Small Bump

'Cause you were just a small bump unborn for four months then torn from life
Maybe you were needed up there but we're still unaware as why.

--“Small Bump,” Ed Sheeran

 

A nurse helped me wrap up in plastic the IV catheter line that still dangled from my left arm. It’s been flushed several times already with cleansing saline. They had tried to tap a vein in my right forearm when I came into the hospital and mentioned that I’m left-handed. They went for my non-dominant hand but failed, so now I had swelling in my right forearm and a dull ache where the liquid wasn’t able to go in. 

After the nurse water-proofed my catheter line as much as possible, I stepped into the hospital shower, drew the plastic curtains, and cleansed myself, letting the warmth of the water envelope me. I scrubbed away the sticky lines left over on my skin from band-aids being ripped off. Then I dressed in front of the fogged-up mirror. As my visage cleared and looked back at me, I dropped my eyes to what was left of the small bump of my stomach. I laid my hands on where Thi used to be and started sobbing, insulted that I still had to wear this façade of pregnancy when I was actually so empty inside. How could my body betray me this way? That it could house a dead baby for weeks and not give me any signs of her passing. And yet I think of all I’ve put it through, how much it gave to me. It hung on to my baby long after my logical mind knew she was gone. It refused to go into labor until subjected to medically-induced contractions to let go that which was no longer growing.

I had asked the nurse to bring me something I could use to bind my breasts so milk wouldn’t come and flow. So open was my heart before to feed the babies besides my own, that I should lovingly pack and freeze my milk to donate to strangers and help those women nurture their little ones. Now I am shut down, and I couldn’t imagine having milk but no Thi. My liquid gold is hers and hers alone, and may it go with her where I cannot.

Tears on My Pillow

If we could start anew, I wouldn't hesitate
I'd gladly take you back
And tempt the hand of fate
Tears on my pillow, pain in my heart
Caused by you

“Tears on My Pillow,” Little Anthony

A friend of mine had kindly booked us a photographer through an organization called “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep” since many women cherish keepsake photos of their stillborns. Tung and I had taken some photos from our phones the night she was born. I got the phone call in the morning from the social worker who worked with me in the hospital. “I got in contact with the photographer,” she said, a hint of caution in her voice, “But I hope you’ll understand that while we’ll try our best with the pictures, don’t be too disappointed if you don’t get the ones you envisioned.” I told her of course I understood, and for them to do their best since Tung and I didn’t have a picture with us both together with her.

When the social worker and the photographer visited me that afternoon, they said they had just been to the morgue to try and collect Thi and bring her to me for the photography session, but she was born too early; without the warmth of my womb to protect her, she had largely turned back to liquid, tissue, and blood. I didn’t think my heart could still break when it was already shattered. I didn’t know it was possible to feel the sense of losing someone so dear to me, over and over and over again. On the ultrasound table when we found out. On delivery day. The day after when I asked to see her. I would have kept a mother’s vigil last night with her kept safe in my arms if I had known that was the last time I’d ever lay eyes on her.

“She is but a drop of your blood,” my mother said as she came bedside to pat my back and comfort me. “Painful in losing, but now it is done.” All I could say in acknowledgement of the social worker’s news was a tiny, defeated, “Oh.” I held any other words in because the tears were coming too fast, hot rain on my hospital blanket and pillows.

That evening, after my tray of hospital food was delivered, my mom brushed my hair before leaving for the night. “It’s not too tangled yet,” she mentioned. “We could still work with it.” She twisted the parts into two loose braids and secured them with some rubber bands she saved from the Vietnamese sandwiches we were brought earlier in the day. I felt the love and care through her fingers as they expressed what words could not. I knew in my heart she was grieving for three—her mother-in-law who had just passed, who cared for her when she lay in her own postpartum bed all those years ago. Her granddaughter who had left the world too soon, so wanted and so cherished. But in that moment, most of all she was grieving for me, as I was going through a pain you wouldn’t wish upon your worst enemy. I stared at the wall and could not say a thing back to comfort her, thinking of how I’d never run my hands through my own daughter’s black curtain of silky hair. 

Lullaby: The Moment I Saw You (Delivery Day)

The moment I saw you I wanted to hold you and keep
you warm on a cold day’s morn
The moment I held you I wanted to kiss you and welcome
you here on the day you were born

“Lullaby: The Moment I Saw You,” Nicolette Larson & Graham Nash

The hospital was naturally in chaos around this time with a terrible flu season running rampant and the Labor & Delivery ward chock full. I had just been in a hospital a day before Christmas Eve to see about my ailing paternal grandma, who had heart complications and was also diagnosed with the flu. I wore a flu mask and talked with doctors as I visited her, weathered and shriveled on the hospital bed. She passed away a few short days later, and the family was planning her funeral when I found out about Thi. This passing is sad, but different in that my grandma had the chance to live a full life. There was so much my baby didn’t get the chance to know. I comfort myself in thinking that pain is among that list, that she lived and died next to the sound of my own heart.

“I know this is a strange request,” I told the nurse when she started laying out sheets and towels in preparation, “but I’d like to request one more ultrasound. I want to make sure.”

My OB came in to see me, wheeling an ultrasound machine. I kept a glimmer of hope—maybe the baby was just measuring small, or that she was in a bad position to pick up the heartbeat. The dark part of me knew I was in denial. The OB showed me where blood flow should have been and turned on the audio; only static silence echoed back where rhythmic heartbeats should have been. And my girl was so still, so curled up. “Thank you for confirming,” I said to my OB. The screen flickered out, taking with it the last image I’d see of my baby inside me.

They induced me with Misoprostol (Cytotec) tablets inserted vaginally to start uterine contractions, and it took three pills (each applied every 4 hours) for things to kick in. I had only opted for Fentanyl through IV for pain, and in between doses, I was really feeling the last few contractions.

I had been hanging at 1 cm dilation in the 10 hours I had been at the hospital. At this point, my nurse checked me again and announced that I went the full 10 cm in the last two hours. I asked for an epidural then, but I was already delivering. “You’re strong,” my nurse, Carol, assured me before she went to get the delivering doctor. “You can do this.”

My baby girl came quickly, but my placenta stuck around for a while. They waited for it to pass naturally, then administered Pitocin cranked up from a beginning modest amount to 999. As I watched the drug drain straight from the bag and into my bloodstream, I thought of the irony of trying to avoid Pitocin through opting for Misoprostol and still needing to be on it in the end. I had heard stories about women opting to induce labor to avoid a D&E, only to have one performed for a stubborn placenta, and hoped it wouldn’t be the case with me. I was vaguely aware that the nurses were laying out the tools just in case, heard the cold clink of metal on metal, and tried not to look. Finally, after another hour, the delivering doctor came back in to check on me and delivered my placenta. I had to do some pushing for it to come out, luckily whole. I had the chance to look close-up at the home my baby had inhabited for the short five months of her life. With Luc, I didn’t even want to see it, but after Thi when I felt like I had taken a stroll through hell, nothing much scared me anymore.

The Misoprostol caused a slightly elevated body temperature, and I had caught the tail end of Tung's cough from the flu he had the whole week. It was surreal to both be sick and in L&D together to pass our dead baby. The nurses allowed me to take my time with her, and I got to hold Thi and play her lullabies. My maternal instincts kicked in, and I patted her softly as if comforting her newborn cries. I stroked her head with a fingertip and helped straightened out her wayward limbs. I had to prepare myself for this moment during the days before I was called in to be induced, and I looked up what a fetus might look like, being delivered at 16 to 20 weeks’ gestation. I was so ashamed that I would be afraid to look at my little girl. But in the hush of the hospital room with the weight of grief hanging thickly in the air, I had no inkling of fear. Only an empty wish that I could see her alive, even for a moment, to connect with her soul by looking into her eyes so that she would know the visage of her mother, and the depths to which she was loved.

After Tung had a chance to say his farewells, we sent Thi away so that I could rest after labor. 

I asked if they could bring her to me the day after, and they said they would certainly try to accommodate. I had wondered how it came to be that I carried around a baby who had been dead inside me for four long weeks and had no inkling that she had passed. Why hadn’t she come to tell me goodbye? But while in labor with her, I half-dreamed, half-imagined Thi to be at Luc’s age right now, a toddler already sure of her footing. She looked like him, but with more hair. We were in a golden field together, dandelion fluff floating gently around us. Thi picked some wildflowers in her fist and ran toward me. “They’re beautiful, Thi,” I told her, “Are they for Mama?” She said yes, and that she loves me.