22. Zipper of Fire

If my mother’s over-sensitivity to anesthesia is connected, somehow, to that gray cloud of unknowing that descends over me at critical moments, it is also true that my own under-sensitivity to anesthesia connects to the opposite tendency: to be awake when I’m supposed to be sleeping, to feel things I’m not supposed to be feeling. In fact I felt the scalpel make the incision my second daughter would be born from.

The sequence of events went like this: because the autoimmune antibodies in my blood increased the risk of clotting, which could damage the placenta and restrict the blood flow to the baby, I had injected an anti-coagulant drug into my belly twice a day for the past three months. Because the risk of autoimmune activity went up sharply in the last weeks of pregnancy, and because vaginal birth could risk creating oxygen stress for the baby, we decided to deliver two weeks early by C-section. Because the anti-coagulant drugs increased the risk of bleeding into the spine with an epidural, we decided I would have general anesthesia.

Because general anesthesia poses a not insignificant risk to the baby, the anesthesiologist went a little light.

So here’s how that works: one drug stills the body, one drug numbs the pain, one drug darkens the mind. The anesthesiologist mixes the cocktail, trying to keep it in balance. But it mixes unpredictably with your cocktail, the balance or imbalance inside you.

And so, in sum, when the doctor went in, I couldn’t move, I couldn’t see, I couldn’t speak, but I was able to hear and to feel, acutely. When I told them later that I had felt the incision being made, they acknowledged the possibility of this, they didn’t outright call me a liar, but they insisted, every one of them, that of course you didn’t feel it as pain, though. Right?

I felt it as a zipper of fire opening my body.

Then I went under.

Awake.

Can’t move. Can’t see. Lung-lock.

Can’t breathe ––

Voices; laughing.

They don’t know ––

Metal. Clinking.

Can’t breathe ––

Woman’s voice: Ew, gross!

Can’t breathe ––

Laughter.

Can’t ––

Panic:

Then––

air flows in. Light.

It is over.

And so, my angel, you were born in a flood of purest animal fear.

Then purest animal joy.

The moment I saw you, I knew you were perfect. Like any mammal mother, I recognized my own. The shape of you, the weight of you, your smell —

When I touched your hair with my lips––

When I felt the light of the sun flow through my body into yours––

a bliss long deferred came to heal me.

I entered the world, became one of its creatures.

We both were born that day.

Of course, big pieces were still missing. Things out of balance, things irrevocably lost. Through all the currents of grief and love coursing through us in those years, I mourned those losses, the ones that I could see, the ones I did not yet know how to see, and the ones yet to come, that I knew must come.

back

contents