Following a vaginal explosion as detailed in my previous posting, and with blood still gushing, I called a girlfriend for a quick chat. I casually mentioned that the boy had come over, it went well, now I'm bleeding, quite a bit actually, but I'm sure it's no big deal and I'll just go to a clinic in the morning.
Minutes later I was hunched over in my friend's passenger seat, on my way to the emergency room. It's a good thing my good friends have learned to pick and choose what words that come out of my mouth to pay attention to, and which ones to ignore completely.
Once there, it seemed certain we'd be processed quickly. Ahead of me at the triage station, a young guy with a skateboard was telling the nurse that he'd “felt anxious” all evening.
At the registration station and below a sign stating that persons with uncontrollable bleeding should make themselves known immediately to a nurse, an older guy was retching into a bucket, accompanied by his son.
Finally it was my turn with the triage nurse, and she asked what the problem was. I said I was bleeding. Like, a lot. She asked from where, perhaps recognizing I wasn't sporting a traumatic head wound. Suddenly aware that everything I said could be easily overheard, I pointed down at my lap.
Could you be pregnant? No? Are you sure? When did it start? What were you doing when it started? Excuse me? You were having sex when it started? Was it with a male or female partner? How long were you having sex for? I don't mean how long you knew him, I meant how many minutes were you having sex for? What position were you having sex in?
I quickly learned to hate the triage nurse. Just in case there was an ambulance driver somewhere out in the parking lot who happened to miss a word of my intake interview, the triage nurse handed my file over to the registration clerk sitting less than four feet away by saying, “This is Bambi. She was having sex and now she's bleeding.”
She could put in on billboards for all I cared, as long as somebody did something very quickly about the pain I was in. I got my wristbands, and then my friend and I were told to follow the blue dots on the floor to another waiting room, where we sat for two hours.
Clearly, matters of life and death were taking place in the ER. The kid with the skateboard and anxiety was looked after immediately. Then, a woman who followed us in was provided with dramatic resuscitation for her multiple bullet wounds.
Ha, no. Not really. She was given a tensor bandage for a puffy wrist though. The guy with the bucket was still puking. And still, I waited. And bled, finally bleeding through my pad and pants.
Finally, somebody called my name and I followed a nurse to a room 20 feet down a hallway and around a corner. I was told to strip off all my bottoms, and to sit up on a stretcher. A doctor would be with me shortly.
Since taking my pants off and sitting down led immediately to making a big gory mess, I was stuck right where I was. As it turned out, I would be stuck sitting in an ever widening pool of ick for more than an hour and a half, so I had some time to think.
First, I thought about my evening so far. To think my biggest worry had once been that the boy would stay over and I would fart in my sleep. I was sure that would strike me as funny at some point. Perhaps not this year, but maybe if I survive another few decades.
Then I thought about what in the fuck could be possibly be happening to me. The sex with the new boy was downright normal, if perhaps a little overly enthusiastic on his part. Still, his dick wasn't shooting laser beams or bullets, so one would think things should have been fine.
And yet, one would be wrong. Therefore, in my highly esteemed medical opinion...this was something else.
I had to be having a miscarriage.
Yes, I'm on the pill. Yes, the firefighter and I always use condoms, and yes, my womb is listed as one of the top ten places on planet earth most inhospitable to human life, as voted by the United Nations Security Council. Two of those three things are true, but the third is not that far off.
However...I'm still me. By nature, I'm not a lucky person. It's more than possible I might have taken a pill late. It could be possible a condom might have sprung a leak, or broken altogether. If both of these things were to have happened, they very well could have happened the last time he and I were together, more than two months earlier.
On that occasion I sprained my back and helped prove IKEA shelving will not support a grown woman attempting pages 32 – 37 of the Kama Sutra. If I was going to be accidentally knocked up by the firefighter, that would have been the time.
Miscarriage. Holy fucking shit I'm having a miscarriage. It's the only thing that could explain what's happening, and what was running down my legs and dripping on to the floor.
Though God and I have been feuding since 1998 and despite not being a religious person, I wondered if I should say a prayer of sorts.
I don't believe life begins at conception, but I've seen enough video of spermies (technical term – try to keep up) swimming toward an egg to believe that while perhaps not miraculous, conception is at least pretty cool. If not life, I believe the resulting cell cluster contains at least...a spark.
And so I thought about that spark, and what it could mean. I have no idea whether there's a heaven or a hell. I like to think that hell already exists in so many places and within the hearts and minds of so many people on Earth, there's no need for anything comparable in the afterlife.
I am convinced however, that we come from somewhere and go somewhere else.
Therefore, I wondered how my cell-cluster might have passed his time in the universe's waiting room, considering whether to make his arrival official or not.
(I had no doubt my cell-cluster would be male, because there's no way a female would have made such a goddamn mess of things.)
Because my cell-cluster would have half my DNA, it would inevitably have been freaking the fuck out, and would have sought out somebody in Management to discuss contingency planning.
As blood dripped off of my feet onto the floor of a hospital room, I imagined how that conversation might have gone.
Cell-cluster: So my parents are an artsy type and a firefighter...? That sounds pretty cool!
Management: Well...sure. It's cool. It's also a little complicated.
Cell-cluster: Complicated? I knew it! What's the deal?
Management: Well, you know nowadays there are all kinds of relationships and all kinds of families...
Cell-cluster: Don't give me that bullshit.
Management: Fine. The firefighter is married...to somebody else. Happily. Your mother is single. Beyond single, actually. No hope there.
Cell-cluster: Oh. Well...do the firefighter and my Mom at least love each other maybe? Is it like a polygamy thing?
Management: Ha! Hahahahahahahaha...oh Jesus. You're serious. No kid, it's not like a polygamy thing. There is no way in hell those two women...
(Management involuntarily shudders, removes a bottle of vodka from a desk drawer, and takes a giant swig.)
Cell-cluster: So if they don't love each other, what's the deal? How did this happen?
Management: Well, when it comes to love...your Mom admits nothing. Your firefighter Dad however would totally admit he really loves fucking your Mom.
Cell-cluster: HEY. That's my Mom you're talking about.
Management: The point is, it's complicated. Also, your Mom has killed every house plant she's ever owned. Unless you want an aqua globe up your ass you may have to learn to feed yourself. Your call. Stay or catch the next ride kid.
Overall, I think our cell-cluster made the right call by fleeing. If I wasn't stuck sitting half-naked in a hospital room increasingly resembling that scene out of the Shining when the tidal waves of blood sloosh through the halls of the Overlook Hotel, I would have fled too.
Without question, this was a bad situation.
When the 12 year-old looking doctor finally showed up, stuck a q-tip all up in there to check for gonorrhea, syphilis or chlamydia, instead of expressing any concern with...oh I don't know...the stupid amount of blood still coming from some mysterious location and the fact I was in too much pain to sit or move without help, I sensed the situation had grown worse still.
When she told me she was sure this was all normal, I gave up. I gave up even more when I was told I couldn't leave before providing a pee sample, to check for pregnancy.
Ummm...if I had been pregnant when I arrived, I was fairly certain I wasn't going to be leaving that way. Still, after everything else...why not? Why in the fuck should I not be locked into a blood spattered bathroom (blood that wasn't mine by the way), left alone to unpack my pregnancy pee test kit and instructions, which included two tiny moist wipes which weren't about to do me any good, a funnel of all goddamn things, and of course, a plastic cup.
According to the instructions, I was to begin peeing, stop, then start again into the cup, using the funnel if for whatever reason I needed either a fashionable hat while doing so, or better aim.
(I'm sure my handful of readers brave enough to procreate would have an idea why one would need a stop and start pee to test for pregnancy. Is pee not pee? If I were to just let it all go, would it skew the results that badly?)
(After thinking about it, I don't believe it would. I think the medical community is just trying to prepare women. If the test comes out pregnant and you pop out a child, you'll be spending the next few decades unable to pee without interruption, so I suppose it's a case of forewarned is forearmed.)
Sadly, my vagina suddenly going through a violent Quention Tarantino phase meant that I had lost the ability to pee. When I sat or squatted over the bowl, it felt like my internal organs were going to fall right the fuck out. The pain was so bad, I couldn't push, nudge, squeeze or bitch slap my bladder into doing anything but cower.
By the time I was done trying, the bathroom was in an even bigger mess than when I found it. In my completely normal, nothing is wrong with me at all state - I actually tried to clean it all up.
There was a bottle of disinfectant and a roll of paper towels under the sink so I set about spraying and scrubbing down my legs before my pants went back up, then the floor which I scrubbed with some paper towel under my flip-flop, and then the sink and walls, right before I realized I had lost my fucking mind and really needed to go home.
And so I did. The 12-year old doctor declared me free to go, suggested I pick up a couple of ibuprofen on the way out if I wanted and my poor friend drove me home. If I left a mess in her jeep, she was kind enough to not say anything.
Once at home I couldn't stand, couldn't sit and didn't much feel like sleeping. Instead, I lay down in my shower where I stayed until I ran out of hot water.
As far as I believed, I had had and was continuing to have the most spectacularly ill-timed miscarriage in the history of the uterus. I wanted it to stop, I wanted somebody to bring me some tea directly to my new shower bed, I wanted the pain to go away, and then, more than all of those things, I wanted the firefighter there with me.
Out of everything I wanted that night but couldn't quite manage...that was the worst, and the only aspect out of all of the whole ungodly mess that made me cry.
To have gone from a fun, sexy start to the evening with a new boy, new lingerie, new confidence, new hopes to a bafflingly bloody, screamingly painful end to the night naked and alone in my shower, pining for somebody else's husband to be there to hold my hand...well...was just a bit much.
That was the absolute lowest point - even lower than scrubbing somebody else's bloodstains off of a bathroom floor with some paper towel underneath a flip-flop just so custodial couldn't blame it all on me, but I believed that was the worst it was going to get. That was comforting at the time. Wrong...but comforting.
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