1 post tagged “woman of steel”
Back in the mid- to late-eighties, my absolute favorite band was a county-pop number called Restless Heart. Anybody who's ever worn Rocky Mountain jeans or Wranglers starched to the point that they could stand up by themselves knows what band I'm talking about. One of their songs was titled, "I Want Everyone Who Hears This Song To Cry." It was a typical broken-hearted country ballad, but it got stuck in my head this afternoon after I got off the phone with my friend, The Woman of Steel. Her story can be found at www.melpate.vox.com .
"I want everyone who hears this song to cry.
Maybe I'll get over her...if the whole world helps me try.
When I'm through don't let me see...one dry eye.
I want everyone who hears this song to cry...."
Out of five pregnancies, my friend Mel and hubby Sean have a single surviving child. For years, none of the doctors - not even the ones who delivered her two stillborn 27 week babies - would seriously consider the notion that the problem was anything other than some really atrocious luck. My cat, with her partial hysterectomy and total lack of prenatal care, has a better track record for giving birth to thriving offspring than Mel does. That sounds mean but it's not intended that way, it's intended as a slap in the face of the medical community. If someone came to you with a story like this, what would you say?
Six and a half years ago, at her bachelorette party, Mel confided in me that she was losing a baby, possibly two. She had definately been pregnant, and the doctor at the quack shack on campus at West Texas University said that her HcG levels were high enough to have been supporting twins. She had woken up the day before the wedding spotting, and the pregnancy was lost. Though painful, Mel and Sean shrugged the early miscarriage off as a sign of bad timing or divine grace - maybe there had been something wrong with the baby(ies).
A few months later, Mel found herself pregnant again with a baby girl they planned on naming Avery..we were all so excited for them. I had two small children of my own at the time, and every happy parent wants their friends to share their misery, right? One day I'm feeding my 10 month old breakfast when the phone rings. I answer, and I'm glad to hear the voice on the other end belongs to Mel. When she told me that she was in the hospital being induced to deliver a baby girl that the doctor had already confirmed was dead, I felt exactly like I had been punched in the stomach. The air whooshed out of my lungs at the same time that tears started rolling down my face. I remember looking at D. sitting in her high chair and thinking, "That's not fair. It's not fair that I have two perfectly healthy babies and Mel can't even have one." Mel is a couple of years younger than I am, the first time I ever met her she was wearing her high school cheerleading uniform. I always called her 'my baby friend', I always looked at her as still being a teenager. From that day on, Mel was an adult to me, one who had shared with her husband the one thing that I hope to God I never, ever have to do: have a funeral service for a child.
What do you say to someone who has had to endure giving birth to a dead baby? To someone who has had to pick out a tiny coffin and watch it be lowered into the ground? 'I'm sorry' doesn't cut it. 'Please don't hate me because I have children' doesn't quite do it, either. For the first time in my normally eloquent life, I didn't know what to say. I wanted so badly to take some of her pain and somehow absorb it into myself so that she didn't have to endure it all by herself. Then, five months later when I found myself pregnant with my third child, I really didn't know what to say. I couldn't tell her, I just couldn't. You can only imagine my relief when I got an email from her one day, and all it said was: "I'M PREGNANT!!" I called her that night and said, "Thank God, because so am I!" We laughed and cried, and she fussed at me for being afraid to tell her that I was pregnant. That was when I started calling her The Woman of Steel. As much as she had lost, she still held the capacity to feel joy for people who could have what she couldn't. How amazing is that?
After a difficult pregnancy and quite a bit of bedrest, Mel gave birth to a beautiful baby girl exactly one week after I gave birth to our youngest son. When Mel called to tell me that M. had arrived in this world safe and sound, I remember looking up toward the heavens and saying a prayer of thanks. I was more relieved when that baby was born than when my own was born! I had the pleasure of getting to babysit Mel's daughter last week, and let me tell you - she is a little dream.
After all the trouble they had had, I was kind of surprised a year and a half later when Mel called to tell me she was pregnant again. Come to find out, Mel and Sean had been surprised, too. But we were all glad, because they had never intended for M. to be an only child. None of us were expecting Mel to have an easy pregnancy, but we all figured the worst was behind them. Mel made it through the first trimester, and we all breathed a sigh of relief because that usually means that you're home free. Walker and I saw Sean and Mel in May, and when we were driving home we both agreed that she had looked a little peaked, like the pregnancy was taking a toll on her. I worried - but not too much because frankly, being pregnant makes me look like hell, too. Walker and I bought our first house that summer and we were terribly busy. We were packing and closing and moving and raising 5, 4, and 2 year olds. We spent a week sleeping on an air mattress on the floor of the new house so that we could paint and clean. The day the movers were coming to load up the furniture, we got up at the crack of dawn and drove to the old house. I decided to check our email before we unplugged the computer, because I was afraid that somehow the emails would be lost to me during the move. Sean and Mel had said that they weren't going to find out the sex of the baby before it was born, so when I saw the email subject line that read, "Jackson William Pate," I had opened it up, excited and thinking they had caved in the presence of the sonogram tech. Walker heard me scream and start crying from the kitchen and came running into the bedroom thinking that I had hurt myself. I was hurt alright, but it was a broken heart, not a bruised toe. The screaming and sobbing began when I read the email and saw, instead of fuzzy sonogram pictures, a birth/death announcement for another 27 week baby, this time, a son. There was a sad little picture at the bottom of the page of a beautiful, normal looking, ever-so-tiny baby with only the slightest tinge of blue to his perfectly porcelain complection.
I could not wrap my mind around the fact that it had happened again. Once is a tragedy, twice is beyond endurance. It was cruel. I have not forgiven myself yet for finding out two weeks after the fact that they had lost another baby and Mel had spent several days in the ICU, hovering near death. What kind of a friend gets so wrapped up in her life that she forgets to call and check on the people who mean the most to her? The Woman of Steel tells me, of course, not to beat myself up about something I couldn't have helped or change, but the guilt lingers. Where was I when she needed me?
Fortunately for Mel and Sean, they still had a child at home who needed her parents. I think that M. is probably what kept them going. She forced them out of bed in the mornings, and kept their minds busy during the day. I don't know, but I think the nights would be the hardest, when the house was quiet and M. was asleep. I would think you would lay there unable to sleep because you know it shouldn't be this quiet - a little voice should be crying out to you to feed me, change me, rock me, hold me. But I don't know, because I can't even begin to imagine.
Even though she nearly died from complications that arose with Jackson, Mel is made out of sterner stuff than most and after two years she was actually ready to try again. I didn't even know she was pregnant again until I got an email telling me that it was lost, this time very early. The good news, she said, was that the OB/GYN and a maternal/fetal specialist were both taking her seriously and running a whole bunch of tests. They both felt that the problem had to do with a clotting issue, and could probably be solved with some baby aspirin or heparin. It seemed ridiculous, when she told me, that something as simple as a baby aspirin could have spared them the heartache they had suffered. Both Drs. ran tests, and both gave them the unofficial okay to start trying to conceive. I saw Mel this past weekend, and she was talking about asking for some Clomid to regulate her cycle a little. We were all excited at the prospect of them having a successful pregnancy, of giving M. a sibling.
Today Mel called as she was leaving the follow-up appt. with the specialist. Through her tears of anger and sadness, she told me that basically, she can't have any more children. That M. was a fluke that likely would not be repeated. That, if she got pregnant again, she would have a 45% chance of delivering yet another stillborn child, and a 20% chance of not surviving the pregnancy herself. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't take those kind of odds to Vegas. The Dr. also told her that if she were stupid enough to get pregnant again (the Dr.'s words - not mine), the Dr. would not be able to treat her since it would in essence be a suicide mission.
So, after mourning two early miscarriages and two dead babies, my friend now gets to mourn her fertility. Something that comes so easily to millions of women - including teenagers, crack whores, abusers, and welfare leeches - is beyond her abilities. What's wrong with this picture? So, the chorus of an old song keeps running through my head:
"I want everyone who hears this song to cry.
Maybe I'll get over her...if the whole world helps me try.
When I'm through don't let me see...one dry eye.
I want everyone who hears this song to cry."
I know I'm crying, and I can't help but thinking that maybe...if the whole world cries with Mel and Sean tonight...just maybe it will ease their pain.
