger in the fire and letting it burn. I can’t turn away, even when I start watching a video on my phone of a young father who lost his wife to HELLP. When his voice starts to break, and he lowers his head to his baby, I hit stop.
I can’t take it anymore. I can’t watch another second. I turn off my phone, and jam it into my pocket. Now my head is cluttered with facts that have done nothing to change my reality, or Harley’s. I return to the nursery to hold my child.
I cling to my daughter, clutching her in my arms so tightly. She is my anchor. She is rooting me to this earth. Without her, I’m sure I’d fall off the planet, tumble into the void of space. I reach for her hand, small and precious, and she grasps my finger instinctively, and we hold onto each other.
One half of me is singing; the other is caving in. I am empty without Harley, and I am flooded with happiness for the six pounds of joy in my arms.
Soon, Debbie and Robert find us, and sit with the baby and me. Tears flow down their cheeks too, for the new life, for their granddaughter, for everything that is lost and found at the same terrible time.