Motherhood Part I

I was finally entering into the home stretch. In eight more months, I would be a physician assistant and finally done with school. It was a cozy winter and I remember enjoying the Christmas break snuggled up at home with my boyfriend, surrounded by family. And then it got better. On our 7th anniversary, New Year’s Eve, we were engaged. We, or more precisely I, started to feverishly plan my dream wedding. September 25th. The color would be red. We would travel from the church to the reception in a hay wagon, decked out with corn stalks and pumpkins, drinking Lager, celebrating the day.



I soon departed back to Wilkes-Barre and started my Ob-Gyn rotation at Geisinger Wyoming Valley. This rotation proved to be a favorite of mine. I quickly fell in love with women’s health, pregnancy, and caring for newborns. I got to deliver babies! What an amazing experience to be the first person to hold a baby as it enters the world. It was starting to click and I could see the shape of my career beginning to be molded. And then my period didn’t come. It was never “normal” and I figured that all of the varying hormones levels I was being exposed to on a daily basis at both my clinical rotation and my house full of five women were the culprits. But finally, the distraction was becoming too much to bear. I could think of nothing more while trying to study for tests and writing papers.


So I took a test so I could just get on with it already. I’d been there before; usually the day after I test and get a negative, the period begins. But this time was different and it hit me in the gut like a punch. The first test was verified with a second. I vaguely remember telling my roommate about it, but remember happiness from my friend and a trip to McDonald’s to help ease the freak-out. I clearly remember making the phone call to my mother. I was scared to death. I sat cross-legged in the center of my bed, atop my purple sheets, and could see it all play out in the mirror across the room. I was so dreading the tone of disappointment that would be felt through the line. I took a deep breath, spilled it, and braced myself for the second blow to the gut of the evening. This came on more like a sideswipe that I never saw coming. Joy. Excitement. Did she not remember that this was an unplanned pregnancy from her unwed daughter? Looking back now, I’m unsure how I could have so incorrectly characterized my mother, but I had.


My fiancée’ beamed excitement. And my sister…..this may just be in my head, but I really think she may have been jumping up and down the first time I walked in her house after she heard the news. I said to her that I wasn’t quite there yet, but didn’t go into detail about how the nearly two hour trip from Wilkes-Barre to Williamsport was spent sobbing. Talking irrationally to no one. Praying to God. Like a petulant child, mourning the loss of my dream wedding gala drunk fest that was to follow. My due date was October 2nd, one week after our proposed wedding day.


It didn’t take long to put those ideas aside and refocus. Reorganizing plans, shuffling dates, and spending hours on chat rooms in various baby community websites. Eventually I joined the ranks of those around me. I was finally excited, too. My Ob-Gyn rotation came to an end. I stepped aside on the remaining deliveries in my final two weeks. It was instantly a little too real. Soon I packed off and headed to Bridgeport, Connecticut for my surgical rotation. I left the chorus of excited friends and ventured hours away to quiet where no one knew me.


It was a lonely six weeks with much time spent on the road. I had to divulge my secret on day 1 of my rotation when the big radiation emitting C-arms came rolling into the OR for my case on the new rotation. People I met were as supportive and kind as strangers could be. But I was lonely. It was a low time.


I somehow trudged through 5 weeks there, thankfully distracted my wedding planning with a new and fast approaching wedding day, May 1st, set in the books. I researched pregnancy and checked in on my websites everyday to see what the baby was doing each day. I passed the twelve week mark and took a big sigh. This was going to happen. This is my new reality. I couldn’t wait.


The Tuesday morning of my last week in Connecticut, while rounding on surgical patients, I snuck for a brief bathroom break in a tiny bathroom resembling something I’d seen in movies about hospitals and asylums in the 1950’s. Something looked off, was that blood? This started a day long debate involving my online resources my doctors back in Pennsylvania and my own level of denial. Eventually, I came upon the reality that I was losing this baby. My kind and somewhat scared preceptor told me I had fulfilled my rotation and should go home.


Off I went back to PA. That was a long car ride in the old Mustang. I was scared, fearful that “this would turn south on me” as I was warned by my Doctor’s nurse over the phone. What did that mean? Would I start spewing blood while high above the Hudson on the Tappan Zee bridge? I was holding on to a smidge of false hope despite what my gut had told me. Nothing was confirmed, there could still be a chance. I felt guilty. Did this baby die of loneliness? Was it afraid that it was going to be born to a mother that was mute and only listened to the first 3 seasons of Friends over and over and over again? Did it fear it would be named Chandler? Did it die of sadness?


I made it back home without a bloodbath anywhere in my travels and had an ultrasound that confirmed what I knew. I went home that night with the plan to return in the morning for a D&C. I was awakened with cramping sometime in the very early morning hours and made multiple trips back and forth to the bathroom. Luckily, my eventual husband was my comforter there in bed with me each time I returned. Eventually, my mother left the house to get an early start down to Williamsport to help my sister with her child, preparing to be my supporters for the day ahead.


Things got worse. I banged on walls, screamed and cried to house empty other than me, my love, and my pain. I was relieved that my mother did not have to witness the distress, again, underestimating her character and her strength. My water broke, and it emerged. I fished it out of the toilet and held it for few minutes in the palm of my hand. This would be the only time in my life that I got to be the first person in the world to hold my baby. I showed my fiancée, but just as I had been earlier, he wasn’t there yet. My medical training had taught me many words to use to describe what I held and gazed upon: products of conception, fetus, not viable, but these were not the word that came to mind. My heart penned the description much more accurately: baby, first born, the one who shaped my destiny. On this day, a mother was born.