The author’s son.Credit
It’s 3 in the morning when a lovely woman dressed in baby blue slips through a crack in the door to take my vital signs: temperature, blood pressure. She pings my knees with a rubber mallet, does a jerky massage on my feet to see if they’re swollen.
“Your ankles look great,” she whispers, and soundlessly glides out through the crack of light from whence she came.
I’d been living in this surreal and foreign land for seven weeks. Some nights it resembled an alien abduction: green flashing lights and identically dressed figures who hooked me up to mysterious machines at four-hour intervals.
Of course, that woman in blue was a night shift nurse in scrubs, and this was no abduction. I’d been on one of the world’s dullest assignments with life or death consequences. It’s the Cold War desk job of pregnancy: bed rest. Your life is the tedious equivalent of being glued to the same spot shuffling paperwork all day, but one innocuous wrong move and you might set off a chain reaction akin to the Cuban Missile Crisis in your uterus.
On the Antepartum Unit, we got ultrasounds every few days at dawn. In the dark, the scene on the sonographer’s glowing screen resembled an old Jacques Cousteau documentary. A prehistoric looking creature swam in the eerie underwater light, resembling a cross between an exotic mammal and a reptile extinct since the last ice age.
Apparently that was my son, at 30 weeks into pregnancy. How would I possibly fasten a diaper on that body?
Ante partum, in Latin, means before birth, which doesn’t sound too bad. To my knowledge, however, there is not an existing phrase in Latin that means the seemingly endless slog of weeks before birth when you are confined to a bed.
I was still in my second trimester when my water broke in a hospital elevator. The best you could say about the situation is that I was already in the hospital.
Bed rest is like Las Vegas. It’s nice for three days, but stay any longer and you might lose your mind.
Not to mention your money. My insurance covers maternity care and childbirth, yet I dread the astronomical copay bill I’ll eventually receive. It will doubtless be far more than the $9,767 bill Johnny Depp received when checking out of the Mark Hotel after he and Kate Moss trashed it, and Veuve Cliquot is not even on the hospital room service menu.
If you’re wondering how I could afford to sit in a bed for a couple of months and do nothing, the answer is that I couldn’t. As a freelance writer with neither disability insurance nor paid maternity leave, I couldn’t stop working. So I learned to type with an I.V. stuck in my right wrist, strapped to a heart monitor and a contraction monitor.
I tried to remind myself that the sheer ability to work from bed rest is a luxury, one that women who work in retail or restaurants lack. But after having to cancel all of the assignments that required me to travel, teach or be physically present, it didn’t exactly feel like a luxury.
According to a 2015 Labor Department report, just over half of American private industry workers lack access to any type of disability insurance. Bed rest only compounds the dismal situation that many American women face. We emerge from the hospital after delivery not only exhausted, with a helpless newborn in tow, but also likely already broke before facing another several months without pay.
The day I was admitted, I expected to be treated and discharged within a day or two.
“You’re not leaving until you deliver,” the doctor said.
I suddenly pictured the atrophied blob of a human I would become after months in bed, barely able to muster the strength required to care for a newborn.
According to some studies, this isn’t that far from the truth. Research on the benefits of bed rest is murky: Some studies suggest that it’s not only medically unnecessary, but that it may actually be harmful. Even my own doctor, who outlined the standard risks — blood clots, muscle loss, depression –– admitted that the “rest” aspect of bed rest would not necessarily prevent preterm labor. In my case, more important than being sedentary was being monitored, since most patients whose membranes prematurely rupture, and who successfully delay delivery, ultimately develop a rapid onset, serious infection. If things went downhill, I would be “decision to incision in 10 minutes.” That’s obstetrician-speak for an emergency C-section.
Of course, some patients did go AWOL, or at least the antepartum equivalent of it: A.M.A., which stands for leaving against medical advice. That means that you sign a paper stating that you are declining recommended treatment at your own risk.
I stayed. Doctors and midwives visited me at all hours saying, “I’m glad you’re still pregnant,” as if I were their favorite contestant on a “Survivor”-type reality show, called “Antepartum.”
“I’m leaving for Boston tomorrow,” one said cheerily, “and I hope you’re still pregnant when I get back!”
The odds, when I was admitted, were pretty terrifying. Half of preterm patients go into labor within 48 hours of their water breaking. Even if you make it through that crucial window, there’s still a 70 to 90 percent chance you’ll deliver within the week. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one out of 10 babies in the United States are born preterm each year. Those born between 22 and 28 weeks are deemed “extremely premature” and go straight into the neonatal intensive care unit; they won’t come home from the hospital for many weeks. Many will have serious disabilities. Some will never come home.
After a month moored to a hospital bed, my relationship to free will began to evolve. It’s easy to procrastinate when you feel at liberty, but just lack (there is always an excuse, is there not?) the money, the time, the motivation, the courage. But when you cannot go anywhere, when your freedom is reduced to a room, your perspective shifts.
Earlier this year, in the spring, I was hiking the Camino de Santiago in Spain, a thousand-year-old pilgrimage trail that winds from the Pyrenees to the Galician coast. Your essential task on the Camino is simple: You rise every day at around dawn, slip on your backpack, and walk all day to the next destination.
I learned on the Camino that I am not patient, and that this is one of my worst qualities: always thinking, always looking behind or ahead. Bed rest is like a reverse Camino. My job was to wake up every day at the crack of dawn and not go anywhere. The doctors advised me not to think too far into the future, though I have been practicing this dubious skill my whole life.
One doctor told me, “This is the most important job you’ll ever do.” I blanched at first, probably because I’ve never wanted to think of motherhood as a job. Then I realized what she meant. I needed to focus on staying pregnant — giving the baby time to get bigger and stronger — at least for one more day.
