Jeannie Out of the Bottle - Barbara Eden [73]
By the time the show arrived in Washington, D.C., my feet ached, my back hurt dreadfully, and I was just wiped out with exhaustion. As usual, I had my checkup; the doctor examined me thoroughly, then asked when I was going home. “Pretty soon,” I said brightly. I was more than seven months pregnant and the tour was nearly over. In a few weeks I could go home, relax, and have my baby.
When I got home to Los Angeles and saw my regular doctor, he examined me for what seemed like an eternity. Finally he said gently, “Barbara, I think we have a problem.”
Now, I’ve been a positive thinker my entire life. Optimism is bred in my bones, and negativity is as foreign to me as finding a rattlesnake inside a box of chocolates. So I struggled to associate the word “problem” with my much-longed-for baby.
“What kind of problem?” I said finally.
“I’m afraid I can’t find a heartbeat,” he said very quietly. “But I can’t be certain; I can’t say anything for sure. You need to immediately go to the hospital and have a sonogram right away.”
Like a sleepwalker marooned in the midst of a horrendous nightmare, I went out to the waiting room, where little Matthew was waiting with Michael. My son took one look at my stricken face and cried, “What’s the matter, Mommy? What’s the matter?”
I couldn’t bear to tell him the truth.
“Nothing, Matthew,” I said. “Nothing.”
Michael and I exchanged covert glances, in which I silently signaled to him how bad things looked for the baby.
But Matthew must have picked up on our signals. He piped up, “Mommy, I am going to have a baby brother, aren’t I?”
Picking my words extremely carefully, I said, “We’re not sure, Matthew, but I think so.”
He had never seen me cry in his whole life, and I didn’t intend for him to see me crying now, but I was within inches of losing all self-control.
By the time our car pulled up in front of Good Samaritan Hospital, where I had given birth to Matthew and had been so deliriously happy, I was shaking from head to foot and fighting back the tears.
Michael helped me out of the car. My friend Mary was outside the hospital, waiting for me, and so was Michael’s mother.
I had been on the road since I’d first found out that I was pregnant, but now my pregnancy was extremely visible. So when I walked into the hospital, the nurses, some of whom who had assisted at Matthew’s birth, virtually broke into applause.
“You’re having another baby, Miss Eden, how wonderful!” they said in unison.
The only reply I could summon up was, “I’m not sure.”
The receptionist presented me with a medical history form to fill out, but my hand shook so much that I almost dropped the pen. So I dictated my answers to the questions to Mary, who wrote them down for me instead.
Then I was taken into a treatment room, where I was hooked up to a machine that beeped in time with a thumping heart. But I could hear only one heart beating, my own. Not a second one. Not my baby’s.
It was already achingly obvious to me that my baby was no longer alive. There are no words to express my anguish.
The doctors took X-rays and performed other tests, and then my doctor called me into his office and confirmed what I already knew.
My baby was dead. His umbilical cord had been crushed, and there was nothing anyone could do to save him. I say him, because the doctor told me that my unborn baby was a boy. The doctor also told me that in all his many years of practice, he had never encountered a case like mine. I listened to his words and tried to grasp the meaning, but the only thing that was clear to me was that my baby was dead.
The worst was breaking the news to Matthew that I wasn’t