Jeffrey
B. Romanczuk
3,570 words
© J.B. Romanczuk
To hear my mom mention so casually “I had a miscarriage between Wayne and Terry and another between you and Mike,” always made the process seem like no big ordeal. It wasn’t until my wife had hers that I realized, “Hey, dummy, your mom’s were thirty to forty years ago.” That she remembers them at all, in a mix of eight successful pregnancies, means they were unforgettable. At least she wasn’t in Germany.
My wife and I were in the Air Force then, with a three-year-old boy to show for what little time we had spent together. Of course, we were as much to blame as the Air Force for our separations. But that was to change, no grudges held, as we were being reunited in Germany. Not only had our friends in Assignments wrangled us jobs at the same base, but we were assigned to the same unit. In fact, Cathy’s office was only down the hall from mine.
After twenty months of her being in Ohio and me in Texas, our newfound proximity and a very real belief that Luke shouldn’t be an only child had the effect of desire. Cathy and Luke got to Germany two months after I did, in early January. In early April, Cathy passed a home pregnancy test. “Passed” is probably the wrong word to use. We wanted it to be positive and it was. Anyway, the wand’s tip changed color.
The clinic on our base confirmed the pregnancy and set Cathy up for regular appointments at Landstuhl Army Regional Medical Center, the closest “American” hospital to where we lived and worked. In retrospect, Cathy would have been better to try her luck at one of the two nearby German hospitals. But this was early in our stay, so we were relieved to be sent to an American gynecologist.
Although a woman (big empathy points, we thought), Dr. Smith proved to be the stereotypical Army doctor of old. Even at the first meeting, she seemed tired and distracted. As we took our seats, without looking up Dr. Smith said, “Says here you’re pregnant.” At length, she put down the laboratory report, rubbed her palms in her eyes, then finally looked at us. “I guess they set you up with the usual follow-up appointments.”
“Yeah,” my wife said and it sounded strange to me. Although Smith was a doctor and an officer, we figured her for a peer. We said, “Yes, Ma’am” to other junior officers only when we’re being sarcastic.
Then, looking at me, she said, “You don’t have to come, you know?”
“I know,” I answered. “This is our second.”
“Oh. I guess that’s it then,” Dr. Smith finished. “Anything else?”
“My lower back hurts.”
“That’s normal.”
“Well, I don’t remember it hurting this much with Luke, even towards the end.”
“You know there aren’t many safe painkillers you can take.”
“I know that.”
“What do you want? A duty excuse?”
“I’ll give you massages every night, Cath.” I wasn’t sure why I interjected this. I guess I didn’t like the way the dialogue was going.
“Yeah, I know how long that’ll last,” Cathy said, accompanied by one of those if-only-men-could-get-pregnant looks.
“I’ll give you a 48-hour,” Dr. Smith said. “Try to stay off you feet.”
“I don’t like her,” Cathy decided as we left the parking lot. “She has no ‘bedside manner’.”
“They probably have her working 80 hours a week, Cath. We’re lucky she was awake at all. At least you’re only pregnant, and not something you really need a doctor for.”
There was that scowl again, so I tried to change the subject. “They said you’re due December first, good income tax baby.”
“Huh?”
“We’ll get the exemption for this whole year.”
“Men are so out of it,” Cathy said. “How can you even think of shit like that?”
“It just occurred to me.”
But we didn’t make it to December, or even out of May. During these months of her pregnancy with Luke, she didn’t feel as achy and never had morning sickness. All she felt then was tired all the time—so much so, that when she wasn’t working she was sleeping. But with this pregnancy she kept crackers by the bed to eat right after the alarm rang. Sometimes it calmed her stomach; more often it gave her something to expel. The lower back pain became constant, as well. At its worst it made her walk like she was toeing for landmines.
Finally, she felt horrible enough to go for a follow-up appointment with Dr. Smith. I didn’t accompanying her, but could imagine the tone from the dialogue Cathy relayed.
“Every woman has pregnancy pain. It’s natural.”
“But I don’t remember it hurting this much with Luke.”
“He was your first, right? Nobody remembers the bad part, especially of the first time.”
“Maybe, but sometimes I can hardly walk and I’m not even two months along. I shouldn’t even feel pregnant yet.”
“I can’t give you a duty excuse every time—”
“I’m not asking for one. If I’m going to feel this miserable, I may as well be at work.”
A couple weeks later, perhaps Dr. Smith realized Cathy knew her own body. More likely she alerted on the other indicators. Cathy had lost three pounds in the two weeks, had a lower than normal temperature, and often felt contractions similar to premenstrual cramps. Whatever, Dr. Smith thought an ultrasound necessary and I was there for it, unfortunately. The reality of my first ultrasound experience wasn’t the miraculous, joyous thing I was expecting from hearing other couples’ ultrasound stories.
“Here, drink this,” a corpsman said, handing Cathy a quart of ice water.
“What is it?”
“It’s just water, but you have to drink the whole thing. It’ll make your uterus stand out better.”
Cathy looked at me, looked at the huge cup, and I left to get her a diet coke. Awhile after she finished drinking, Cathy walked up to the desk. “Are we going to do this soon? I have to go.”
“Oh, are you ready?”
While leading us into the room with the ultrasounder, the technician laid out the ground rules. “I can’t answer questions about what you’re seeing, okay? You have to wait until the doctor interprets it.” Then the corpsman handed Cathy a hospital gown and pointing to a curtained off corner said, “Here. Put this on and take off your pants and panties.”
As Cathy went behind the curtain, I turned to the equipment which in itself was no more fascinating than an oscilloscope. I was more curious about the readers, attached by coil wire and sitting ready with the KY jelly on top of the thing. Coming across the room to pull herself up onto the end of the padded table, Cathy presented some interesting contrasts. Her blue uniform collar showed above the gown’s white neckline as her bare legs and black socks did below. I must have been smirking because she glared at me with her lips closed tight and jammed into the right cheek. Cathy was trying to stifle a laugh herself, though she hadn’t laughed in weeks.
The corpsman tried the external sounder first, and as she slid it about Cathy’s pelvic area the machine made noises like a person underwater slowly letting out a mouthful of air. A line like a windshield wiper quickly whipped back and forth over the screen and I couldn’t see a thing—just a big dark area in the middle of a fuzzy white field.
“What’s that?” I asked, finger on the dark area.
“Wait to talk to Dr. Smith, Captain.” Not the answer I wanted. My head was full of stories of people seeing the big head, making out little arms and legs, and even noticing a winky or not. I couldn’t see even a blob of life.
The corpsman lubricated the internal sounder, which looked to me—muddled as my thoughts were—like a sophisticated sex toy. Without waiting to be asked, Cathy put her feet up on the stirrup supports, mounted about a foot above either end of the table for that purpose.
“This’ll be cold,” the corpsman said. Cathy agreed, wrinkling her nose as she sucked in air through her teeth.
But the view on the screen stayed the same as the soldier hunted around inside my wife. I turned my head sideways, hoping to get a better view, then gave in to frustration. “What are we looking at?”
“The doctor will talk with you afterward.”
“Right.”
We went down to Dr. Smith’s office afterward, and waited out in the hallway until after the ultrasound pictures were delivered to her. She called us in almost immediately and in her usual blunt fashion—which, I hate to admit, once I got used to it, saw as a relief—said, “You are going to miscarry.”
“What?” Cathy said. “What’s wrong?”
“There’s either no baby there or the baby isn’t growing.”
“We were looking at an empty fertilized egg?” I asked. As she nodded her head slowly, I appreciated the unusual delicacy with which Dr. Smith chose her previous words. I turned to Cathy, “So, it’s like a natural abortion.”
“When?” Cathy asked.
“Oh,” Dr. Smith started, with a weary exhale. “Hard to say. Any time now. Within the next couple weeks, anyway.” Then came for me the most curious part of the whole ordeal. “If you have a discharge that looks like raw meat, bring it in with you when you come in for the D. and C.”
“Should I just go back to work until then?”
“You can.”
Around bedtime a few nights later, we were all upstairs getting ready. While Cathy was on the toilet, our three year old decided he needed to go as well. Instead of running to the downstairs bathroom, Luke pulled down his pants and squatted on the floor about four feet away from her.
“Jeff!” Cathy called, with the familiar “come running now” tone we had learned to use on each other. It probably would not have mattered if Cathy weren’t on the toilet. Luke was past three and a half and not toilet trained yet. To make matters worse, for the past couple weeks he had diarrhea. So when one of us called, the other came running to help clean up the mess.
I ran into the bathroom and scooped him up and into the tub in one motion. I guess I wasn’t quick enough, or too quick. In any case, there was a trail from where he squatted to where the boy was now. I set to cleaning up the trail first, then the boy. When I got back to him, though, I realized he wasn’t done yet. Luke had diarrhea running down the inside of both legs.
“Oh, Lu-u-uke!” On the edge of control, I asked “When are you going to get this thing down, buddy?”
As I started to run bath water, from behind me I heard, “Does this look like raw meat?”
I turned to see Cathy standing in front of the toilet, with her head twisted around looking into the basin and blood running down the insides of her legs. I looked from Cathy, to Luke, to Cathy again. Then went over to the toilet. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on the instance, the toilet basins in Germany were built a little different from American ones. There was a shallow curve toward the bowl’s front, which curved back almost horizontally before cutting away sharply into the vertical drain toward the back.
In a pool of blood in the shallow basin, sat a glob of something.
“Guess so,” I said. “It looks like a little chicken breast.” Such was the last coherent thought I had until the next morning.
“We need to go to Landstuhl,” Cathy said.
As I finished cleaning up Luke, my mind became a clutter of what to do. Putting him in pajamas, I realized I needed to find someone to watch him instead of dragging him to the hospital with us this late. “I’ll go talk to Barbara.”
Barbara was our next door neighbor, who knew twice as much English as I did German. At that time I knew about one hundred German words. With Luke in hand, I rang the doorbell. Barbara answered, saying “ ‘Abend” expectantly.
“Guten abend,” I replied, and the other ninety-eight words promptly fled my overcrowded head. I descended into broken English, mixed with a little semaphore minus the flags. Mercifully enough, she caught on that Cathy needed to go to the hospital and we needed someone to watch Luke. She gestured to her fourteen year old daughter, Sylvanie, then to Luke and I thought, “Bingo! What language barrier? Hah!” In German, Sylvanie said she would be over in a minute. I happily understood, and dashed back to the house to tend to the raw meat.
Finding a jar to put it in should not have been a problem, since we drank from emptied peanut butter jars regularly. But in my frantic search of one, none were to be found in our kitchen. As I slammed cabinets, Luke sat on the floor spinning a jar on its rim. Only the wobbling sound of glass on tile caused me to look down at him.
“Give me that,” I sighed, snatching the jar away from him. I plopped Luke in front of the television and put one of his cartoons in the VCR. As I ran upstairs to collect the evidence, I realized I didn’t bring anything to use to put it in the jar. I grabbed the glob out of the toilet bare handed, noting it was lighter than I expected as I dropped it into the jar and screwed on the lid.
Our doorbell rang and I called into our bedroom, “That’s Sylvanie. You almost ready?”
“Almost.”
I hurried downstairs to let in Sylvanie, with the jar still in my hand. I asked her in English to just sit with Luke until the tape ended then put him to bed. Not sure how much she understood—and aware the whole time I was speaking she was staring at the glass jar—while heading for the kitchen I asked in German, “Do you want a drink?” Sylvanie said, “Nay.” So I put the jar into a discreet paper bag and left to start the car.
Cathy and I didn’t say much to each other on the drive to the hospital. For once, I was glad for the left lane of the autobahn. Zipping along at 130 kilometers per hour (“kays”or “klicks” as Americans there say), as fast as the Ford could go, we got to the LARMC Emergency Room in under fifteen minutes.
The ER staff showed some sense. One nurse working the desk did, anyway. When we explained why we were there, and I started to mention what was in the bag, Cathy leaned full torso over the desk. The nurse and I both stopped talking and turned to her.
“Someone get this lady a wheelchair. Now!” she said. “I’ll take that,” the nurse added as she grabbed my jar bag. An orderly with a wheelchair appeared from behind double doors on the left, and supported Cathy by the forearm as she plopped into the seat. The nurse disappeared behind the double doors the orderly arrived through. I was left with one desk attendant to fill out admission paperwork while Cathy was whisked away through another set of double doors on the right.
By the time I was completing the third and last form, the nurse reappeared and said, “That was only clotting in the jar.”
I nodded like I understood the significance.
“You know how to find the OB/GYN ward, I assume?”
“With my eyes closed,” I said.
She smiled and said, “That’s where your wife is. They’ll need to do a D. and C.”
I nodded again, and headed for the elevator.
When I arrived at the ward, Dr. Nace was waiting for me and Cathy was being wheeled into the delivery room. It didn’t occur to me until then that they use the same operating room whether you’re having a baby or not. I guess it makes sense, but for those women miscarrying or having something like a hysterectomy, I would think the baby-having connections would only make the down side worse.
“I’m Mary Nace,” the doctor to perform the D. and C. said, reaching out a hand to shake mine, and wearing scrubs and a big, friendly smile. Although the smile seemed misplaced, it had a calming effect like warm tea on my jagged nerves. “You must be Jeff I-can’t-say-your-last-name.”
“I must be.” Dr. Nace was an Army major and head of OB/GYN for Landstuhl, one of those rare instances in which the military chose it’s leadership correctly. Or maybe the Army just plain got lucky. Either way, as we would find out the next year during a successful pregnancy, in every way Mary Nace was clearly the finest women’s doctor available. Cathy’s only luck so far was that Dr. Nace was on duty for this midnight operation.
“What’s that stand for, Doc?” I asked. “D. and C.? I know it means stretching and scraping.”
Dr. Nace laughed hard while shaking her head in disbelief. “Men!” Then regaining some composure she explained. “That’s exactly it, Jeff. Dilation and curettage. It’s French for ‘stretching and scraping.’ Honestly, if men had to go through— Well, never mind. I’m taking Cathy in now,” she said. “She’ll probably sleep afterward, so you ought to just go get some sleep yourself and come get her in the morning.”
“She’ll be released tomorrow?”
“Should be. Cathy seems pretty fit.”
“Sounds like a plan, Doc.”
When I got home, around 12:30 a.m., I was surprised to find Luke alone in his bed with no one else in the house. Interesting. We wouldn’t have worked it that way, but then we know Luke. The following morning I called the office to tell our boss I wouldn’t be in today, and Cathy wouldn’t for a while longer. Instead, I got our First Sergeant.
“Did she finally have the miscarriage?”
“Yeah, last night.”
“You just do what you have to, Captain. I’ll let the colonel know.”
“Thanks.”
Next I called the woman who watched Luke daily for us. Since we usually already had him dropped off by this time of morning, she too guessed why I was calling. Andrea was German, but used to be married to an American and had spent seven years in the States. She learned to speak English in Alabama, so she spoke it with a mixed German and Southern accent, an unmistakable phone voice.
“You’re not bringing him, then?”
“Well, Cathy’s supposed to get rest—”
“Bring him down, then,” Andrea said. “I know she won’t rest with Lukas around.”
“I’ll probably pick him up a little earlier than usual, though.”
“Whatever.”
By the time I returned to Landstuhl, it was nearly 9:30 and the hospital’s flower shop was just opening as I approached it. I stopped. “Are you open yet?”
“If you give me a minute,” the woman said, pausing as she filled the cash register with change. “What d’ya need?”
I scanned the bouquets and picked one.
“Do you need a card, or are you delivering it in person?”
“No, I don’t want a card.”
I went directly to the OB/GYN ward, to find Cathy dressed and sitting by the bed, two prescriptions and a pamphlet in hand. “Where’ve you been?”
“Luke wanted to sleep in, so I let him,” I answered, then handed her the flowers.
“Must be nice,” Cathy said. “Thanks.”
“What’s that?”
“Painkillers for me, prophylactics for you, and a booklet on miscarriage.”
“What are they trying to say? ‘ If you’d been using these in the first place, buddy, you wouldn’t be going through this right now’. Did you read the pamphlet already?”
“Yeah.” She handed it to me. “Nothing we didn’t already know.”
But as we waited for the prescriptions to be filled, I read the pamphlet anyway. A section about how the man involved shouldn’t ignore his own feelings while trying to be supportive effected me. The article mentioned that a lot of people will ask how the woman is doing, but no one buys the man flowers. When I looked at Cathy holding her flowers and waiting for the pills, it was as close to crying as I came throughout this whole mess.
The pamphlet also mentioned, now that we’ve joined that society, we would hear everyone else’s miscarriage stories. And we did. Our neighbor, Barbara’s story was the first, and the quietest. When she saw us pull in the driveway, she hurried next door with a huge bunch of flowers and said, “So sorry.”
“Thanks,” Cathy said.
Hearing everyone’s miscarriage tales, and realizing that what happened to us is pretty common, was the good side. However, the bad side usually came right before that, when they would say something like, “When are you going to start wearing the maternity uniform?” or “You don’t look like you’re due in December.” Then Cathy would have to explain and they’d be embarrassed, or they’d share their own “war” story. The common theme in all the stories is twofold. Considering the complexity involved, it’s amazing everything goes right as often as it does. But the more important theme, for those that have experienced miscarriage, involves what an unforgettable ordeal it truly is.