Dead Dobie
Wall
It was an April
morning in Arizona. Storm clouds loomed as my husband, Jeff, and I headed north
to Jack’s Canyon with an entourage of vehicles. We were on our way to go rock
climbing. At the time, we were both members of the Arizona Mountaineering Club.
Jeff was an outing leader, and this was his outing.
The skies looked
ominous with their swells of gray clouds. Sheets of rain fell in the distance
like silver arrows. We decided it
would be pointless to continue on, so we turned around with all of the
first-time climbers in tow.
Secretly, I was
glad that the day’s event was going to be canceled because earlier that
morning, I didn’t think I should go. I had experienced a tugging feeling in my
abdomen and vaginal discharge. Normally, this wouldn’t be a concern. But, in my
case, I was twelve weeks pregnant.
“I don’t think I
can go,” I pleaded with Jeff.
When I described
my symptoms, he didn’t gush with the sympathy I had expected.
“I have to go,” he
insisted, “and I need you to help. We don’t have enough instructors for you to
stay home.”
So I went, even
though I knew I should probably stay in bed and rest. I used denial to my
advantage. I had read that vaginal discharge is often a normal part of
pregnancy, so I chalked it up to that.
So we made a
U-turn—not to go home—but to make our way to a local destination: Dead Dobie
Wall at Lookout Mountain.
***
It was January. I
stared at the solid blue line on the home pregnancy test. I was pregnant for
the first time, and I felt a surge of excitement. Call it instinct, the desire
to care for someone other than myself, or appreciation of the innocence
associated with children. I wanted to be a mother. My time had finally arrived.
Thrilled with the news, I told close to everyone: parents, in-laws, friends,
store employees. To those I didn’t tell, I advertised my pregnancy with
maternity clothes that I wore well before their time. I took extra care to eat
right, I steered away from beverages tinged with alcohol or caffeine, and I
flooded my body with the vitamins and folic acid it deserved.
Not only did I
watch what I put in my mouth, but I was careful about what I breathed and what
I touched. When some moron decided to spray paint inside my office building, I
immediately left.
Everyone was
ecstatic over the news—especially me.
At eight weeks
gestation, I had a prenatal appointment. Unexpectedly, my gynecologist
announced that she wanted to perform an ultrasound. The baby looked like a lima
bean with a heartbeat. It was amazing to see that little, fuzzy image and the
pulsing life on the old-style monitor. I even took a still picture of the baby
home with me as a keepsake.
Around my ninth
week, my extreme fatigue and morning nausea started to subside. I had heard
that the second trimester was easier. It occurred a little sooner for me than
for others. Or so I thought.
***
We arrived at Dead
Dobie Wall in northeast Phoenix. I felt horrible. My uterus ached. So the
trudge through crumbly rock to the base of the climbs felt treacherous. While
the weather to the north was riddled with rain and storms, the Phoenix metro
area was typical: sunny and warm.
When we got there,
we dumped our packs and gear. I reluctantly wriggled into my harness. Though I
had no intention of climbing, I did have to belay. The pull on my harness as I
lowered all 190 pounds of Jeff felt excruciating. Sympathy lined my friend
Sally’s face.
“How are you
doing?”
“I’m in a lot of
pain,” I offered as Jeff’s body neared the ground. Yet, I continued to
participate. No one encouraged me to stop. My subconscious weighed in every now
and then with a you shouldn’t be doing
this. But I chose to ignore it.
Things
progressively grew worse as the day went on. The discharge did not stop. In
fact, it became excessive. But we were in the middle of an outing. People had
signed on for this, taken the day off specifically to climb. I couldn’t let
them down. I couldn’t let Jeff down. So I spent the entire afternoon saturating
maxi pads and crouching between the basalt rock and a bush, releasing what
seemed like volumes of fluid from my uterus. At that point, denial was swept
away. Something was clearly wrong. I should have called a doctor. Instead, I
went rock climbing. Somehow, I made it through the day, hoping that things
would be better by morning. They weren’t.
At 4:30 the next
morning, I experienced a great deal of cramping. By 6:00 a.m. there was blood.
It was a Sunday, so I called the doctor’s answering service. The nurse
practitioner called back and told me to go to the emergency room. Jeff was out
buying bagels and coffee. He was scheduled to go to traffic school that day for
a speeding ticket. He dropped everything to take me to Mesa Lutheran Hospital.
The emergency room was a nightmare, complete with all of the blood and gore, all
the fear of being stalked by something. Death.
Stripped down,
naked beneath the paper gown, my butt exposed to the sterile cot, I had lain
with a maxi pad circa 1955 between my legs. Jeff sat beside me, quiet and wondering—just like me. As the
blanched blue curtains ruffled with the ghost doctors who drifted by, my
stomach jumped as I thought of them rushing to me. I wanted to know and I didn’t want to know.
My cordoned-off
area sat in shadow. Only one
recessed light shone behind my head.
A stack of super maxi pads and mesh ER panties sat beside me on the
table. I wanted to reach for another and another, but each time I moved, I felt
the plasma spilling out of me. I
figured if I didn’t stir, the bleeding would stop.
With a rip of
the hand, the curtain blew back.
The metal rings clanked against the brassy bar like an awakened wind
chime. A white-smocked woman
wearing ringlets of chestnut hair settled at my side with a toolbox: there to
fix everything.
“We’re
going to need to take some blood,” she announced while cinching my arm in her
padded fist. Then, “This won’t
hurt a bit” as she stabbed a ten-inch knitting needle in my arm and proceeded
to suck out vial after vial of blood.
I turned my head and grabbed Jeff’s hand because of my fear of blood
draws.
“All
righty. We’ll get this specimen to
the lab. It may be awhile before
we hear anything.”
To
keep my mind off the dreaded possibilities, I focused on my arm and the purple
bruise that would mark its territory there by the day’s end.
After
minutes—and what seemed like hours—ticked by, I was taken for a pelvic exam.
The doctor loomed over me; my legs open and upward, ankles fastened in the
stirrups.
“We’re going to
get a better look at things,” he explained. His speech sounded overly annunciated,
condescending, as if he spoke to a lost child.
The lines of
experience on his face appeared more deeply pressed than they should have been
as he evaluated the scene. He
assessed me like I was an accident that he had happened upon—disfigured, bloodied,
hopeless.
Jeff
gave me a reassuring pat as the nurse handed the ER doctor a suctioning
device. A Hoover is what it was,
meant to suck the crumbs from the depths of the sofa cushions, not to be placed
inside of me.
“This may be
uncomfortable and the noise may be a little disturbing, so we’ll do this as
quickly as we can.”
As the nurse
flipped the switch, and the doctor inserted a hose inside of me, I concentrated
hard to ignore the sound. I have had quite a few pelvic exams in my time, and
they never involved emptying anything out of me. I listened to the inhuman
sucking through the vacuum while blood, tissue, and quite possibly my baby
moved through the hose like liposuction.
A liposuction I did not sign up for.
The machine
chewed noisily, smacking its lips with every taste of what was pulled from
inside of me. As more and more
scarlet rushed by in my peripheral vision, so did my hopes and dreams for a
future with this child. I stared
off into the distance and pretended none of it was happening. Though, just out of my view, on the
white floor tiles, I saw the scarlet trail of blood from when I stepped off the
gurney and onto the exam table.
After the pelvic
exam, the nurse returned me to my assigned spot in the ER. No one uttered the
word—baby. Apparently, it was taboo.
“We’re going to take you for an
ultrasound. See what we can see,”
the nurse had been sent in to tell me.
The room smacked
of sterility: white-washed walls, bright interrogation lamps, and
ammonia-scrubbed floors.
The radiology
technician parallel parked me alongside a monitor. She slid an air hockey
paddle over my stomach—a double agent that worked incognito as a shock device
during artificial resuscitation.
No words escaped her lips.
Only hmmm’s and undercover sighs. I strained to see the monitor, but it
was tipped just out of my view. I
felt desperate to see my baby, witness the heartbeat, and know she was going to
be all right. The technician
punched a few keys, then the ultrasound was over.
After four hours or
more, I received the dreaded IV. Once the nurses realized I had not been given
pain medication, they rushed to ease my pain.
“This will pinch
a little,” the nurse reassured me as she stabbed the vein of my hand with a
needle the size of my index finger and threaded the I.V.
Normally, my body
would protest such a procedure. But knowing that the beyond-premenstrual pain
was going to end made my fear of IV’s a blurry memory in my mind.
I heard someone
utter the word narcotic and knew that
a pregnant woman such as myself should not have it, but I no longer seemed to
care.
No one should have
to endure what I did that day. After six hours, the doctor swept aside the
curtain and pulled a rolling chair to my drug-induced side.
“Your baby is
dead.” It took all of my efforts to process those words as he prattled on about
no sac, no heartbeat. Technical
jargon I didn’t want to hear, didn’t want to know. All I heard was that my
child was dead. I was told to get dressed, that the nurse would be in with my
discharge papers. I was sent away as if this sort of thing was an everyday
occurrence. Maybe for them it was. For me, it was life-changing. I shuffled out
of the ER with a Target bag of maxi pads and mesh ER panties; leaving what was
left of my child and my pregnancy within the walls of the hospital. It was the
worst day of my life; it felt like the end of the world. My body had betrayed
me, and so had God.
As I waited
outside the hospital for Jeff to pull the car around, I blamed myself: if I
hadn’t gone climbing none of this would have happened; if I had left the
building sooner during the spray-painting session, my baby would still be here.
I listened to the birds chirping, watched the small breeze slightly ruffle the
leaves of the trees, and witnessed the ongoing motion of life. For me, life had
stopped. It seemed that someone had to take the rap for the death. I looked
around, and there was only myself to blame.
Later in the week,
when I was supposed to have a prenatal appointment, my own doctor encouraged me
to have a D&C to avoid infection. I did. It made me feel physically and
emotionally void. Not only had the surgery emptied out the contents of my
uterus, it scraped clean all semblance of hope for being a mother; it made my
world stand still when everyone else’s kept moving; it gave me a very
personalized experience with death and all the grief that accompanies it.
Before this
miscarriage, the only deaths that I had faced were my maternal grandparents who
were both over 80 and the two dogs I grew up with. While losing them was
painful, it did not compare with this. Losing my child to death—the child with
whom I felt so connected—was beyond sadness. I had hopes for this baby, I had
prepared for her, and I wanted her. And, in contrast to my other loved ones,
she had not lived a full life. She had not lived a life at all. Despite the
intensity of my grief, I was expected to carry on as if nothing ever happened.
Few recognized my loss as real, so I became absorbed in anger.
“It’s a good thing
it happened when it did,” remarked a friend.
“Something was
probably wrong with the baby,” said a family member.
There were so many
statements that were meant to bring comfort but only brought more hurt. Those
who had never endured a pregnancy loss had no clue what I was going through; my
child died that day.
***
Five months later,
I found myself pregnant. After the requisite waiting time proceeding a
miscarriage and D&C, I had felt ready to try again. I didn’t know it would
happen so quickly. Though I didn’t yet have any symptoms, I had another
positive pregnancy test to prove that I was once again expecting.
At that time, I
was in the midst of student teaching, attempting to earn my Masters degree in
education. I was extremely hopeful that things would work out well this time
around. They didn’t. Five weeks into the pregnancy, I started spotting. My
obstetrician ordered blood work to check my hCG levels. I waited and agonized
in advance of the results. By the end of the day, the nurse called. No calming
tone, no words of sympathy; simply: “Your numbers are low. The pregnancy won’t
survive.” I opted to miscarry naturally this time around. It was a long and
physically painful process: it felt like the worst and longest period in the
history of my life. There was a lot of blood, there was intense pain, and
knowing that my body was expelling a child was difficult to endure. Despite all
of that, I was grateful for choosing a more natural means than a D&C. In
some strange way, it felt like the right thing to do. I even student taught
while miscarrying my baby. As with the first pregnancy and miscarriage: the
show must go on.
At least that is
what people want from a woman who has only lost a fetus: something that no one
ever knew and no one ever cared about. No one except me. So when others refused
to acknowledge my children because they had never been wrapped in a Pottery
Barn blanket or because they didn’t have fully-formed vocal cords, I chose to
celebrate their lives. I wrote letters to them, kept journals detailing what
could have been and, in my mind, what should have been. I remembered them on
holidays and anniversaries and remained thankful for the short time I had with
each of them. And nine years later—I still do. While others have long forgotten
them, I will never forget. Ever.
Jeff and I still
rock climb. When we go, we often take our two living sons with us. We have been
to many places to scramble up routes: City of Rocks in Idaho, X Rock in
Durango, and Queen Creek in Superior, Arizona. But as much as I like to climb,
I will never return to Dead Dobie Wall at Lookout Mountain. Looking back now, I
think how fortuitous that name was and how much weight that place still carries
for me.
