“Your daughter is progressing well. Her oxygen levels have improved significantly and the team is cautiously optimistic about her respiratory development. She’s a strong little girl.”
Strong. She survived a plane crash in my womb, three weeks on an island, a category three hurricane, and a prematuredelivery. Strong wasn’t even the right word. We hadn’t invented the right word yet.
“There’s something else I need to discuss with you regarding your surgery.” He glanced at Quest. And Quest gave a slight nod. One of those loaded, we-already-talked-about-this nods that told me my fiancé had been carrying something heavy and waiting for me to wake up so he could put it down.
That look between them scared me more than the stitches.
“During the cesarean delivery, you experienced a severe postpartum hemorrhage. The bleeding was extensive and the surgical team made every effort to control it using standard interventions. Unfortunately, the hemorrhage did not respond to those measures and in order to save your life, we had to perform an emergency hysterectomy.”
The word walked into the room and sat down. Right next to the doctor. Made itself comfortable. Wasn’t planning to leave.
Hysterectomy.
I didn’t need a definition. I didn’t need a pamphlet. I knew what it meant because I had spent seven months imagining the family Quest and I were going to build. Two kids. Maybe three. A house with a yard, a playroom, too many shoes by the front door. Holiday dinners where the table wasn’t big enough and the noise was too loud and we’d look at each other across a room full of kids we made and know that everything we survived on that island was worth it.
Gone. Cut out of me while I slept.
I didn’t even get a say in it. This was worse than when I lost my fallopian tube. Why did this shit keep happening to me?
“I understand this is very difficult,” the doctor said. “The decision was made to preserve your life. Without the procedure, the hemorrhage would have been fatal.”
“I understand,” I said.
He said more things. Recovery. Follow-up. Counseling. My ovaries were still intact. Surrogates. I heard none of it. Quest thanked him for me because my mouth wasn’t cooperating. The doctor stood up, said he’d give us time, and walked out. Door closed.
Just me and Quest and that word still sitting in the room.
I turned to him and everything I’d been holding crumbled.
“I wanted to give you more children, Quest.” The tears were different this time. Deeper. Pulled from somewhere I didn’t know existed. “I wanted us to have a big family. Brothers and sisters for her. I wanted her to grow up in a loud, messy house full of people. I wanted to give you that.”
He took my face in his hands. Those rough, scarred, island-survivor hands that I’d memorized over three weeks of hell. And he looked at me with red, wet eyes that had zero walls up.
“You’ve given me more than I ever could’ve hoped for, Peach. You gave me a daughter who survived things that would’ve killed grown men. You survived a plane crash and an island and a hurricane carrying her inside you. You fought for our family when there was nothing to fight with except your body and you won. I don’t need more children. I need you. I need her. And I have both of you and that’s everything.”
I cried into his hands and he let me and for a long time neither of us said anything because there was nothing left to say that was bigger than what he’d already said.
• • •
A nurse brought a wheelchair after I was given a check-up. Getting out of bed was an event. Every single movement sent pain rippling through my stitches and Quest was hovering behind the nurse like he wanted to carry me himself but knew he’d make it worse. They lowered me into the chair, adjusted theIV pole, and the nurse wheeled me down the corridor toward the NICU with Quest’s hand on my shoulder the entire way.
My heart was climbing with every turn of the wheels. I was about to see my daughter. I’d carried her for seven months. Talked to her every single day on that island. Felt her kick and hiccup through a plane crash and a storm and starvation and all of it. I knew her without ever seeing her face.
And I was terrified that seeing her in that incubator was going to break something in me that couldn’t be fixed.
The nurse buzzed us in. Rows of incubators, each one holding a baby who got here too soon. The beeping of monitors blended together like a heartbeat that belonged to the whole room. She stopped at the third one on the right and I looked through the clear plastic and saw her.
She was so small my brain couldn’t compute it. She looked like somebody had placed a doll in there as a placeholder. Her skin was reddish and translucent and I could literally see her veins. Tubes in her nose. Wires on her chest. Tiny fists curled up tight. Knees drawn to her belly like she was still trying to be inside me, still curled in the position she’d held for seven months, refusing to unfold into a world she hadn’t agreed to enter.
I couldn’t speak. My hands went over my mouth and I cried silently because sound felt wrong in here. Too big for a room full of babies this small.
The nurse opened the side port. “You can touch her. Gently. She knows your voice and your scent.”
I reached through the opening and touched her arm. Her skin was warm and so soft it didn’t feel finished yet. I ran my finger down to her hand. Her tiny fingers uncurled slowly and wrapped around my fingertip. The grip was barely anything. Almost nothing. But it was everything. The whole world compressed into five fingers holding onto me.
“Hi baby,” I whispered. “It’s Mommy. I’m here. I’m sorry it took me so long.”
And then she opened her eyes.
