An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination_ A Memoir - Elizabeth McCracken [31]
“Well,” I said. “Well.”
He nodded and turned back to his paperwork.
At the end of that first appointment I had to schedule the next. “Who do you want?” the receptionist asked. “Doctor? Midwife?”
“Doctor,” I said. “If that’s all right.” I didn’t blame midwifery for Pudding’s death, I just couldn’t bear the idea of too much warmth from a medical professional. All my romantic notions about collaborating on a birth had gone out the window. I wanted to be told what to do; I swore I would obey.
Besides, what were the chances?
When I returned for every successive appointment, the pregnant women in the waiting room made me sad: there they sat in the present, dreaming of the future. I couldn’t bear watching. I wanted a separate waiting room for people like me, with different magazines. No Parenting or Wondertime or Pregnancy, no ads with pink or tawny or pearly smiling infants. I wanted Hold Your Horses Magazine. Don’t Count Your Chickens for Women. Pregnant for the Time Being Monthly. Here I was, only in this second, and then the next, and nothing else. No due dates, no conversations about “the baby” or what life would be like months from now. No “This time will be different” or “Listen, it will all be worth it when you hold your child in your arms.” What I wanted, scrawled across my chart in shaky physician’s cursive: NOTE: do not blow sunshine up patient’s ass.
I rotated through the doctors, and they all seemed perfectly capable. In the unlikely event (my God, how we strived to ever lower our expectations) that I actually had a baby, any one of them would be welcome to extract it.
And then I had an appointment with Dr. Knoeller.
Almost immediately Edward and I took to calling Dr. Knoeller “Bones,” because she was a doctor (short for Sawbones, like the doctor on Star Trek) and because she was extraordinarily thin, but mostly, I think, because we instantly worshipped the ground she walked on and it helped us to be irreverent about one small thing. The appointment was our last checkup of my first trimester, and she looked at the chart.
“Is this your first child?”
“I had a stillbirth last year,” I said.
“I’m so sorry,” she said immediately, words I’ve never tired of hearing. We went over the details a little, and then she said, “You’ve scheduled an amnio.”
“Yes,” I said. In France the blond Baltimorean asked us if we were worriers; when we said yes, she made an appointment for an amniocentesis. Even so, I’d been startled when I spoke to the French genetic counselor, who was heavily pregnant herself, and she informed me that if the results came back positive for Down syndrome, they “recommended” that we terminate the pregnancy. Edward and I hadn’t discussed what we’d do if it turned out that Pudding had Down syndrome, because we agreed that all the theorizing in the world would probably crumble to dust in the face of a fact.
But this time it was different. We simply wanted to know. It would only be information.
“I mean,” I said to Dr. Knoeller, “we figured we might as well. I guess. I don’t know. What do you think?”
Well, she said, the real question was, if we had an amnio, and the results were normal, but it was one of the one in two hundred pregnancies that miscarried after the procedure, how would we feel?
We were stunned into silence, because of course that was the question. Even if you rephrased it — as Edward pointed out, one in two hundred sounds worse than one half of one percent because with the former you visualize actual people — we weren’t willing to risk it. Once you’ve been on the losing side of great odds, you never find statistics comforting again.
She said in a manner both businesslike and warm, “Let me just say that I had an amnio myself, but I didn’t have your history.”
And just like that, our history was in the room, and I had found a doctor I loved.
Another woman might want a doctor