(Life's Little Unexpected Miracle)
I was distraught. I had debated ignoring the test and signing the papers anyway...not telling my husband or anyone else, changing my name, and raising my son myself. Then, things took a tragic turn. After nearly collapsing after a clinical session at the hospital, I went to doctor only to find that my pregnancy was "not normal".
To make a long story a little less long, I went under the knife that day to take care of a "tubal pregnancy on the verge of rupture". I signed consent papers for tube/ovary removal. The next day, I found out that my "tubal pregnancy" was an 8 cm cyst. While under anesthesia the doctor made the judgement call that the baby was going to be abnormal, and without my consent he preformed an abortion to terminate my pregnancy.
But, somehow, my miracle baby managed to survive the cyst surgery, the anesthesia, and the abortion. With the trauma that resulted from the surgery, he also managed to survive three threatened miscarriages, a car wreck, leaking amniotic fluid, and maternal toxemia. "Devine intervention" was the term my doctor used to describe the partically unheard of phenomenon.
Now, to the fun part of my pregnancy (try not to laugh too much). I was huge during my last month. I was cranky, irratable, and would shun a mirror like a vampire would garlic. To say the least, I was not a very happy camper. I was not "glowing" and I was far from "sexy". I no longer had a waist line, I couldn't get comfortable, and the premature contraction were bothersome. And, much to my dismay, during my last few months, my belly was rubbed more often than Buddha's (and not by family or friend's). For the longest time I swore I was pregnant with a large polar magnent, and the opposite pole resided in the hand of every stranger I passed.
And, the strangest thing about the whole ordeal....I wouldn't trade a single moment of it: Seeing the little life inside me for the first time looking like a little cashew and thinking how could something so frail and puny survive an operation, watching him progress to what looked like the little bouncing ball on the those sing alongs, to hearing his heart beat for the time, then feeling the first flutter of movement to first time he had hiccups and to the first time he played soccer with my bladder, then watching him progress in the ultrasounds to actually taking a human appearance, then going without fear for 18 hours of unmedicated labor thinking "this is it, I finally get meet my son face to face" only to momentarily freeze up with the crowning push at the idea of being a mother, to feel the flood of emotion wash over me when I first laid eyes on my child...not completely delivered and all pink and puffy, to watch him take his first breath and cry his
first cry, to take my child in my arms and nestle him to my body and realize that for the first time in my life I know what "love" really was. And the strangest thing in the world is, I remember all these things as clearly as if they happened yesterday, but the pain and discomfort were long forgotten by the time they got started.
