Open Communications

(a Winter Theme post: Comfort)

I sit in the driver's seat and shuffle the thin stack of papers while Ella complains at her too-tight straps in the back. She's growing out of her carseat already. I'm only now readying myself to read about the days when she was too small to fit in it, bolstered by pads and blankets in her loose newborn clothes. I make it through two and a half pages and then hastily lay them on the passenger's side for later, or never. I throw the car in reverse. We'll go somewhere else, instead. Anywhere but the hospital parking lot.

It's a common assumption against the current medical climate that doctors these days push for C-sections. "They want you out of there as fast as possible," the rhetoric goes. But I contend that wasn't my case. As informed as one can be when waves of outrageous pain are crashing down, it was a good decision. That is one of the very few things I know about Ella's awful delivery. We hastily signed the papers and went for it. But from there on, I am adrift in uncertainties. There were complications that got resolved in further procedures, there was more pain, and there was an awful lot of aloneness in silent rooms for a day that would otherwise have been a time for togetherness. And then we just kept going, forward-looking, carried along in the current of caring for a baby night and day. That was the good part.

Less good were the equivocal doctors with sardonic responses and evasive answers. Questions and frustrations mounted one upon the other. But the weather warmed and my body healed accordingly, and our very own wee small being came into a personality of her own. There were better, higher, lovelier things to think about, and so the events surrounding her birth got hung in a back closet alongside the frustration, not least at God, and the winter clothes that wouldn't come out again till the end of next fall. Next fall, of course, arrived, and the uncertainties were still patiently hanging there, alongside some rather rumpled but very real emotions. And questions.

Where does one go when answers are needed? To the Health Information Management office, they tell me, so that's where I start. After days of shifting the trip to the next day on the calendar, putting off a trek into the unknown, I drive down to the hospital, baby in tow. I walk out a surprisingly simple ten minutes later with an envelope of printed sheets dotted with disturbing phrases like, "significant blood loss" and "extravasation of dye."

I hold the surgery notes in my hands, but the results, as they say, are inconclusive. Somewhere between "IVP needed to be performed" and "The patient tolerated the procedure well," something got lost. I look closer and see it is me, crying in a dark and empty x-ray room, my post-operation pain killer waiting too long on the pharmacy counter one floor below. I never knew "alone" until the moment a slapdash x-ray tech asked unfeelingly if I'd had a hysterectomy (I hadn't), while his stone-faced colleague jolted me on the steely table, up, down, and around to get all the right pictures. My baby was in a far off bedroom with my husband, and I was in this dark room, forgotten, with techs who didn't have all the information. I was too sorely alone to give them any answers. The nurse ran in apologetically with the forgotten painkillers. I merely cried. This is not in the doctors' notes.

I wonder again, where does one go when answers are needed? One of our chief communities is church, and lots of friends prayed before this baby came: healthy delivery, safe arrival. One friend even prayed for green lights between our home and the hospital. I have no recollection of the traffic signals between here and there in the snowy dark of that December 4:00 a.m. But I recall a January letter from a friend who'd given birth decades before under similar circumstances, and she voiced a frustration that hadn't surfaced for me yet: "But we asked God for better than this!" Did he not hear our requests? Were our prayers ineffective? These are the deeper questions that run alongside the the uncertainties of what happened on the surgery table.

There are straight - though not easy - answers to the deeper questions, and I know what book to find them in. But most of them ring either hollow or harsh in my ears. I find I've suffered a loss without losing anything, save, perhaps, my faith in medicine to give conclusive answers, my faith in doctors to always care, my trust that things will generally make sense. It's a loss of understanding and thus a loss of control. A corner of my brain reminds me softly that this can be a good thing. I find myself listening to lots of Gillian Welch and mournful old spirituals.

And in these cold, grey days that hearken my thought to the winter past, I start asking. My approach to God is most often akin to my approach to the Health Information office. I put Him off till the next day, and then put Him off again. My faith is utterly small, the tiniest known yet to be recognized as such, I'd wager. But it knows at least what hallway to walk down, and which door the answers lie behind. Now that the asking has begun, I will keep knocking here, even after the doctors have told me all they can (or can't), insistent as a widow that's lost her last coin.

Meantime, in a section of the papers, there is one kind of answer. The doctor had told me over and over that the bits and pieces of me that suffered extra damage had to do with Ella's head getting stuck somehow. "But isn't that often the case in a C-section?" I kept wondering. Now I read and see what tricks the little girl was already pulling. It turns out she wasn't too keen on giving up her restful spot. And so, as the doctor and nurses pulled, she rolled. I can picture it now. I go in to get her in the mornings as she whimpers herself awake, and she rolls away from me, every time. "Not just yet, Mommy," she tells me by the thumb in her mouth, as she pretends sleep for a few moments longer. She's my slow-waking apple, lying awfully close to the tree from which she fell. I get that. "Not just yet," she tried to tell the doctors, as she rolled over in her nine-month sleep spot. And so they tugged her out feet-first, like a heavily sleeping teenaged boy. It took some extra work, and my body took a beating. She was just being Ella, reaching for her pillow, as it were. It's a sweet thought amidst the pain.

In memory, I find that the hardest part to bear of that pain was the aloneness. It still is. Surprisingly, if there is any comfort, it also lies therein. There remains a deep, chilly loneliness in the remembrance of an experience that is only fully known by me - and by One Other. And so I keep open communications, if only to hear there is still no answer except that I am, actually, not alone.