The People You Meet

The Third In a Series of True Stories

“Just press this button to control your pain. It’s morphine,” she said. She closed my fingers around the pump and smiled.

“What about the babies? Will it hurt them?” I was five months pregnant with twin girls, and the experience had only grown more surreal as the weeks passed. I felt like my head was attached to someone else’s body.

“Not at all.”

I didn’t believe her. In fact, anyone with a stethoscope hanging around their neck seemed suspect. Early on, we’d been told that one of the babies was too small, and that it was likely she wouldn’t come to term. Not so. The day before this morphine exchange, I was at home when I started to feel like pitchforks were scratching at me from the inside. For the first time in 25 years, I went to the hospital and was released an hour later. “You’re fine,” said yet another nurse. Lie. “Just drink a Coke when you get home.” Wrong.

Twenty-four hours later I was wheeled with dizzying speed directly from an emergency MRI into emergency surgery. And now I was recovering in a hospital bed with tubes running this way and that, fetal monitors beeping incessantly, and an incision across my belly.

I quickly softened towards the nurses because they brought me warmed blankets when my teeth were chattering. They were careful with me, usually touching me gently on the shoulder when they left. They tried to teach me to visualize my pain away and chided me gently for being stingy with my morphine. They were kind.

It was a teaching hospital, and I kept opening my eyes to find a group of physicians standing around my bed, talking about me like I wasn’t there. I’m sure I slept—I must have slept—but I don’t know when. On the first or second night, a young doctor stopped by to check on me. “Hey,” he said, “it’s almost 2 in the morning. Can’t sleep?”

“No, I can’t,” I said. I remembered him from rounds; he looked so young. “How old are you?”

“I’m twenty-eight. Are you crying?”

I nodded. “I’m older than you. That’s weird.”

David—let’s call him David—visited every night after that, sometimes sitting at the foot of my bed, sometimes pulling up a chair. I told him about my husband, and where we were from, and why we were living in Santa Barbara. He talked about his wife, who helped to facilitate adoptions from foreign countries. They rarely saw each other because of his schedule and her constant travel. They were trying to buy a house, he said, but it was hard to save money.

He relayed grade-A gossip about my excellent perinatologist and some of the bigshot doctors, one of whom was from India and boasted the most amazing, huge head of hair I’d ever seen in my life. He was the one who marched the groups through my room.

“Are you scared of him?” I asked.

“A little.”

“We should call him ‘The Lion,’” I said. From then on, David would stand in the back of the group during rounds and pantomime a roar before exiting the room. I didn’t understand how he could be at the hospital in the afternoon and still show up in my room at two or three in the morning, but he did.

Even though he wasn’t supposed to, he told me about some of the other interesting cases he was working on or had heard about it. “This?” he said, pointing at me. “This is nothing! Trust me. You’re golden.”

I sometimes complained to David about things I felt might bother the nurses. “Something hurts,” I said. “Will you look?” I pointed vaguely to the bandaged incision site on the underside of my belly which, in my enormously pregnant condition, I couldn’t see.

“Ack. You’re allergic to the tape; your skin is blistering.” He called a nurse in and waited while she replaced the gauze and secured it with paper tape.

A few nights later I said, “I refuse to believe that I can’t feel better than this.” I started to cry; I was always crying.

“What would make you feel better?”

“I want this out. I want it out.” I pointed to the tubes that were running up my nose and down into my stomach. They expelled something disgusting into a canister that existed somewhere behind the headboard; I had no desire to look.

The next day at rounds, The Lion came and pulled the tubes out while everyone watched. It was kind of horrible. “Thank you.”

“Oh, you’re very welcome,” said The Lion. I wasn’t talking to you, I wanted to say.

I was released after ten days or so, many of them made easier only because David had talked me through long stretches of night and calmed me when my belly went taut from the contractions I wasn’t supposed to have. It bothered me that I had never said thank you properly, but I decided I’d just ask my husband to send over a gift.

It was a few days before I felt well enough to call the hospital to find out David’s last name. Unfortunately, no one was able to help me. “Are you sure?” I asked. I described him again.

Yes, they said, they were sure. There was no such person on staff.