My Regards to the Monitor

Hours after I had the baby, Dr. F told the monitor near my face that it was very sick and would need a blood transfusion. I felt bad for the monitor, such a rough start to the day– it was only 5:30AM. 

I could smell life: some people were having toasted onion bagels with cream cheese falling out the sides or hospital hazelnut Keurig coffee which burned their tongues. Other people were being transfused. The monitor had worked hard all night in emergency childbirth. For what? 

Minutes later, when the monitor didn’t respond or react to his announcement, I realized he meant me, I was very sick, he just hadn’t thought to look down 45 degrees to where my face was.

I didn’t think I could get up from the hospital bed anyway. The fact that the bed could be completely broken down was the only reason I had confidence I’d ever not be in it. My sacrum was one with the thin padding they referred to as “mattress.” I tried to explain this to Dr. F but it came out like this: “OK.”

I wasn’t on drugs, exactly. I mean drugs were in me– morphine, and rights to tap the pump further- but I felt nothing like a person on them. It was like the drugs were scoping out my vascular system, an apartment they were considering renting, but it turned out the infrastructure was kind of shitty, and there were exposed wires in the kitchen– so, no.

Dr. F left to go make other statements other places, and some family who were around held my hands and tried to show me pictures of the newborn in his little bin, and that was helpful, because in theory there was a beautiful tiny fighter of a person who had come out of me and he was in a different room, that was all.

I didn’t actually understand what transfusion meant or why I was suddenly sick except that emergency surgery is always a roll of the dice, so when the doctor eventually came back, I asked why and how and what, and he nodded at the monitor. I guess his procedure was not the rushing and yelling kind of transfusion that I remembered from the show ER. But oh how I wished George Clooney was here, because he would definitely take my questions, or blink compassionately at me with his lifesaving and only-slight-egotistical big eyes.

Being inside the ambulance hearing the siren is very different than being outside. On the streets, your adrenaline and empathy stirs, even raising hairs, and you are fleetingly aware of some of the most profound human misfortunes, and maybe cover your ears. Inside the ambulance, you are the peristaltic movement of misfortune. You are misfortune’s etiology. You may have had your last toasted bagel, and you reckon with that in a metal box traveling at the highest permissible speed. 

When Dr. F came back back for the third time, the monitor had gone to sleep. In my memory, he apologized. He didn’t want to wake up the monitor. It’s against hospital policies for postpartum people to get satisfying naps, but monitors, no problem. They need a little recovery time. But also: I wasn’t sick. It was a mistake. They had retaken my iron. My iron levels were fine. Lab error. Oops. Happens sometime. My blood was red. The sky was blue. The sheet was white. And the baby was alive, and I was going to see him, in his little incubator box, his little eyes programmed to find my eyes, and stay. 

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