Bridget, you're in recovery. I need you to wake up for me now. Bridget? Come, on honey. Wake up. Please wake up now for us.
No...just go away. Please. Go away. God, just leave me the fuck alone.
The literal sweetheart. All 95 pounds of her. They don't listen to her anyways.
Where have I been? Who cares.
Saturday lunchtime I discovered pain that I think I would have traded for death. I don't have an actual normal pain threshold so it has to be exquisite before it even registers. I thought I had pulled something in my upper back from all the throwing up, I was crampy and miserable, the coughing was so incessant. But I wasn't worried. Overall, I was feeling better for once. Then I almost hit the kitchen floor at fifty miles an hour while getting the milk out of the fridge, taking a terrifyingly moment before fainting to register the confusion and fear on Jacob's face when he caught me on the way down and we realized this wasn't good. Our dream? Subsequently destroyed.
We were pregnant but we're not anymore. It was ectopic. Which explains why my levels weren't going up the way they were supposed to. The pain was from the tube rupturing, which nearly killed me. I had surgery on Saturday afternoon. We were given a 25% chance of successfully conceiving after this. Oh yay. Bring it on, God. Just bring it. The gloves are off now.
Twenty five percent. Because four previous surgeries and my 'advanced maternal' age (My age. Last time I checked thirty-five wasn't all that old.) are putting me in a club I don't want to be in.
I didn't want to listen to my doctor's mellow voice on Sunday speaking in such a cold light. And so I ripped out the hearing aids and threw them at the wall. The doctor flinched. Jacob didn't say a word, he just put them in his pocket. They're still there.
I didn't want to wake up and see Claus sitting there on Monday reading his notes, because he knows, oh, he knows, Bridget is going down now. I wouldn't speak to him at all. So he just kept me company, every day for around an hour and a half. I watched him read, feeling slightly like Linda Blair in the Exorcist. I was waiting to flip upside down and smash into the ceiling. I wished I could have. Just to make him leave.
I didn't want to open my eyes today and see Jacob sitting in the damn chair, with his hands tearing at his hair, only to have him look up at me in surprise and see the anguish written on his face, drawn in a grief stricken finality. I thought I had seen every emotion he had inside, but I missed the one labelled "rock bottom".
He brought me home. He's taking some time off. Time he can't afford to be off. His workload triples. He hasn't smiled. He hasn't raised his eyes to meet anyone else's, only mine, Ruth's, Henry's. He speaks in one word answers to everyone but us. Jacob has shut down. This was over before we had a chance to appreciate it and somehow that should make it easier but it doesn't. Or maybe I jinxed myself with my legendary superstition by writing about it here. I said I wasn't happy. I said I was scared.
What I wouldn't give to take it all back.
He said maybe he had asked for too much. My heart is broken again. I want to give Jacob everything and what came so easily before suddenly seems to be an insurmountable task. I tried to console him, the deaf leading the blind, I don't know what I'm doing. I tried to talk to him about the future and maybe later on, in a year or two or whenever he was ready we could try again and he cut me off.
No, we're done trying, Bridget.
Twenty-five is still hopeful, Jacob. Where's your famous hope? Where's your faith?
Don't talk to me about faith today. Not today. I can only see what's in front of me and that's you, Bridge, and I'm so thankful just for you.
We don't have to accept this. We'll get another opinion.
He stood in front of me and held my shoulders, digging his fingers in until it hurt and he spoke to me with red eyes, teeth gritted, the face of someone in the grasp of an unimaginable sadness, and an understandable rage.
No, we won't. Do you know how close I came to losing you? I can't go through that ever again. I had forgotten how sick you used to be, and I can't do this ever again. You weren't strong enough and I pressured you. We didn't get enough sleep. And then you almost died right in front of my eyes. I can't lose you, Bridget. I just found you.
Oh God. His voice. It broke again and it's the worst sound in the world. Hoarse. Out of control.
You know something? I don't think we can talk about this right now, Jacob.
I had to shut off. I'm too drained, too shellshocked, and now scared because his hands hurt where they embedded into my skin. He shook me then, hard enough to make tears come out.
Bridge, we can't talk about it anymore ever! I have everything in the world and it's more than enough and I wouldn't give it up now for a baby. Let's focus on the four of us, and just getting you better, and living life. Okay? Please? Because I can't live without you.
He let go. And that was that. No talking, no negotiating, no nothing. We knew the risks and we took them and we lost and now I'm angry that I was reckless, thumbing my nose at the odds in the first place. I'm not the person to look toward when you want a miracle and yet we did it anyways and once again we've been pushed back into our place by fate or bad luck or whatever position we were meant to hold by a redundant hand. I'm sure somewhere in there God picked up on my hesitation to have another baby and called me on it.
Slow down, Bridget. You've cashed in enough miracles for now.
Damn everything all to hell.
Jacob becomes emotionally scarred, his heart stitched back together by my shaking hand because he wanted this so badly. And the chances have disappeared in a frightening chain of events that again leave us surrounded by experts and that sickly antiseptic smell that only hospitals have, left consoling each other and wishing we were somewhere else. Unwelcome fixtures in our lives now, these places.
I become physically scarred, the angry red line low on my abdomen right where he used to like to place his left thumb when he was pulling me close to him, now traced by his shaking fingers as a taunting memento because once again he was forced to stand by helplessly while everything went wrong all around him, his only consolation being in the comfort of catching me halfway down while the milk splashed everywhere but he kept my head from hitting the tiles. It's not good enough for him. Once again he wished so ferverently for a happy ending. There's been so few of those. The consolation he finds in me is also where he finds the fault now. And still he loves me unconditionally. He was there for the first time at the right time and he couldn't fix this and now I think he understands his limits as a human being and he resents the hell out of it.
He stayed overnights with me in the hospital (sleeping in a chair). Last night he got up at 3 am and gathered me up in his arms and just held on and within minutes the sobs wracked his entire body and flooded me with a fresh pain. He doesn't think I'm strong enough for this. He's too scared to try again and too angry to talk anymore. He just quietly resigns himself to the blessings he has, leaning heavily on his faith in God now to carry him through this part even though he denies it for some reason known only to him and I don't get it. Again, I'm looking for the absolutes. He's calling it a test.
I don't want any more damn tests! I failed. I fucking failed. Let me be.
And where is the other damn door, the one people always talk about?
Because this door is now closed. Locked. And no one even volunteered a key. And just to make certain, they've started to brick it over. It's a door that we're going to have to walk away from now.
Jacob insists there are other doors that will open, I don't hear him. He's gone back to his whispering. And he doesn't explain. We've found a reluctant comfort in dark times with each other. Sort of like finding yourself adrift in an ocean and being rescued by what turns out to be a ghost ship, you find you weren't really saved after all but you find someone else in a boat that is oddly the same one you were in. So you keep drifting, together. And hoping. Holding on for dear life. I to him, and him to me. Haunted.
Now, if you'll excuse me I'm going to go have a nervous breakdown. But I can't because they're medicating me again. Lucidity comes hard today.
Fine by me.
