The upside of living in a hospital in a pandemic

A letter about love and trauma

Happy New Year, friends! I’m back and so is this newsletter. Or I hope it’s back—time is in short supply these days. Like all writers who become mothers—or caretakers of any kind, really—I’m hoping to adapt. Most likely that will mean this letter is a bit chattier and less ideologically dense, the kind of thing one can write in short bursts while tethered to her breast pump. (For the record, I don’t want to glamorize being productive while pumping—feeding another human from your body is productivity enough! But this one small and necessary space helps me feel like someone I recognize.) Since I tend to overthink, overwrite, and overedit, this more casual approach is probably good news for us all. The newsletter will still be about loneliness but it will also inevitably be about my experiences with a difficult pregnancy and early parenthood, experiences which have been, in every imaginable way, a case study in social isolation and connection.

In late July I moved into the hospital, exactly twenty six weeks pregnant with identical twins. I told people that my pregnancy was “complicated,” which I guess was a socially acceptable way of saying “terrifying and exhausting and maybe the hardest thing I’ve lived through in my forty years.” Mark and I were advised that once I checked in to the hospital, we should be ready for delivery at any time. So if we were not comfortable with, for example, the risks associated with delivering extremely premature babies at twenty four weeks, I should wait another week or two to admit myself. A NICU doctor called to walk us through the statistical likelihood of chronic lung problems and severe brain bleeding week by week. A medical ethicist explained how other families made similar decisions. I read every study I could find on monoamniotic twins. Mark and I talked in circles, trying to determine our capacity to care for two chronically ill babies, attempting to imagine the quality of all our futures based on a set of terrifying statistics. The best outcome was birth by c-section at thirty two weeks, because that was when the scales tipped: the risks of leaving the babies in were higher than those of taking them out. 

In total, I spent seven weeks living in Evergreen Room 5. Just as friends were finally getting out into the world—going to restaurants and weddings and visiting family they hadn’t seen in months—I was leaving it. The Evergreen ward at BC Women's Hospital was built in 1982 and the curtain that pulled around my bed was as old as the building itself. The view out my window was of a cinder block wall and a red maintenance door that opened to some unknown hallway. From the right angle, I could see a sliver of sky. 

I thought my stay would be long and lonely and anxious. I was anxious, intensely so at times, though the anxiety decreased a little with each week that passed. And the weeks passed quickly. There was little privacy in room 5—nurses, doctors, nutritionists, and pharmacists were constantly barging in with barely a knock—but hospital life was far more social than my year of Covid isolation had been. The twice-daily non-stress tests involved tracking both babies’ heart rates for twenty to thirty minutes, but finding two distinct heart rates is difficult so they often took much longer. As a result, there was plenty of time to get to know my nurses.

I learned about the many ways Astrid and her father had injured themselves on mountain bikes; I knew what Joanne’s kids were like as babies. Nancy, who was halfway through her own pregnancy, explained how difficult it was to have a job that meant knowing every possible thing that can go wrong. My nurses knew me too: they often got to see my niece on FaceTime and when Roscoe had to stay overnight at the emergency vet, word spread quickly and everyone on the ward asked how he was doing. 

The only time I felt lonely was in the moments just before dawn. If I got up to pee before 7:00 a.m. I was supposed to call a nurse to come take my vitals and listen to the babies’ heartbeats. Instead, I would lie in bed with a palm against each side of my belly, willing the babies to move. I could feel my pulse quicken as I waited. For those long minutes, I was the only person in the world. I knew a nurse could easily confirm that everything was okay, but I couldn’t bear to push the call button until I could feel it for myself. 

If it wasn’t for Covid, I might’ve gotten to know the other patients, too. Apparently in the before times there were crafts in the lounge and people socialized on the patio. I thought often about how nice it would be to talk with someone who was also living with the particular terror of a high risk pregnancy. But another part of me worried that knowing the specific contours of someone else’s situation might be too much—it might require more empathy than I had to offer. I’d never felt quite so vulnerable, even as I knew that, physically speaking, I was fine; I would survive the pregnancy, whatever the outcome. 

Since I could control almost nothing that was happening inside my body, I decided that what I could do was try to make the babies feel loved. Even if the worst happened, I reasoned, I would have done this one thing. I didn’t know how, exactly, to impart a sense of love to someone who hadn’t taken a single breath yet, but I decided that if I could feel love, maybe they could too. Maybe it was the kind of thing that could cross the placental barrier. So when I got into bed at night, I tried to remember every moment of care given or received or even witnessed over the course of my day: the time I laughed with a nurse, the doctor who made me feel less afraid, the Oreo Blizzard Mark and I shared on the drive back to my room after dinner. All of it counted. I thought of psychologist Barbara Fredrickson who defines love as “a micro moment of positivity resonance.” By this standard, love felt abundant. 

The thing about attending to love like this is that it proliferates: in looking for warmth and care, I became more warm and caring. Of course there were unfriendly nurses and doctors whose stern clinical detachment left me angry and stressed. But I was greedy for moments to add to my tally and so I (mostly) put aside the parts of myself that can be reserved and cynical. Instead of rolling my eyes at the recreational therapist who stopped by at least once a week to offer me scrapbooking supplies, I made friendly conversation. I did not want to commemorate my stay because I couldn’t be sure I’d ever want to look back on it. I didn’t daydream about future with the people growing inside me and I categorically refused a Zoom baby shower. But as the weeks passed, I started to feel that the world was a pretty decent place full of people who were doing their best to show up for one another, which is more or less the opposite of how I’d felt since, well, the election of Donald Trump. 

The babies arrived exactly as planned at thirty two weeks. I am not big on the concept of miracles but everything about their arrival felt wondrous and impossible. They couldn’t eat or even reliably breathe on their own, but they were here and in good hands. We weren’t allowed visitors but friends brought bags of pastries and homemade curries to the hospital door. Mark slept in the NICU with the babies, and, thanks to some magic of hospital administration, I wasn’t moved to labor and delivery but instead sent back to my room on the Evergreen ward to recover from birth in the company of friends. Astrid helped me out of bed and to the bathroom. Joanne gave me painkillers at regular intervals. For the first time, I felt like a real patient, someone who needed their help to get by. I did not want to go home to the apartment we had moved to two days after I checked in to Evergreen; I had never even spent a night there. I knew it would be a harder, lonelier life once I was back in my own bed.

Those final nights in the hospital, I’d wake up covered in a film of postpartum sweat and find myself overwhelmed by the web of love we had somehow woven around these tiny humans. No one had even met them yet—they didn’t even have names—but their very existence was contingent on such extraordinary levels of care. Care from entire teams of people at the hospital: my OB, our midwives, my antepartum nurses and many, many NICU doctors and staff—but also from friends and strangers. When she read about our diagnosis, an acquaintance in India made a prayer mandala for us and, later, a group of her friends had a feast of sweet corn to celebrate the babies’ arrival. A friend’s aunt sent a card and books from San Francisco. People I’ve never met (people who read this newsletter) wrote to me to ask how we were all doing. Writing itself felt an act of love that could spiral outward and return back in unexpected forms from unexpected places. It felt like something I could offer my tiny, fierce brand new babies, even though I wouldn’t be able to feed or bathe them for weeks. 

In the haze of postpartum hormones, every feeling was like that: big and profound and overwhelming. Now, four months later, life is more hectic and and also more ordinary. I have mostly forgotten the anxiety and powerlessness of those final weeks of pregnancy and I think back happily on my days in hospital. I miss the friends I made there. But I don’t quite recognize that version of myself. I suppose my cynicism has returned, a protective layer that makes it possible to survive a pandemic winter with two newborns. 

I have written a lot about my ambivalence about having children. And I wasn’t wrong to be wary. Mark and I often laugh about how terrible our new lives look on paper. We don’t shower or sleep regularly and we barely leave the house. It’s hard to write or exercise or see friends or do any of the things that once made life feel full and meaningful. And, on top of everything, our children are the most unreasonable people I’ve ever met. (One of them just yelled at me for putting him down so I could warm a bottle, even though that bottle was the thing he wanted most in this world.) But here, in our home, in a snowstorm, in a unending pandemic, I have the thing I spent all those weeks in the hospital too scared to hope for: ordinary days with ordinary babies who have absolutely no idea how unlikely their arrival on this earth once was.