Fuck Me Gently with a Chainsaw

In honor of Halloween, here is a maternity horror story

My son turned 18 this summer, so the brain tumor didn’t kill him after all. This time Google was right, and the head tilt my 9-month-old had going on for over a week was not, in fact, a stiff neck, like the first doctor thought. (Doctors are not gods, they need to tell you that, but only to be contrary, because whenever you don’t want them to be gods, they tend to act like one.) In the years following my son’s discharge from hospice, my attempts to write about this were predictably insufferable. (Could Raymond Carver have written “A Small, Good Thing” about his own child?) I eventually gave up. After that, I couldn’t settle on what type of fiction I might spin it into, and it felt like something between boring old news and bad luck to revisit it at all, but I was recently inspired. Sometimes, when the most vivid scenes play back in my head, the wizened old army general in me thinks all that time in the foxhole deserves some type of medal.

If they taught “The Monkey’s Paw” as maternity allegory in high school—that story about the consequences of terrible choices—then I might have noted the warning and might not have spent six weeks in an antepartum bed followed by several years in the NICU and PICU. (It could still be a hell of a baby shower gift for the right person, though.) But I did have an instinctive warning. I knew, but I didn’t listen to it. If this were a horror movie, those weeks in antepartum would be represented by a dream foreshadowing: midnight, the camera zooms in on a body twisting in the bedroom of a suburban home, muttering no, no! Closer, behind the tightly closed eyes and tense frown, the camera is inside the dream itself—shadows and fog slowly revealing a short, cold, fish-eyed doctor with an enormous pointy nose standing at the foot of a hospital bed, denying the pregnant woman’s demand for a new doctor.

Those six weeks, and the fateful decision leading up to them, hold enough material for a tight psychological horror film. Two things, however, stand out. First, despite all the time on my hands, I couldn’t be motivated to do much of anything other than beg God for a normal, healthy baby despite the grim prognosis. I certainly didn’t read up on medical facts. So I didn’t realize that dilation is determined by fisting, and I have to say that based on that experience, I can’t understand the fetish. They stopped the meds that had been suppressing the premature contractions immediately at 32 weeks and sent in a group of young female nursing students to gauge how much time we had before we all had to convene in the delivery room. I remember asking for a hot male nurse at this point, but none of the girls laughed. They were too busy to focus on me, I guess, being grouped around my gaping legs like an office water cooler. They were stumped because it should be a head, but it felt like an elbow. (It was his head, the older nurse from the Bronx brusquely informed the girls. Six weeks wedged in a ruptured uterine canal is where Coneheads really come from.)

You can probably guess the other thing that stands out from this time. In any other circumstance, I am too grossed out by fart jokes and potty humor to talk about it, and I don’t find it hilarious in movies. But if I liked poetry, I would write a sonnet about the first bowel movement in post-partum. It was transcendent. It started out like a horror movie and tortured me for days, but it ended up like Easter morning. It’s been 18 years and there’s not been another one like it. I still can’t fathom the storage capacity of the human body.

My son, who was recently excited to discover from YouTube that it’s possible to pay for sex, and asked me to buy him a hooker, was born weighing 3 pounds, 12 ounces, and so had to spend a month in the NICU. I don’t think it is possible to imagine without personal experience, what it feels like to drive away from the hospital without your baby. I don’t want to describe it.

For about six months, things were almost normal, save for the non-stop demonic, bloody diaper rash and colic.

Really useful things are never gifted to people trapped in hospital situations. Word puzzles and other time wasters can’t distract from this level of emotional turmoil. Only hookers and booze could do that. It’s really the most thoughtful thing you could do for someone when you feel bad but can’t stand to be near them anymore. The hospital chapel was always empty when I walked by, and it seemed like it would be good for someone to chant God’s name in there. I brought my laptop and a box of books, of course, but I could never spare attention for them.

This was when everyone in the hospital started calling me “Mom.” Every staff member in the hospital, from the janitor to the neurosurgeon, refused to call me anything but “Mom” as if it was a title of importance, like Prince—formerly known as. All things considered, it was more like “prisoner number X.” The staff acted as though addressing parents that way was the most respectful, empathetic thing they could do, but it felt more patronizing than anything.

Once, when I was waiting outside the OR while the surgeon had James’ skull open, fishing for tumor cells like lost golf balls at Pebble Beach, a family of depressive zombies who had just lost a baby the same age as mine exited the NICU in a file of singles and pairs.

“Why did she have to die?” the little girl zombie wailed. “She was only 9 months old.” Shit like that could easily feel like bad juju. Not just because their baby was the same age as mine, but you start to wonder about the veracity of curses. I felt a spark of jealousy that they got to leave the hospital because we had been there for months by then.

I was, of course, overall grateful to not be the person leaving for the last time. But one thing I learned from the children’s hospital—like bled into my bones—is that it can always be worse. Sometimes it felt like it would be better to be the parent of a dead child than a child who was constantly near death, or a vegetative child who could do nothing but breathe. The parents of the dead child, for instance, didn’t have to live with a profoundly mentally and physically disabled teenager who also had cancer. For some reason that seemed worse than waiting for someone to tell me definitively that James was not going to die, because I had no idea yet what was still to come. That mom (we all had the same name) pushed her daughter in on a reclining wheelchair and kept to herself while she waited for her daughter’s radiation therapy. There was only ever the two of us in the 1950s basement lobby—it didn’t take as long to zap brain cells as it did to hunt for them, so the woman never tried to make conversation or even glance at me in our brief time together.

For once, my filter was working and I didn’t blurt out something thoughtless to make the woman with the profoundly disabled teenager hate me, like the time I asked our neurosurgeon’s seven-months-pregnant NP, “Are you sure you want to do that?” As always, I didn’t mean to; it just came out. The doctor laughed—he had teenagers—but his PA was pissed. His wife just had a baby and apparently it was their first. You’d think he’d be tougher, working where he did. It takes balls of steel to procreate when you work in a children’s hospital. Like the kind of person who says, “Fuck you, God, you are nothing to me. You are an ant!”

There were about twelve brain surgeries, a year of radiation on his brain stem, and a year or two of chemotherapy before they discharged him to hospice. I can’t remember at what point they started prompting me to prepare for the end, but it was early. They eventually sent in a retired chief of staff to James’ room, who looked like Larry David and spoke with a heavy New York City accent. He’d stroll in swinging an empty doctor’s bag prop and damned if it didn’t help to pacify me for a little bit. He was so animated and loquacious that sometimes it really seemed like he might pull out a golden ticket from that bag. I held out hope for a bottle of top-shelf Macallan. Larry David was disarmingly mild-mannered; for all his snazzy pep talks, he never told me what I wanted to hear. He told me I could do nothing; they would totally understand at that point.

I might have agreed to stop playing the overextended houseguest if my mute baby could have given a clear sign whether he wanted to live or die. Failing that, I consulted my Hindu guru, Native American shaman friends, and free online Yes or No Tarot. The consensus was radiation and then chemotherapy, rather than the other way around, as a last-ditch effort. He was such a happy baby when he was conscious. I remember thinking that I hope he’s still laughing when he finds out how many essential brain cells we incinerated.

Dr. Poncherello and Dr. Sipowicz were my favorite attending physicians in the PICU. Their physical resemblance and personalities were remarkably similar to those actors, although I never told them that. It struck me as stupidly poetic that there were not just one, but two doctors resembling characters from carceral shows. Dr. Poncherello sat with me for over an hour before one of his surgeries, when I was freaking out about the shunt that protruded from James’ head like Worf from Star Trek. I forgot that skulls grow, and it would disappear at some point. If I had been in my right mind, I might have known better than to freak out about it, because he was born with a cone head and that went away. I’ll never forget the blank look on Dr. Ponch’s face and his sublime patience when he tried to explain that the shunt was not the thing to be hysterical about.

He was the attending who had been leading rounds the day diarrhea exploded down my legs like the Hoover Dam in front of him and all the residents. This was also the incident that seemed to presage that the rest of my life would be spent single and alone. The bug was wild—it came out of nowhere and had attacked me for several days, prompting the shift nurse to deliver the stern warning that I would have to leave soon if the diarrhea didn’t stop because this was the PICU, and I was not a P. So that’s why I was waiting for rounds at the door of the hospital room virtually naked, considering if I had the balls to go John Q on them if they tried to make me leave my baby. No one commented on my medical gown attire. Dr. Ponch was standing at a floating podium quizzing the residents circled around him on James’ case when the rank deluge poured out of me without so much as a warning gurgle. I wish I could obtain the unflappable serenity of medical professionals. Dr. Ponch merely paused mid-sentence, raised a brow, and said, “Are you okay?” in the nonchalant register of passing a Kleenex.

One way or the other, the hospital years became gradually finite. Maybe the entity started to appear around then because it was an energetic thread to the hospital and the vibrations of everyone around me there. It was essentially PTSD, but in a horror movie it would probably be as I imagined it—an amorphous, gray blob, about the size of a ball of yarn. It had a personality like a benign collection of negative energy built up over years. It resided inside me like Alien, but it didn’t feel mean or evil—it was simply an acquaintance who had nowhere else to go. A parasitic Eeyore that floated up from some cave at the deepest depths of blackness whenever I spoke about James and what happened. It lingered for years after his discharge from hospice until one day it was just gone. The entity was the lonely neighbor who always popped up uninvited at inopportune times. I would be perfectly happy talking to some stranger, but the minute I mentioned it, however casually, the entity showed up as if summoned, bringing tears without feelings attached. It only happened when I was speaking to someone and was easily shooed away. In a horror movie, I guess that makes me final girl.