Did he go back to Stephanie?
Gail drags one of the visitor’s chairs closer to my bedside and sits down. “Do fallopian tubes really just explode like that?” she asks, lightly.
I ignore her question. “Dex? Have you heard from him?”
“Your fallopian tube? Did it really burst for no reason?”
I huff, frustrated. “No. There was a specific reason it happened, and that reason is why I want to know if you’re heard from Dex. I didn’t take my phone in the ambulance and no one will go and get it for me, so I haven’t gotten the chance to talk to him.” And Julia won’t let me call him from her phone.
“About what?” Gail asks, drumming her fingertips along the armrests of the chair.
“Gail. I will get HR on your ass as soon as I’m out of here.”
She steeples her fingers together and cups them over one of her knees. “He had an early flight this morning to tie up some loose ends for the Pippa Grace memoir. Neither of us mentioned your emergency room visit at all when we spoke earlier, so I’m doubtful he has any knowledge of it.”
“He’s in California? With Pippa Grace? For how long?”
“We didn’t book his return flight yet.”
I slump back in my bed and start to cry.
“What’s that?” she points to my face, disgusted. “What’s happening right now?”
“Nothing,” I say, wiping at my cheeks. “Suicidal fallopian tubes are just really fucking sad.” Maybe Dr. Gorgeous was right, maybe I do need to talk to someone.
Dex and I just had that awful fight. I told him to lose my number, that we were totally through, and now I’m here alone dealing with this giant hole in my chest from losing a…
…a baby, and he’s with Pippa Grace, forgetting all about me.
Chapter 3
Isit through three grief groups, all filled with couples dealing with loss.
I outwardly cringe at everything they say. I flinch. I moan. I mutter to myself. I have no control. I rage. Listening to them speak about the heartache and despair they’ve lived through makes me feel like a fake. A fraud. An imposter. I haven’t experienced the same misery, the same aguish these women, these couples, have suffered. I didn’t know I was pregnant. I didn’t have the time to fall in love with the idea of a life growing inside me until it was gone.
So I sit and listen, without saying a word. I’m the only single woman there. Everyone throws me strange side-glances. They all whisper and talk down to their feet.
When people ask me anything, I become self-deprecating and sardonic. I blame birth control pills and go off on a tirade about pharmaceutical companies perfecting boner medicines but failing to fix the tiny 1% knock-up rate for females. As I spit and stutter out the moronic words, heat flushes through my body and my arms go numb. I tell everyone I think I’m having a heart attack. They assure me it’s just hormones.
“Fuck those fucking hormones,” I say, loudly enough that a group of nurses in the hallway peek their heads in to see if everything is okay.
Fuck those fucking nurses too.
The counselor, an older woman who had a miscarriage a decade ago, promises the pain will lesson. That someday I will start to feel like my old self again.
“I wish my old-self would hurry the fuck up,” I grumble.
I slap my hand over my mouth after, and bite down on my tongue.
If this is how I act with the influx of hormones I’ve for the five seconds I was pregnant, what sort of beast will I become if I ever get to carry full-term? I don’t mean to ask that out loud, but of course I do.
The gasps were many. The decibels of them, full volume.
Eventually, I get kicked out of all three groups, citing my sarcastic morbid way of dealing with my loss is too much for the others to have to witness. What ever happened to the adage:people deal with grief in their own way? Okay, sue me. I never knew I wanted a baby until one tried to burst out of my fallopian tube. I can’t deal with it any other way. To do that, I have to acknowledge that I was actually…
Forget it. I roll out of each session in a wheelchair, cursing under my breath.
I don’t know what’s happening to me and I hate the monster I’ve become.
