Anger

Have you realized yet that I am kind of an angry person? I mean, not all the time, but often. Anger is a big part of my personality, my reaction to things. It's one of the main things I'm working on in therapy.

But I am angry right now, this minute, about losing my daughter, and about how I lost her.

The anger surrounding my daughter's death has been the single-most intense and lasting emotion from that time. Yes, I think, even greater than the love I feel for her, although it's hard to admit that. I know that the anger is so great because the love was/is so great, but it saddens me that this is the emotion that is still hanging in there.

It pops up rather unbidden. I lurk around a lot on infertility/loss blogs and sometimes that triggers it, but usually what triggers it even more is the story of the "miracle" that I didn't get to have. The 11-ounce baby who lived, the woman who actually got some treatment when she went into premature labor and now has her child.

I work for the major university in my state and that's where I went for care. I've written a bit before about it. I work in public relations for the health colleges here. From 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., I'm supposed to trumpet the amazing, cutting-edge research, education and clinical care that goes on at this university, and I do it, all with a bitter taste in my mouth, because I know the reality of this place. I know my reality of this place.

I know there are people who get their miracles here. Recently, through the course of my work, I became aware of this woman. She got her miracle (so far; she's still battling the cancer, of course). As I sat in our staff meeting I wondered...how is it that this woman from North Carolina can have a tumor half the size of a golfball on her cervix, end up here, and end up with a healthy baby, when I, an employee of this place, a PR person nonetheless, went in with a much more common complication of pregnancy and left with nothing but a bereavement envelope?

The whole truth of my experience here on June 9, 2003, is that I could have stayed at home. That is honestly the true amount of help I got from them. The only thing I got from this "cutting-edge" facility that I couldn't have gotten at home was two shots of Nubain.

If I had stayed at home I wouldn't have had to hear the minutes-old healthy babies crying in the rooms around me.

If I had stayed at home I wouldn't have had a nurse hand me a bedpan when I told her I thought I might be having the baby. "It's probably just a bowel movement," she said. "The only doctor here is in a c-section. These babies are so small, sometimes they just come out so fast that nobody can be here when it happens," she said.

If I had stayed at home I would have held my daughter during her 9 minutes of life, instead of being told there was no heartbeat. Two hours after her birth, when signing the birth and death certificate information for her, we saw that the birth and death times didn't match. That's how we found out she'd lived, if only for a few moments and if only by the most technical definition--a heartbeat. Apparently, it was not important enough for them to tell us. I can only hope they didn't lie to me when they told me a nurse held her the whole time. I can only hope she didn't live her few precious moments on this earth lying alone and naked on a cold metal counter.

If I had stayed at home, maybe, just maybe, when my contractions stopped at 2 p.m. that afternoon, they would have stayed gone for a week and a half more, and my cervix may have stopped opening for a week and a half more (like it did with my son), giving my daughter a chance at life, instead of being coerced into hurring up "the inevitable" with a drip of pitocin.

If I had stayed at home, an ignorant and arrogant nurse would not have told us that our child was a boy, in spite of our doubts and our repeated questions for confirmation. We would not have named our son, we would not have cremated our son (complete with a Star Wars t-shirt that was my husband's when he was little and a letter to "my sweet boy Jack William" that I tucked alongside her little body), we would not have dozens of cards in our child's scrapbook expressing sympathy for the loss of our son.

I am angry that I didn't get to see a licensed doctor for four hours after I came the hospital bleeding. I am angry that nobody did a damn thing to even try to save my daughter. I am angry that I didn't get any drugs to stop contractions, that I didn't get even an attempt at an emergency cerclage, that I didn't even get compassion from most of the people we dealt with that day. I was just another woman losing just another fetus. Just another day at the "premier" health care institution in my state.

How do I come to terms with this? Yes, I've made progress since that day. I've gotten very good at pushing it into a part of my brain and heart that I refuse to let myself access most of the time. I won't say the anger has diminished because I don't think it has; I think I've just gotten really good at burying it and staying away from the grave because I couldn't function otherwise. Feeling that anger could be a full-time job. A lifetime isn't long enough to feel all of it.

At home, I have a little treasure chest my father made for me when I was 12 or so. A year or so ago I cleared it out and filled it with the papers, medical records, and audio tapes I made from phone calls with my OB and the head of the OB/GYN department, things I gathered when I was consulting with lawyers. Every so often I am tempted to listen to them, but I instinctively know that I cannot endure the pain of them. I know hearing the endless suffering in my voice would unearth that grave full of seething rage that I have worked so hard to keep covered.

On our answering machine, we have three messages. They all begin the same way. "Um, Depressionista? Um...." And that's all I hear because both J. and I skip past them every time we're clearing it out. But we save them, and have saved them for almost four years. They're messages from my old OB, calling to tell me the results of the genetic tests we had done on Hope. I don't think they say much, other than "The results are in, please call me," and stuff like that. But neither one of us can bring ourselves to erase them. It somehow would feel like erasing our daughter. Those messages prove that she lived, and they prove that we forced a doctor to think about that for at least a few minutes.

I hope we show up in her dreams, my daughter and I.

I hope we show up in her nightmares.