Two Kisses for Maddy_ A Memoir of Loss & Love - Matthew Logelin [9]
“What are you doing?” she screamed like a mother who had just busted her teenage son with a stack of porn. “You must keep these on! Not wearing them can kill you! It’s happened before and it will happen again!”
Liz just nodded as the nurse put the cuffs back on her lower legs, but as soon as the door closed behind her, Liz lost it.
“Fuck her! I mean, I know she’s right, but she didn’t have to yell at me like that. How scary! God! What a bitch.”
I let out an uneasy laugh as the words came from her mouth, and then I agreed with her. “Yeah, that nurse is a bitch.” But that was the last time Liz ever removed those leg cuffs without consulting a nurse. No matter how painful the procedure, no matter how awful and uncomfortable she felt, she knew she had to endure it—and she wanted to, because her only concern was delivering a healthy baby as close to full-term as possible. She made it her job, and once it became her job, it was her singular focus. That was just Liz. Once her mind was set on something, she not only had to complete the task but she had to do it as well as she possibly could.
Even though we lived closer than a ten-minute drive to the hospital, I refused to let Liz spend even one night by herself. I was there as much as I humanly had time to be; this pregnancy was bringing us so much closer, and I just couldn’t let her do it alone. I slept on an extremely uncomfortable foldout chair, waking up at least once every hour when some random alarm would go off, or when Liz woke me up to tell me to cover my ears so she could use the bedpan. (I have a passionate, lifelong hatred for the sound of anyone peeing.) My schedule was the same every day: I left the hospital before six o’clock each morning, to avoid the daily parking charge, and headed home to take a shower and change my clothes. I spent most of my days at work thinking about our soon-to-be-delivered baby while replying to e-mails from Liz:
Watching Titanic. You’re sooooo lucky you’re at work.
Meatballs sound so good tonight. Can you pick some up before you come up here?
I just had the BEST mani/pedi in my hospital room, thanks to Mari.
I’m watching midget madness on Jerry Springer… AAAAHH!
Good massage, onto my bath… Ah, the life of luxury I lead…
I would leave my office after eight hours of being too distracted to accomplish anything, and stop home just long enough to grab our mail, pick grapefruit from our tree for the nurses, and gather flowers from our yard for Liz. I would pick up meatballs, mint chocolate chip ice cream from Baskin Robbins or whatever she was craving at the moment, and deliver it to her hospital room. We ate together, watched shitty television, listened to the music I thought she should hear, entertained guests during visiting hours, and talked on the phone to friends and family about how we were doing.
Liz was often not up to taking visitors, sometimes because she felt nauseous, other times because she thought she didn’t look cute enough. Instead of telling them not to visit, though, she insisted that I was happy to entertain them, usually just outside of our room, in the lobby of the hospital, or in the cafeteria. When the phone calls became too much for Liz to handle and I grew unwilling to repeat the same mundane story to friends and family all over the world, I decided that I’d update my blog each evening so that everyone had a central source of information whenever they had a question or wanted to know how our baby was doing. It was a website that I’d had for years but rarely posted to—nobody but my mother checked it. Liz thought this was a good alternative to answering the