On October 10, my doctor took my amnio to find out if I could deliver the next day. The results would come back in two parts-a "rapid test" took six hours, and the fuller test took twelve.
The rapid report wasn"t encouraging. "It looks like you"re going to have to wait another week," the doctor said when she called me.
"Oh no," I said, sighing heavily into the phone.
"I"ll call you about nine p.m. when we get the other test back and let you know definitely," she said.
Since it was Monday night, Denine came over to watch TV as she always did, and Karen joined us, too. My mom had come from New Jersey because she thought we"d have the baby the next day, and she hadn"t been convinced to stay home by the earlier call. We all sat in the living room, watching TV and eating ice cream. Warren popped in and out several times, asking if the doctor had called yet.
"It"s not going to happen," I told him. "I won"t be at the hospital. Plan on a regular workday tomorrow."
When the first TV show was over, Karen said, "It"s nine o"clock. Call her, Jackie. Maybe she forgot to call you."
I picked up the phone to call, then put it right back down. Forgot? How likely was that? I still had my hand on the receiver when it rang.
"h.e.l.lo?"
"Pack your bags," the doctor said. "You"re going to the hospital tomorrow to have your baby."
"You"re kidding. Oh my G.o.d." I dropped the bowl of ice cream and watched it spill all over the floor. I shook all over.
"I thought it would be next week."
"The twelve-hour test came back fine. Tomorrow it is."
I suddenly felt nothing but sheer terror. The doctor had warned that the C-section would be difficult, and I couldn"t face physical pain. I also worried what my reaction to the baby might be. What if, instead of a burst of maternal love for the daughter who had just come into my life, I started crying for the daughters I had already lost?
While I stared at the puddle of ice cream spreading across the kitchen floor, all the anxiety and guilt and uncertainty of this pregnancy came to a head. When Warren came over, I grabbed his arm.
"Please don"t make me do this," I said in a hoa.r.s.e voice.
"You"re going to be okay," he said as he put an arm around me.
"I don"t want to be cut open again."
"You"ll be fine," he said soothingly. "You"ve done this before."
My friends told me that everything would be fine, cleaned up the messy kitchen, and offered kisses and good wishes. They left and my mother, overcome by her own emotions, disappeared to the bas.e.m.e.nt guest room to go to sleep.
Warren put his hand on my back, a gentle hoist as we headed up the stairs to bed. We crawled under the covers and as he held me, I trembled in his arms. I couldn"t stop my spiraling thoughts. I would go to the hospital in the morning, and who knew what would actually happen? In the scenario everyone else expected, the next time I returned home and got into this bed, my baby would be here with me. After all I had been through, that still seemed too unreal to imagine.
Kasey Rose Hance came into the world at 10:20 a.m. on October 11, 2011, weighing 6 pounds 13 ounces. She was perfectly healthy, with rosebud lips and long eyelashes that she blinked endearingly for her first look at the world.
I"d had an epidural, so I couldn"t feel most parts of my body. I moaned groggily from whatever sedatives the doctors had given me.
I saw Warren holding her.
"Look, Jackie. Isn"t she great?" He held the pretty baby out to me, but I could hardly take her in. The moment was too overwhelming.
A nurse came in then and took the baby to get cleaned up, and Warren left the operating room with her. Someone wheeled me into the recovery room and people began coming in and out-Jeannine and Isabelle and Melissa were all there, and so were Cortney and Kara from New Jersey, and Laura and Bob from down the street, and Warren"s dad and my mother and I don"t know who else.
I tried to focus but, disoriented from all the pain medication being pumped into me, I couldn"t recognize faces or remember details of why I was in the hospital. My grasp on reality started slipping away.
"Is someone taking care of Oliver?" I asked, forgetting that our dog Oliver had died many months ago. I didn"t ask about our new dog, Jake. Maybe the blur of a.n.a.lgesics had transported me back a few years.
"How is Emma doing?" I asked. "Is Emma okay?"
"Emma"s not here, Jackie. You know that," Warren said, stunned by the flash of amnesia.
"Wasn"t Emma just born? How is Emma?"
Warren started getting upset, worried about a return of the memory loss I"d suffered after the accident. The nurses promised him that it was just the drugs speaking, and they turned out to be right; an hour later my awareness returned.
I went to a private room and a nurse brought in Kasey. I tried breast-feeding and she took to it immediately. Then the nurse insisted on trying a technique called skin-to-skin, where she placed the naked baby on my exposed chest and wrapped us both together in a blanket. I lay there feeling awkward and uncomfortable as Warren and our friends snapped pictures. But there must have been something to it, because the baby, feeling my body warmth and heartbeat, immediately stopped crying.
As the afternoon wore on, the postsurgical pain became so awful that I clenched my fists in anguish. The nurses administered more drugs through the IV, but nothing seemed to work. In desperation, Warren called the nurse from the delivery who had been generous and gentle and offered to help however she could.
"Someone forgot to unclamp the intravenous, so nothing was getting through," she said when she came to the room. Warren turned beet-red, furious that I had suffered when it could have been averted.
"This should help," the nurse said, fixing the line.
But twenty minutes later, I still didn"t feel any relief.
"You shouldn"t be in this much pain," Warren insisted. He called the pain management team, but they must have had a lot of pain to manage that day, because more than an hour pa.s.sed before anyone arrived. As we waited, Warren could barely control his anger. Finally at my bedside, the pain team quickly discovered the problem-the epidural needle had fallen out hours earlier. Instead of any medicine going into me, it was collecting in a puddle on my back.
"Everything went wrong?" Warren asked, in disbelief. "The intravenous line wasn"t opened and the epidural had fallen out? How could that be?"
"It"s okay, Warren," I said as I saw him getting more and more infuriated. "Just be nice to everyone. They"re trying."
"This shouldn"t have happened! How stupid! You didn"t deserve that!" he roared, wanting to take care of me.
"Relax, I"m okay now," I promised him.
He wanted to stay the night, but I insisted he go home and get some sleep to relieve his tension. I put the baby in the nursery and tried to do the same. The next few days in the hospital pa.s.sed smoothly, though we laughed that Warren never stayed a night. One day, he went with the Floral Park fifth-graders to the foundation"s "Grow With Me" event at the Centennial Gardens. It had become Warren"s favorite program in memory of the girls, but he looked so exhausted when he stumbled into the hospital afterward that I sent him home again. Friday night, when he arrived after work, he seemed to be getting sick, and I insisted he leave one more time.
"I need you healthy when I get home," I told him.
I felt comfortable in the hospital, well cared for and in control. Several of my friends asked if they should plan to stay over with me when I got home, but I insisted I"d be fine. My mother would be there if I needed backup, and we"d cope. I could handle one little baby.
But the moment we left the hospital on Sat.u.r.day, I started to panic. Warren came to get me, and a flock of neighbors thronged the house when we arrived. I just wanted to lie down.
"Go rest," Warren said chivalrously. "I"ll take care of Kasey."
I went upstairs and started crying, laid low by some combination of postpartum depression and the devastating realization that I had gained one baby only because I had lost three. I"d experienced depression after Katie was born and remembered calling my mother to tell her that I couldn"t possibly handle a third child. But the intensity of my emotion this time was off the charts. I lay in bed, sobbing. I felt both sickened and sickly. I couldn"t function, and my hormones were spiraling out of control. I stared at Kasey Rose and sometimes she looked exactly like Emma as a newborn, sometimes like Katie. Either way, she was here because they weren"t.
By nighttime, Warren finally pa.s.sed out in fatigue, and I took Kasey with me to another room. As often happens with newborns, she cried regularly during the night, and we stayed up together, both of us inconsolable. I tried breast-feeding her, just to calm her down, but nothing seemed to help. Her cries ripped through me, giving me chills of terror and despair.