The younger nurse says, “Sorry. It’s hospital policy, in case we need to take her into surgery, or God forbid, she chokes from the pain.”
He exhales loudly through his nose, irritated.
But after that nurse leaves, the older one says, “I didn’t see you give her a bag of chips from the vending machine in the waiting room two doors down from here.” She winks, then leaves.
“I’ll be right back,” he says.
But I shake my head. “I can’t think of eating right now. This hurts too much.”
“Do you want an epidural? There is no shame in that.”
But a few weeks ago, I watched a video of the removal of one, and it still gives me the heebie-jeebies. “No. I don’t want—ow.” At first, I grip the bed railing and force myself to breathe.
But then it gets worse, and I grab Pavel’s hand. He looks at my face, and his goes white. I would find it funny, except I don’t have the capacity to find things funny right now.
The staff burst back in, as if they already know we need them. The doctor checks me again. “We’re close.”
We’re close.
Close is a nice euphemism for the most excruciating, all-encompassing pain of my life. It’s as if my innermost parts are being torn apart from the inside of me.
No thoughts. No breath.
Only pain.
I try to be present, but my body forces me to go somewhere else in my mind. Maybe it’s a safety mechanism that the brain does… perhaps that’s why we forget the pain. I don’t know. Even though I’m aware of the pain, it registers as less than it was.
And then, we are there.
The first cry is the most extraordinary sound I have ever heard.
I’ve been trying to prepare myself for it, researching and anticipating and constructing a mental model of the experience, and none of the preparation touches what it actually is. It’s the sound of a person who didn’t exist a moment ago announcing their existence. It’s this cosmic thing, and I’m too small to contain everything it hits in my chest.
Pavel makes a sound that is not a word. He is completely undone—the composure is simply gone, not managed or controlled or performing anything, just gone, replaced by something raw and enormous that he’s not trying to contain.
Then, there’s more tearing, more shredding, and my head is so far gone that I feel like the time I ate a weed brownie in high school. Again, the pain is there, but I care less about it than I care about finishing this.
The second cry follows, and the second person announces herself, and the room contains four of us now, which is the most improbable and most true thing I have ever experienced.
They are placed on my chest, and I look at them—these two small, extraordinary, furious, smush-faced people who have been with me for nine months and are meeting the light for thefirst time. I didn’t know there were things larger than joy and relief and love, so I never knew I’d feel them.
I am so grateful to these two tiny strangers for letting me feel them.
Pavel looks at them with the expression of a man who has been unmade and remade in the space of the past several minutes, and is still in the process of understanding what he is now.
“Girls,” the doctor says, with the warmth of someone delivering good news.
Pavel looks up. Something crosses his face. “Girls.”
“Two,” I confirm, because he looks like he might need the confirmation.
“But…” His eyes go lost. He had been certain of sons. He looks at the two small faces on my chest. “Girls?”
“You’re going to have to update your legacy planning,” I tell him.
I thought he was mystified before. Now, he’s even more confused. “Why would I do that?”
“Because, well, I thought… I mean, I don’t know that girls are going to be welcome in your… business.” Can’t say bratva in front of the medical staff. Just in case.
