Story Twelve

That time someone else spoke.

Now and again you meet a person who’s as talented as you are. This is one of those cases. I’d spend more words talking about their value but I don’t think you’ll need me to convince you once you’ve read the following piece. Full disclosure: Sav is my editor here at Substack and they’re publishing here because I think if you like my work, you’ll love theirs.

Those of us who write from personal experience and emotion always try to bring an audience into our own experiences; this piece is a master class in empathy. I am so honored to work with this human, and the best that I can hope is that someday I find words as good as these. What follows is their life and their words and I am honored to be able to share them with you. -Linda

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Human rights.

“Can we do something about the shaking?”

I was stuck, immobilized from the tits down and strapped to an operating table. The surgeon was speaking and the thing shaking was me, my body, though I couldn’t truly feel the motion. I knew that something involving knives and surgeons was happening inches from my face, but I couldn’t feel my skin, only my weight, as I helplessly shook on a table with more tubes coming out of my body than I had given permission to be there. The way your body feels when it’s been medically paralyzed is a feeling that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. (That’s probably why people with uteruses are subjected to it, hourly.) So ubiquitous as to be happening at any midnight in any hospital near you— someone who was born as the gentler sex is having their uterus cut open, daily. Right now, in fact. It happens while the person owning the organ watches! It’s a very specific type of body horror that haunts my dreamiest nightmares and it’s why I tried my very hardest to give birth at a BIPOC-safe birthing center with midwives. (Yes, I also ate my own placenta!)

Anyway, everything you think you know about the reproductive care available in this country is fucking wrong. Please, let me tell you why. I’m writing from Texas which is important but not specific to the experience as a whole. It’s also incredibly important to note that I went into my birth with all the privilege and power of any white woman in America, mostly, and I still got wrecked and violated having a baby that I desperately wanted. No matter what I tell you about my specific experience, you must remember that it is always worse for BIPOC in any medical facility, ever. What happened to me was not that bad and I’m okay, now. I’m not fine, not at all. But I am okay. My children are the best part of my entire heart; I’m healing.

Most people in my position would not be okay. I prayed every single goddamned day of my childhood about the day I would inevitably become a mother. I don’t like abortion, as a concept. It should take place in a safe medical facility, available to all uteruses consenting to the procedure, and my brain dislikes any doctor touching my body. However, I knew I would be a mom simply by luck of the draw— I’d been born a woman into a family of women. We make good babies. I’d begged my previous god for a child to love the right way, many times over. I’d thought I was barren for 7 years and then, in March 2020, the stick was blue, even though the world was shutting down. (I’ve always been a rebel.)

Because I’m a goal-oriented person, getting pregnant any time of the year with any baby was, technically-speaking, something I could easily achieve. I’ve already told you that I was READY to be a mother and I have the distinct privilege over other first time moms of mothering a child I didn’t birth. I come from a very medical family so contrary to my family’s and state’s preferences, I’ve had an exquisite and sex-positive education. When I say I had 39 weeks on the dot to accomplish some GOALS, you’ve never seen a more stereotypical Straight A student get to work to bring my son earthside. All I knew at the time about birthing sons was that my mother’s son, stillborn in a hospital, had died. I began my research immediately even though, medically, I knew brith was an event that happens to you, ready or not. When my midwives told me that this baby was sticking around, unlike my previous three pregnancies, I knew I only had 27 weeks left on my internal clock.

I labored for days in a manufactured labor at my home and in a birth center, trying to get the baby to engage in his own birth. He was not ready to leave my warm and safe body. Preeclampsia said he had to be evicted and quick, otherwise both our lives would be forfeit. His entrance into this godforsaken world happened only after I let go of my stubbornness and let my fiancé drive me to a hospital, in November of 2020.

Back on the slab in an insanely bright OR, I was woozy from my misplaced epidurals and maternal exhaustion and I was choking on bits and pieces of my previously eaten but poorly-chewed grilled cheese sandwich coming back up my numb esophagus when I heard the female surgeon’s questioning voice over the loud feeling of nonconsensual body horror: can we do something about the shaking? Her hands were moving inside my body as she spoke, manhandling my occupied womb. I could not turn my own head to let the vomit out of my mouth, so my fiancé had to suck the vomit out of me with a surgeon’s tool.

I was shaking for multiple reasons, but mostly because that’s what the drugs they give you to numb you from the armpits down does to a body. It’s a common side-effect of cesareans. My body was not my own, and it was shaking so hard that it was annoying the surgeon in charge of getting my son out of me alive, putting my organs back in a vaguely upright position, and then sewing my organ back together and attaching my skin back to itself so it (me) could heal. (Gotta get that babymaker ready again!)

On the table, I was vomiting because I had insisted on providing my laboring body with calories, so it was my fault that I had anything in my stomach to vomit at all, I’ll admit, much less a disgusting grilled cheese from a hospital cafeteria procured at midnight. (Calling that particular sandwich “food” is using the English language in a way that it was not intended to be used, so I won’t bother.)

For my efforts to provide my contracting uterus with calories I’d eaten myself, I’d been laughed at and then been drugged to be made compliant in a hospital room where I could not stop screaming or crying. Twelve hours after that, I was on a table, my naked body in full view of a room full of hospital staff and the surgeon was an asshole with thanksgiving plans. I was a midnight surgery, the opening surgery of her shift, and an annoyance because she’d get less sleep on her holiday shift. She didn’t know me, but one sentence from her had the aesthetician doubling my phenergren, and then I really was drugged up. And finally, compliant. I couldn’t see my son when they finally pulled him from me, though the rush of air into my lungs once he exited is a feeling I can’t forget. I couldn’t hold the baby because my arms were numb. I couldn’t see the baby because I forgot my contacts. I don’t remember anything after that but waking up in my room with a baby on my chest that I couldn’t name because my heart hurt. That’s how my precious baby boy was born. I woke up from major abdominal surgery, groggy and hoping someone got a decent picture or two. (They didn’t.)

After a six (6) day labor while juggling childcare and pet-care, dancing through contractions every 6-8 minutes, cleaning my floors and cooking fudge, less than six hours in an American hospital broke me into pieces. Truly, six minutes was all it took. I am not someone who can exist in hospitals safely— I have a uterus. It doesn’t matter what I say, the staff knows my medical history before I can open my mouth. Before I have a chance to tell anyone anything, I’m always a white woman from Texas who should be going to church more, she really should. I went into the hospital room the midwives prepared for me while knowing, very intimately, who I was to every staff member who watched me waddle my pregnant and fat ass to L&D— a first time mom who doesn’t know how to push and wants to keep her vagina intact for her poor, beleaguered husband. (The Husband Stitch is medical abuse!!) I walked those hospital hallways to my doom and I damn well knew it. It’s been 13 months since I heard this stupid surgeon talking about my vital organs like they were a hurricane without an epicenter and my body is still scarred and tender and sore. I will never be the same person I was when entered a hospital to have my baby. I would not use the wheelchair the nurses tried to force on me; I walked into that fucking maternity room with my head held high and got on the bed of my own volition while simultaneously ripping off the gown they were trying to button on my naked body before I even sat down on the bed.

I remember the exact moment I broke in that sterile room with soft lighting and pink pleather couches. I’m not proud of this moment. It takes a lot to truly break my spirit. The hospital staff kept my fiancé from me while the intern and the resident shoved needles into my spinal cord while reminding me to keep my body calm through multiple contractions so I wouldn’t accidentally paralyze myself while the intern dug around my nerve highway like it was a game of goddamn Tetris. My fiancé was settled in the farthest corner of the room from me, and then the staff got to work putting several needles in my body. I asked for a tissue to wipe my tears and soak up the snot flowing down my face— I was told to wait to wipe my own face off. I could not stop crying for my fiancé. (His first birth was traumatic as well. Being in the hospital at all meant that I had already failed him completely.) It takes a lot of mental effort to remain perfectly still while an 8lb baby is rioting in your womb because he can feel other people touching the skin of his beloved mother. I had a lot of mental effort left to spare, at the time, so keeping my spinal cord relaxed when it really mattered was easy for me. I was as still as a statue for the sake of my spinal cord and my son. I asked for a tissue and a hand to hold, after they resettled my body to take the second epidural procedure. I was refused. I could not have my dignity, my fiancé, or a goddamn Kleenex. I hope those nurses hear my primal screams in their sleep at night. All I wanted was a fucking tissue and some dignity.

I tried so hard to have my birth in a birthing center, with no surgeons or trauma at all, but in the end, my agency was ripped away from me, again and again and again and again. Birth in a hospital means a surgeon who didn’t ask me what I wanted told another staff member to pump my laboring body with more drugs that I did not want to have inside me, and it was simply done. They didn’t ask me if I had ever had any side effects from this particular drug before they gave it to me. They should’ve. They also should not have let the intern do my epidural— the clumsy hands of a nervous intern tore my spinal membrane open and my spinal fluid starting leaking somewhere in me. The destination of the newly freed spinal fluid was unclear, but the migraine it left behind made me unable to feed my baby, so 24 hours AFTER my first and only major abdominal surgery, I had to have another epidural— with ZERO pain medication and only because it made nursing impossible. That’s when they cared about my blinding migraine. When I couldn’t milk myself for my newborn due to PAIN.

All this horror, all for the love of procreating and parenting, all for a baby who is so spoiled he doesn’t even bother to say “mama.” I lost a good job because the Fortune 500 company that hunted for me is STILL on a salary and hiring freeze, due to the pandemic.

I love my son more than I love myself, but I also have to face the reality that a four day hospital stay in November of 2020 means I’m homeless in March of 2022. I cannot pay my landlord the back rent I owe her for ONE month of this fucking endless panini and now, my medical debt tarnishes my newly minted name. I wanted this baby. I prayed for this baby, as a child and teen. I kept him in my fucking body for 9 months by sheer force of will and now, I’m a taxable single mother who can’t keep a job to feed him.

I’m a good, Christian white woman who can do anything but get a job at a Burger King or Kroger to feed my baby, as much as my fiancé says that’s what I need to do to be the kind of good parent he is. I’m in Texas though, is the thing. They don’t care about women here and they certainly don’t care about babies.

I’ve had four miscarriages. Two were chemical pregnancies, but two were viable. One happened in the last week of September and I had to get a job immediately to pay those bills. No one cares when the miscarriage happens naturally, so I put on the equivalent of a diaper (maxi pad) and hauled my bleeding and contracting uterus to work on October 1 instead of staying at my boyfriend’s apartment to cry about a child we lost. I didn’t think I could ever get pregnant again, but I didn’t have the time to mourn, you see. I already had one kid I didn’t birth and she needed a Working Mom. I went to work, a retail job, while I was bleeding and charming all the customers during the holiday rush.

I love my baby so much. I love my big kid so much. I literally put myself through hell just to make sure they have a roof over their heads and food in their belly and a family where they feel safe to be any damn thing they please. And I STILL have to get on this goddamn internet and shout to people that abortion is a healthcare right and not a fucking moral compass with which to judge the hated sex.

I want abortion to be legal again in Texas BECAUSE of my damn son. I have the mental fortitude to succeed at something out of sheer spite, so I survived my traumatic pregnancy and rapey hospital stay specifically FOR my son but this is not a thing that can be forced on someone. Not in a humane society. I know exactly how the entire fucking medical and insurance system works and it’s a goddamn pyramid scheme without getting into the racism and sexism inherent in medical autonomy. The backend of patient care is messy and the front end is still women being talked over on operating tables while they choke on the patriarchy and carry its children.

Fuck all of you for doing this to women. We deserve better.

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