Page 22 - WTP Vol. V #1

her room to seep in and lower her body tempera- ture, the isolette shouted with a vicious DING! that resonated deep within my chest, at a place
I never knew existed. When I heard the sound,
My surgeon grandfather must have been pacing outside the OR with my parents, understanding the stakes, likely hiding his understanding from the rest of my family.
I tried to disappear into the corner, I crouched down and cowered. I said nothing.
The first cut of the scalpel on a small, smooth field, the slicing away, the carving out, the rejoin- ing of tissues, clean edge against clean edge, my survival made possible in the healing of that gap. And then a colostomy. And then a mother with an empty belly forced to leave her baby in the care of nurses and doctors.
My husband and I went home with my empty belly, our empty car, our empty hearts. The
only efforts I could think of making felt futile. I pumped milk for her that she could not consume, placing it in little plastic containers to go in a NICU freezer. I cried into soft, pink clothes she could not wear. I closed the door to the half-dec- orated nursery that I imagined she might never see. I would re-learn how to grind through the day, how to park my car, to go through the hospi- tal lobby, to push the elevator button, to sterilize myself, to put on a gown, to stand next to her box and watch her as she lay still as a stone, the only signs of life coming from machines.
When I was one and then two and then three, I had more surgeries. More surgeons’ fingers guided scalpels horizontally across my middle, opening my body in an attempt to solve the prob- lems of my digestion. More incisions. More scar- ring. A vertical incision. And then, a diagnosis. Though it surely brought more worries, it must have been a relief to my parents to have a label: Hirschsprung’s Disease, the diagnosis handed down from a famed doctor in Memphis. I was to be the youngest child yet diagnosed, and he was to be in journals. A surgery to remove a substan- tial part of my colon. A post-surgical biopsy, neg- ative for Hirschsprung’s Disease. Fingers pointed to the radiologist who read the pre-surgical slide, to the doctor who would now not be in journals. A lawsuit. A jurisdictional technicality ending
A mother should do something more for her baby. But what?
I did not know how to love her. I did not under- stand what she needed from me, nor what I could give her. Maybe the people who cared for these babies knew better. It was the ultimate defeat. Mother does not know best—I was turning the cliché on its end.
the lawsuit. A colostomy removed and a child left with bowel incontinence.
I think of my own first skin. My skin that would someday become her skin. I rewrite its story, a story that also began with a baby in a bassinet. A story that also began with a mother in fear for the life of her baby.
Medicine had both saved and shattered my life. Kids made fun of me and didn’t want to be my friends. I had my suspicions about the kids who did; I knew they must have been hiding secrets of their own. If we were friends long enough, my suspicions were confirmed when I stayed at their houses: ticks full of blood that crawled from under the house where dogs slept in filthy pits, a father who threw shoeboxes at his daughter’s face, a mother who never ate and danced in the storage shed in her pointe shoes until her toes bled.
My first skin, pink and plump and firm, covering organs that 24 hours after my birth doctors discovered were not fully functioning–meco- nium that had not pass; an intussusception of the colon; a prolapse; a telescoping of skin into skin that created an obstruction. A dire emergency for a newborn that in 2014 was treated simply by passing air through the digestive tract, but
Like the friends I felt lucky to have, I lived in shame, certain there was something I could do to change what was happening to me but never
in 1978 was treated by surgery to cut away the telescoped skin and join the remaining tissues.
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