The Time I Turned 40 pt 1

• I think it is only fit to put a trigger warning up for NICU parents*

I’ve never really put much emphasis on birthdays. I think the last big birthday I celebrated was my 21st, and I do remember a close friend arranging a 30th for me under pretty unhappy circumstances.

It seems every milestone birthday I have had since my 21st was marred by some tragic event or another and I was quite looking forward to the big four-oh.

It just so happened that fate had other plans for me, and in my 40th year, COVID-19 emerged as a contender in the race to derail my birthday plans.

To be fair, a pandemic was the last of my worries, as a month before the big announcement was made I had discovered something unexpected — I was pregnant.

Totally unplanned, and very much panicked after having been told it was not possible to have more kids, counted back the weeks from my surgery, and decided it was impossible. If I was indeed pregnant, I would be galloping well into my second trimester and as a mother of two already I fancied myself to be pretty in tune with my body — plus they told me I COULDN’T have more kids. But there I was, staring at two lines on a stick, and my immediate thought wasn’t even baby. It was would something far more sinister and scary.

I had phoned the local ultrasound clinic and was told that the next available appointment was only a month later and I made peace with the fact that whatever was growing inside me would have to wait another couple of weeks.

Just in case I wasn’t going to die of a tumor, I went to get vitamins, I figured it couldn’t hurt and cut out all of those nasty things we do over the holiday season.

And then COVID happened and the clinic was hesitant to allow anyone into their building if it wasn’t an emergency. Impatient, I blurted out, “I’m pregnant” over the phone, and for the first time since those two lines stared back at me, I hoped it was so.

As I hopped onto the technician's table and she whipped out the spaceship-shaped apparatus they use to scan early pregnant women, I tried to communicate that I believed I was further along than the mandatory 10 weeks required to be probed instead of prodded.

After much gesturing and Google translating she understood what I was trying to say and reverted to the trusty external equipment.

I looked up at the ceiling, hoping to avoid seeing the tumor I had convinced myself was growing inside me until a heartbeat permeated the room.

“Boy!” she said excitedly, as I whipped my head toward the screen.

I left the appointment relieved I wasn’t growing something other than a human being and went home with the expectation that this pregnancy would be uneventful — I mean I hadn’t even known he was in there for the first 14 weeks!

And then, as the 7-month mark rolled around something went horribly sideways.

Now in the full paranoid throws of the pandemic, I began to get sick, and I do mean horribly sick. I remember sitting up one morning after spending the entire previous evening throwing up (a feature of my pregnancy from month six onward), telling my husband I felt like I was dying. But after my healthcare professional very sternly and unsympathetically told me it was all psychosomatic due to the current state of the world, I went home, defeated.

“Eat more,” she demanded, “take iron! Your baby is too small.”

I left with a prescription for an iron supplement, herbal antidepressant, and a diet that needed to be adhered to, until my next appointment at the 8-month mark.

But nothing changed, and the pain and throwing up worsened as I battled through what I thought was extreme anxiety and at my next appointment, my doctor, even less impressed with me, barked that I was killing my child for not eating.

I begged her to hear me, I was eating but everything I ate was coming back up, and violently at that. My son, who had been measuring pretty on point until this point seemed to be healthy but his growth had slowed significantly.

I got home and phoned my Mom (of course), crying in desperation.

“No one will listen to me,” I wailed, “this is not in my head! Something is wrong!”

Together with my sisters, she was able to get in touch with health care professionals in my home country and they suggested I may have hyperemesis gravidarum, and suggested I begin taking allergy medications to lessen the symptoms.

It worked!

Yet something was off, I knew, on an instinctive level that I wasn’t going to get through this pregnancy and I couldn’t find another doctor to see me.

At 8 and a half months, I returned to my doctor, who took me off to be scanned before I was ushered into her office. She looked at me sternly, berating me for not following her treatment plan, and honestly, at this point, I was fed up.

I shouted back at her, “you’re not listening to me! I am sick!”

She had her assistant place a blood pressure cuff on me while she looked at the scan, telling me that my baby had stopped growing.

Her assistant said something I didn’t understand, and the doctor looked up, snapping at me to sit still while they took another reading.

The machine whirred and stopped, the pressure slowly releasing from my arm.

She looked at me wide-eyed… “I think you’re having a pre-eclampsia stroke.”

Numb, I said, “okay, well do a membrane sweep, I’ll go home to get my bags, and I’ll be back in an hour.”

She looked at me with genuine concern for the first time since I had begun my healthcare visit.

“You can’t, you won’t survive. You’re going upstairs now…”