A lockdown birth, an abortion, and an excruciating back injury: Annie Wolfe traversed three hospital rooms on her hard road to motherhood.
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Mum dropped me off at the hospital, at an entrance I’d walked past a thousand times but never used before: big blue “maternity” sign, stick figure with a baby bump and a suitcase.
An orderly met me inside and took my small bag off me. I followed him down the corridor. As we walked, he looked over his shoulder at me.
“If I were him, I wouldn’t make you come in here alone,” he said.
“Right?” I said, mock exasperated. It was fun to pretend there was a him who was just a bit useless, who couldn’t be bothered to show up until things really got started. Michael hadn’t replied to my messages in months.
As a matter of fact, I wasn’t supposed to be here alone. My best friend, Abby, was my birth partner; she had come to all the antenatal classes with me and knew my birth plan as well as I did. But today was the 8th of April, 2020, which meant New Zealand was in level-four Covid lockdown. For a while, no one knew whether birth partners would be allowed in hospital at all.
The policy, for now, was that you could have one support person with you but once they entered the delivery room, they weren’t allowed to leave again, no matter how many hours or days you were in labour for. So I was here alone, and I was supposed to summon Abby and my midwife, Michelle, only when “active labour” began.
Anyway, the birth plan was already shot to shit, because I wasn’t in labour at all, active or otherwise. My due date had been the 25th of March – the same day that lockdown had begun, at 11:59 pm – and now two weeks had elapsed and there was no sign of my body doing what it was supposed to.
I had got pregnant wrong: accidentally, to a complete stranger whom I now described, mildly, as “not a very nice person”. Then I’d done pregnancy wrong: choosing to keep the baby when no one else in my position, with my vehemently pro-choice beliefs, would have; failing to feel happy or excited or connected to the baby; failing to feel anything at all apart from disoriented.
And now I had done birth wrong, by not doing it at all. At 42 weeks, the baby was officially safer out of me than in, so today the doctors were going to rescue him from my now-hostile womb.
I heaved myself up onto the hospital bed and spread my legs so someone could thread a balloon catheter through my cervix and inflate it beneath the baby’s head. I knew that induction was something to be feared because the pain would hit hard and fast, without the gradual build-up of natural labour. But pain isn’t really something you can know in advance.
It started within half an hour of the balloon. I was alone in the room, reading the Marian Keyes book I’d been saving for this moment, then it was like both of my hip bones had been thrust into a blacksmith’s forge, burning white hot. I clambered off the bed and collapsed onto my knees, doubled over. Every time a contraction ended, I got up and walked to a different part of the room, like I could outrun the next one. But I couldn’t.
I’d planned on a “natural birth”, which now seemed jaw-droppingly stupid. Usually, I was happy to pop a pill for almost any reason: headache, period cramp, worry, boredom, whatever. Now I wanted to go without pain relief, on purpose, during the most painful experience known to humankind? God, I was dumb.
I texted Abby and Michelle, begging them to come, and when Michelle arrived, I begged her for an epidural. Once I was numb from the armpits down, I settled back on the bed and talked shit with Abby for hours and hours. We made tasteless jokes and grilled Michelle about her life as a midwife. In the same way I’d expected a drug-free labour, I’d expected a solemn, profound experience. But when had I ever been solemn or profound? Being pregnant hadn’t turned me into a different person; that much was clear.
Every so often, Michelle checked to see how dilated my cervix was. The contractions were supposed to make it steadily expand, topping out at 10 centimetres so the baby could fit through. Instead, I had been stuck at four centimetres all day. We knew, from the monitors Michelle had stuck all over my stomach, that my contractions were still regular and strong, but nothing was happening. (“Failure to progress” was the term they would eventually use on my discharge papers.)
Personally, I was OK with lying here forever, feeling no pain, talking to Abby, being looked after by Michelle. But eventually my body had enough: my heart rate started climbing and I spiked a fever. Abby ran back and forth from the bathroom, soaking a flannel with cold water and holding it to my forehead, where it provided about five seconds of relief before getting too hot again.
Suddenly there were a lot of people in the room. They wanted to do a C-section, now. The doctors visibly relaxed when I agreed to it; I wasn’t going to make this difficult for them. They pumped more anaesthetic into my spine, via the epidural. In the operating theatre, I started shaking violently. My teeth were slamming together, over and over. I put my hand over my mouth and squeezed my jaw as tight as I could, trying to make it stop.
I couldn’t see or feel what they were doing to my body. The sudden sound of a baby’s cry was shocking. He hadn’t been in the room, and now he was.
I saw his back for a moment as someone carried him away, then I turned my head sideways and dry-heaved. Someone brought the baby back and lay him next to my head. I couldn’t stand the proximity; I felt so sick. They took him away again.
After they stitched me up, I was wheeled to a different room, and my teeth stopped chattering. Abby came in, holding the baby, and lay him down next to me. She took a photo, the first photo ever taken of him: Elliott. In the picture, my skin looks green. Elliott is bright red, swaddled, massive.
They wouldn’t discharge me till my heart rate went back down to normal. Nurses came in and measured it every hour, all day, all night, until it finally slowed four days later. Because of Covid, there were no visitors and I wasn’t allowed to leave the room – not that I could anyway, with a catheter in and every layer of muscle in my stomach sliced open. So it was just me and Elliott, alone together. He looked like Michael: big nose, sticky-out ears, hooded eyes. They were both strangers to me.
Jason and I dropped Elliott at kindy, where he’d spent three mornings a week since his third birthday earlier that year, and then drove to the hospital. I led the way to Te Mahoe Unit; I’d been here twice already in the last month, once to discuss my options with the doctor and once for an ultrasound. I’d asked to keep the blurry print-out: a black space that was my uterus, with a small white blob inside it.
We were ushered into a small room, just one bed and one armchair. Jason helped me change into a hospital gown, then he sat down next to me and held my hand.
I’d met him just a few months earlier, at a mutual friend’s birthday drinks. My parents usually watched Elliott for two hours a week so I could socialise, and those precious hours were pure ecstasy for me. Jason told me the following week, on our first proper date, that I radiated joy. He thought that was how I always moved through the world, lit from within. He didn’t know I was a prisoner out on furlough.
We started seeing each other every night. I’d put Elliott to bed, tidy away the toys, shower, put on makeup, then wait for him to knock on the door at eight o’clock sharp. Then we’d stay up till one or two in the morning, both fuelled by crazy hormones, unable to take our eyes off each other.
The fun and excitement of my nights made the tedium of my days even less bearable. I was sleep-deprived, irritable, annoyed with Elliott for needing me. I introduced him and Jason after six weeks, not in the cautious, protective way that I knew I was supposed to, but by spontaneously bringing Jason along on a four-night trip to New Plymouth with us, where we stayed with my friend Lucy. Elliott had spent every single night of his three years sleeping in bed with me; now I unceremoniously kicked him out onto a mattress on the floor so Jason could take his place in the double bed.
Elliott didn’t seem fazed at first – Jason was just another stranger, in a strange place, separate from our real lives – but then we came home to Wellington and Jason started sleeping over every night, on the sofa bed, with me, while Elliott had our bedroom to himself. Two weeks later, Jason properly moved out of his flat and in with us.
“Elliott’s being a fucking nightmare lately,” I bitched to my friends. His behaviour was getting worse and worse: he demanded my full attention at all times, and when he didn’t get it, he would hit, bite, throw, spit, whine and scream. Jason didn’t have much patience for it, and I spent most of my energy trying to convince him I was worth staying with, despite my demon child. I cooked elaborate meals, did his laundry, handled all the bills, kept the flat clean and still put on makeup every evening, although I would never dare ask whether he was coming home after work or going out with his friends.
Most of all, I kept radiating joy. That was the most important thing.
And now this. A nurse at Te Mahoe Unit came in to put an IV line in my arm. Jason charmed her with polite small talk. I told her that last time I was here, I was giving birth to my son during level-four lockdown. She made the same shocked, sympathetic sounds that people always did when I offered up this story. Poor me!
A different nurse came in and gave me a heat pack for my stomach, in case I got cramps; an extra blanket, in case I got cold; a cup of water; and a pill. I had been nervous about this moment, the point of no return. What if swallowing this pill was the thing that finally made me crack open? For the past four years, my main emotion had been numb horror. I knew that somewhere underneath it there were proper human feelings. But I couldn’t access them, and I was scared to try, because there was always something more important to do: change a nappy, pack a lunchbox, send an email, pay a bill, soothe a tantrum, hang the washing, clean the bath.
I swallowed the pill. No feelings came. It was always going to end this way; what looked like a choice was no choice at all. These were the facts: one, I thought Jason would leave me one day; two, I couldn’t raise a second child alone. So that was that.
Regardless, I hadn’t been acting like a woman who was about to have an abortion. I’d known I was pregnant for just over a month. Even before I took the test, I knew for sure; I could feel the hormones coursing through my body. With Elliott, this same feeling had disgusted me. I’d felt possessed – or, rather, like I was the possessor, existing inside a body that wasn’t my own. But this time the sensation of being pregnant was familiar, and I knew what came at the end of it. If I did nothing, a baby would grow inside me, and I would love that baby frantically, even if motherhood made me feel like a caged animal.
So, for a month, I let myself be pregnant in the way I wished I could have been with Elliott. I floated through the days on a cloud of progesterone, serene and goddess-like. I stopped drinking. I took a pregnancy multivitamin. I felt deeply connected to the life inside me. I was sure she was a girl. You’re not going to be with me for long, I told her, but while you are with me, I’m going to look after you.
I didn’t tell Jason any of this, because I didn’t want to scare him. And he didn’t tell me what was in his head, really. He’d immediately agreed that I should have an abortion, but once, during that month leading up to it, he said, “It’s good you’re not drinking, because we might change our minds.” Another time, he said, “Maybe we should buy Lotto tickets every week and change our minds if we win.” I laughed it off but then, secretly, did buy the tickets, hoping for a sign even though I didn’t believe in signs. I won $75 one week and spent it all on more tickets, then won nothing.
So I swallowed a pill that would make my cervix open up. An hour later, the nurse came to take me into the operating room. Jason wasn’t allowed to come with me. I wouldn’t have wanted him to, in case I started crying.
I climbed on to the table and put my legs in the stirrups. They gave me some drug, or drugs, that made me insanely chatty and also made my mouth bone dry. It was frustrating beyond belief – I had so many words I wanted to get out, but my tongue wouldn’t cooperate. That was all I could think about.
Meanwhile, somewhere in the distance, the doctor was vacuuming the embryo out of me. It was a noisy, surprisingly physical task, like she was trying and failing to start a lawnmower. Finally, the noise finished and she left the room holding a tray. They had told me this would happen – in the other room, just out of sight, she was combing through the contents of my uterus, making sure they’d got everything out.
When I think about it now, this is the moment I keep coming back to. She – the embryo, the baby, it, whatever – was part of my body, then she wasn’t.
Ilay face down inside the MRI machine, trying to imagine that I was floating above my body and couldn’t feel the pain. I knew I needed this scan – without it, all the doctors could do was keep giving me painkillers, which didn’t work and made me half-comatose – but lying in this position was literally unbearable. It was like someone had driven a knife deep into my lower back and was wriggling it around.
Just when I was about to shout, “Stop! I can’t do this!” the machinery stopped whirring, and they rolled my bed out from under the scanner. I curled into the foetal position, gasping.
The results were more or less what we’d expected: there were tears in two of my discs, and both had herniated, with one of them compressing the bunch of nerves running down my left leg. The injury had happened over three months earlier, when, getting ready to move to a new flat, I had idiotically stacked a dozen boxes on top of each other, each of them weighing about as much as I did. Lifting them was bad enough, but the stacking was the real killer, because it meant arching my back, over and over, letting the full weight press on to my spine. But what else was I supposed to do?
Five days before the move, Jason – who was supposed to move with us to the new two-bedroom – had rung me and said he’d been “processing a lot”. “I never wanted to have kids,” he explained. “You deserve someone who wants to be with Elliott too, not just you.”
“I understand,” I said. I’d been expecting this for the whole six months we’d been together, after all. But hearing how robotic my own voice sounded, I paused. I’d been getting therapy recently, through a solo-parent charity, and my therapist and I had talked about how reluctant I was to betray any emotions around men. I decided to try something different. “Um, I might say how I feel.”
“Yeah, let me have it,” Jason said. He sounded relieved.
“I … I feel really sad,” I offered. “That’s all. I guess I’ll say goodbye now.”
I never talked to him again.
The day after Jason dumped me, I had gone to the doctor to ask for sleeping pills, knowing I’d completely lose my mind if I didn’t have some form of sedation. He asked me the usual screening questions: had I struggled with insomnia before? how much did I drink? when was the last time I’d felt happy?
“I don’t really …” I said helplessly. I don’t do that. He didn’t push it, just asked the next question. Eventually, he said, “Well, it sounds like you’re really depressed.”
“Oh, I know,” I said. “That’s just me. I’m always depressed.” I couldn’t name a time in the past 20 years when I hadn’t been.
“It doesn’t have to be like this, you know. You could be happy.” He said it with such conviction; it seemed rude to burst his bubble. I let him prescribe me antidepressants as well as the sleeping pills I’d come in for.
Six weeks later, I was happy. It felt like a miracle. Every single thing in my life suddenly took a tenth of the effort it used to. I stunned myself by completing tasks that had previously seemed insurmountable; now I did them without even thinking. I was focused, quick, present. I could remember things. I reached out to people I’d stopped talking to years ago, for stupid or non-existent reasons, and told them I was sorry.
Best of all, I was enjoying being with Elliott. I had rushes of love for him that took my breath away. I still lost my patience sometimes, but when I did, I no longer spiralled into the familiar thoughts: I’m a bad mother. He deserves better than this. I’ve screwed everything up. I’d taken a pill, and it had made me stop hating myself. How was this possible?
Meanwhile, I was also taking about a dozen other pills every day, because my back was fucked. The pain had started out as a cramping in my butt and thigh, then travelled up to my mid-back, then become so excruciating that one whole side of my body cramped up permanently. Later, at the hospital, an X-ray showed that my usually straight spine was curving to the left, just because of the constant muscle tension. Lying on my back or stomach was torture. But so was standing. And so was sitting. And then, eventually, so was lying on my side.
It was my physio who sent me to hospital – I hobbled in one morning, she asked me to make a few movements, then she told me to go to the emergency room. Mum picked Elliott up from kindy and ended up staying with him, at my place, for the three nights I was on the ward, until they could get me in for the steroid epidural that finally provided a bit of relief from the eye-watering pain.
It was all very dramatic, I guess, and of course I was worried I would be one of the people who took years to recover from a herniated disc, or who never did. But nothing truly rattled me. If I had to choose between a healthy mind and a healthy body, there was no contest. Shatter every bone in my body. See if I care.
Every day I was in hospital, twice a day, Mum brought Elliott to visit me. I could always hear him coming down the corridor, going as fast as he could in the red and blue New Balances that he called his “super running shoes”. He’d be chatting away to “Gwandma”, his sweet voice getting louder as he got closer to me.
I would sit up in bed and watch the door, waiting for him. And there he was. His flushed cheeks and tousled brown hair. His solid little legs, smudged with sand from the kindy sandpit. His blue eyes that came from me and his dimples that didn’t. He would grin and run towards me, squealing, “Mummy!” He hadn’t been in the room, and now, oh my God, oh my God, he was.
