She turns on the screen, finds his heart, and pauses. I see that it is still.
I will his heart to start beating again. Just beat, one more time. The resident asks for the attending doctor, Dr. L., as she keeps the probe pressed firmly into my side. Dr. L. arrives, and the resident asks for confirmation that she has the ultrasound positioned on the heart.
“Yes,” he replies. And then, “Turn on the blood flow imaging.”
The screen doesn’t change. Dr. L. nods solemnly at the resident. And then she speaks the worst words I’ll ever hear:
“Okay. I have the ultrasound focused on his heart now. Do you see that?” She points to a spot in the middle of the screen. “It’s not moving. And there’s no red and blue to signify blood flow. I’m so sorry, but your baby is dead.”
Suddenly, it’s as if I’m removed from everything, a bystander on the outskirts of someone else’s trauma. I see us collapse into each other’s arms, breathless and sobbing. I see Aaron drape himself over my belly, hear him beg for a kick. I see the nurses and doctors that have been buzzing around us slowly trickle out of the room. All I can feel is my heart, how it threatens to escape my chest, and my throat, which houses foreign cries. Everything else seems to have fallen away.
I look at the clock and realize that it is almost one. I am supposed to be meeting my mom for our walk. Then the thought hits me that we’ll have to tell our families. I tell Aaron, and he takes my phone. I gather my hands in front of my face and whimper into the curves of them as he dials my mother’s number.
“Amanda? It’s Aaron.” He pauses. I can’t hear her, but I sense her confusion anyway.
“We’re at the hospital. I think you should come. They can’t find Reid’s heartbeat.” He uses our favorite of the names we chose for our baby. Then I hear the muffled panic of my mother’s raised voice.
“No. No,” he chokes. “They can’t find it. He’s gone.”
He makes more calls, each one breaking my heart into a million more pieces, each one constructing a new level of shock. I don’t think I can face the pain on our families’ faces, though I know I will need their support more than anything.
My mother bursts into the room with an air of authority and asks the nurse what is happening. She fixes things, my mother, and she is ready to fix this too. But she can’t, not now. I just wail in her arms and tell her that it’s too late, that our baby is dead.
And then, for a moment, I can’t cry. I sit there and I stare. I stare at my quiet belly and repeat the words to myself slowly, trying to understand. Our baby is dead. Beneath my skin is the body of our child, and somehow that body has to come out. I am sure that they will put me under and cut him from me.
In the throes of trauma, time moves strangely. It can’t have been more than five minutes, surely, but somehow my father, sisters, and in-laws have joined us. But my in-laws would have had to drive in from the Fraser Valley, over an hour away. It makes no sense, but little does right now.
With our loved ones by our side we let the doctors back in to talk us through what we need to do next. Dr. L. appears in the doorway and says he will take us to get a detailed ultrasound to try to determine the cause of death.
“Do you want a wheelchair?” he asks.
I refuse. I’ll walk, of course I’ll walk. But as soon as I take a step I realize it is a terrible mistake. My body feels different and even though nothing has changed physically from this morning—I walked to the car, I walked into the hospital—I am hyperaware of the lifeless body inside me, shifting from side to side as I move. Perhaps that was why they offered. I make my legs move anyway.
We walk through the hospital to the ultrasound wing, the same one we went through twenty weeks ago to find out we were having a boy. We walk past couples standing in the hallway, then couples sitting in chairs waiting for their turn. They quickly look away from our grief-stricken faces, but their knuckles turn white as they hold each other’s hands a little tighter. We are their worst nightmare. They don’t know exactly what has happened to us, but they can guess. And they know, without a doubt, that they do not want to end up here.
We enter the ultrasound room. It is dark and no one turns on the lights. I fumble my way to the bed and Aaron helps me onto the fragile paper sprawled across it. Then Dr. L. is talking. He asks us if he should turn on the patients’ screen. “Do you want to watch?”
I turn to Aaron for an answer. How can we decide? I am sure I will regret it if I don’t. But how can I watch that screen? A black-and-white movie, frozen on the edge of possibility, forever without color. In the end, I look.
After some searching, Dr. L. sees that my placenta is pale and that there is a tiny bit of fluid around the baby’s heart. But both of those things are also common postmortem, he says, so they don’t necessarily indicate the cause of death. He says that we most likely will never find out what happened, that it’s a sad part of life that sometimes babies just pass for no medical reason, and being dragged through months of tests and autopsies will be more painful than we realize right now. But, he says, the choice is absolutely ours. I am inclined to take his advice, even understanding that without an autopsy, we’ll probably never know what happened.
He leaves us by saying that the chance of anything like this happening to us again would be like getting hit by lightning twice. We shouldn’t fear the future.
Back in the assessment room, a new obstetrician comes in to review our options. All of them involve me having to deliver our dead baby vaginally, something I am completely unprepared to hear. The idea of laboring, which I was so calm about before, terrifies me now. I’m not ready. I want it to be finished, but I also don’t want it to start. How strange that something I anticipated with such joyful ease, I now view with such fright.
Why haven’t they offered me a C-section yet, offered to medicate me into a deep sleep? I just want to close my eyes and wake up with it all over. A part of me hopes that during the process, there’s a chance I won’t wake up at all. But I don’t ask. Maybe because I can’t fathom how any woman can get through birthing her lifeless child, either vaginally or surgically.
I am given the option of either an oxytocin drip to induce labor right away, or a Cervidil insert to soften my cervix. I choose the latter so that we can go home to rest and prepare for what comes next.
The obstetrician unwraps the Cervidil and reaches a hand inside of me. I struggle away from her to the top of the bed, in pain. She holds my hips in place with her free hand to stop me from squirming and reaches in further still. She simply tells me, “You need to get it right up there against the cervix.” Then she pulls out her hand, takes the glove off, and continues, “It’ll likely take a few doses of this, so come by in the morning to get your next one. They might start you on the oxytocin if you’ve progressed.”
A nurse with white hair and soft eyes comes in and hands me a pair of hospital underwear and a pad, in case of bleeding if my cervix starts to dilate. She has a gentleness about her, one that suggests she might have done this before, cared for others through losses.
“But our due date is tomorrow,” I tell her as a silent plea for her to change what is happening. Can’t she undo his death if I make it clear how impossible it is? He lived for thirty-nine weeks and six days in my womb. How is it that he stopped living just one day before his due date? One day.
“I know, dear,” she says as she helps me off the bed. “I’m so sorry.”
I
