The Places that Become Monuments in our Stories
Life and death met at the same moment
It is where our story begins and where I go back to in my mind whenever I think of that time in my life. I’ll never forget the night I left the hospital without my baby. I stood by the curb, sobbing quietly, waiting for an Uber. I had just given birth the day before. My stomach still inflated from pregnancy, my arms empty with sorrow. I stood there in the cold, my husband quietly standing next to me. We waited in our darkness, joined by the darkness of the night. My grief stinging deep inside, I couldn’t believe this was the second time we were leaving this hospital without a baby.
Each day when I walked by bereavement services en route to the cafe from the NICU, I would whisper to myself, “not today, Ludwig, not today.” My eyes turned to the ground. I walked holding my breath because I feared somehow if I inhaled that air, it would make my worst fears come true. I couldn’t look inside. I couldn’t bear the idea of making eye contact with anyone in or near there. Their presence made it more real and this place, this hospital, was not the place that was going to be a part of our story. And yet, it became the Goliath we couldn’t ignore.
It’s funny how something so inanimate can become something so big and hold so much importance in your life. We often remember our journeys in the places they unfold. Then, each time when we see these places, they become monuments in our lives.
For me, St. Georges Hospital in London became that marker of emotion in my story. It is where I learned my first baby would never see the light of this world and where my second baby would fight for his life. I begged God every day to let our second child see beyond the walls of that hospital. It held so much of our joy married in our grief.
St. George’s is huge. Servicing south London, it is the largest hospital in the city. I could see how someone might easily get lost in there. Yet, I could walk the halls of the antenatal offices and different birthing wards without the help of a sign to guide my way. Between the two pregnancies, the loss, the recovery, the hospitalizations, and surgery — the walls of this building became second nature to me. It was a strange place where so much happened. It was where life began and ended, a place where you never hoped to be but were so thankful for when you were there.
There are so many things about this hospital I can’t forget. It always looked a bit dirty and disheveled. It was newer in some areas and older in others. More people than chairs seemed to fill its rooms, and the air was almost always humid from body heat. Buildings no longer in use sat abandoned and boarded up adjacent to outside parking lots.
There were closed-off areas inside that connected busy wings. During my transfer from prenatal care to surgery, to remove the baby whose heart had stopped at eight weeks gestation, a porter used one of these shuttered areas as a shortcut. I was weak from losing so much blood and exhausted from the hours of pain my body endured during the miscarriage. That all seemed to go away when I saw the many empty and broken hospital beds that littered the hallways of this broken-down space. Baby cribs and medical devices were also stacked along the route, most with paper hand-written signs taped to them that read “broken.” So much many things lied crippled in this hospital, including myself.
St. George’s was often understaffed and overwhelmed and so far behind the times in terms of technology. My midwife used a pen and notebook to keep track of my pregnancy. She had a ledger to tell her which patients she would see during the day and my phone number was always hand-written next to my name. When I went into labor eight weeks early, a different midwife quickly scrolled through my pregnancy notebook, did her best to read it, and went from there. This always made me wonder how often unnecessary confusion could have been avoided had things been computerized.
At one point, post NICU discharge, during an MRI for my then 7-month-old son, Ludwig, I was told he did not make it to recovery. This was simply because there wasn’t a computer system to record these kinds of events. The room number the nurse called did not have the ledger that had my son’s name. She called the wrong room. Without knowing this, I assumed the worst and sat in absolute agony for 30 minutes, waiting for someone to tell me what happened.
So many things happened here. It’s where my husband and I held each other and wept for the loss of our first baby. It’s where my husband and I excitedly welcomed our second and wept the weeks following his birth, hoping he would come home. It’s where both of my pregnancies were confirmed by two beautiful, rapid, unmistakable heartbeats. It is where, after three weeks of intensive care, we placed our premature son into a car seat, packed our bags, and started our journey home for the first time as a family.
St. George’s has become a monument in my story. Are all monuments this heavy? I can’t recall ever feeling this way about any other place I have visited or spent time in. Tell me, do you all recall hospitals in this same way? I have to keep reminding myself it was just a building, but a building where so much of my life happened.
