Chapter 18 Liz #3
She soon found out. Rather than being allowed to linger in the waiting room at the doctor’s office long enough to flip through old issues of People magazine, Liz was ushered right back.
The nurse weighed her and Liz saw her try to maintain a neutral expression while she wrote down the number.
Liz leaned over to peek, then gasped. She had gained ten pounds since her last weigh-in, which had taken place at her routine appointment the week before. Ten pounds in one week seemed…not okay.
“Try to stay calm,” the nurse encouraged, strapping on a blood pressure cuff.
Liz tried not to tense up as it encircled her arm, growing tighter and tighter and—was it cutting off her arm?
Liz held back a hiccup of discomfort. Finally, the cuff released, Liz expelling air along with it.
The nurse removed the cuff and Liz rubbed her arm.
“I’ll have you provide a urine sample and then we’ll get you into an exam room so Dr. Rosenblatt can see you,” the nurse told her.
“How worried should I be?” Liz asked.
“Try to stay calm,” the nurse repeated, which, Liz thought, had to be the worst possible thing to say to someone who wasn’t calm to begin with, and who was venturing further and further away from its shores with every suggestion to remain there.
Liz’s heart felt speedy, like after Cara had dosed her with molly water at Coachella, and she was a little lightheaded as she went into the bathroom, wrote her name and birth date on a sticker with a purple Sharpie, put it on a plastic cup, and crouched over the toilet, trying not to get any pee on her hand.
She failed, screwed the cap on the cup, placed her sample in the two-sided cubby in the wall, and scrubbed her hands furiously—at least three renditions of “Happy Birthday,” as the poster on the wall advised.
The same nurse was waiting for Liz when she walked out of the bathroom.
“Was my blood pressure high?” Liz asked, then thought she’d need to try a different approach. This nurse wasn’t giving her anything. “Okay—I know it was high,” Liz said, as if they were both in on a fun secret. “But how high was it?”
The nurse showed her into an exam room and flipped the switch next to the door to show that the room was occupied. “Dr. Rosenblatt will review your levels. He’ll be in soon.”
Liz knew that stressing about her blood pressure would only cause it to rise even more, but really, what choice did she have?
Liz changed into the blue paper gown and sat on the exam table, feeling her blood pressure skyrocket.
When Dr. Rosenblatt knocked tersely on the door a few minutes later and opened it without waiting for a response, Liz was already immersed in a full-fledged panic.
“Am I okay? Is my baby okay?” she asked as soon as he stepped inside.
“We are going to take steps to ensure that,” Dr. Rosenblatt said, and Liz’s heart seized in terror. That was not a yes.
“The symptoms you’re presenting with—edema, sudden weight gain, elevated blood pressure, and protein in your urine—indicate preeclampsia,” Dr. Rosenblatt said.
“Preeclampsia? That’s bad, right?” Liz asked, the blood in her veins suddenly feeling ice cold, and how was that possible at the same time her pressure was so high? Shouldn’t it feel warmer? It was difficult to breathe.
“You’re going to have your baby, Liz.”
“I know, at some point,” Liz said. “But what do we do now?”
“We deliver the baby. Today.”
“But—it’s too soon.”
“You’re thirty-six weeks,” Dr. Rosenblatt said. “We may decide to administer a steroid shot at the hospital for the baby’s lung development, but I assure you, he or she is fully cooked.”
Dr. Rosenblatt waited for this to sink in. Liz didn’t appreciate the Food Network lingo or her doctor’s serious expression.
“Okay…I didn’t bring my hospital bag. Should I go get it?” She also hadn’t fully packed it, but Liz figured she could throw in nursing bras and toiletries pretty quickly.
“No,” Dr. Rosenblatt said, with no room for misinterpretation. “My office already called over to the hospital. Let’s go have a baby, Liz.”
“Right now?” She really wasn’t trying to be an idiot; it just wasn’t computing.
“Yes,” Dr. Rosenblatt said. “It would be faster if your partner met us at the hospital.”
Liz mumbled something about calling him, and then, when Liz was in the back of the ambulance, a fetal heart rate monitor strapped to her belly and a collection of sensors analyzing her own stats, one of the paramedics helped dig Liz’s phone out of her purse so she could call Preston.
Even though she was half naked, sweating, and so puffy it was like she had spent a few minutes rotating in a microwave tray on high, and even though there was a real medical emergency going on, Liz was still embarrassed when her three calls to her boyfriend’s cell phone went unanswered.
“He must be in a meeting,” Liz told the paramedic, who looked like she could nab a role in a Dick Wolf procedural. “Or a bad cell zone.”
“Do you want to text him that it’s important?” the paramedic asked. “Or is there another number you can call?”
“I can try his office,” Liz said, realizing that she never called Preston at work.
The view through the windows of the ambulance looked like it was being reflected by a fun house mirror at a carnival.
Liz was about to dictate the agency’s name so the paramedic could help her sift through her contacts, but then they were pulling into the ambulance bay at Cedars and there was no time.
Everything moved quickly after that. Liz was whisked into the hospital on a stretcher and admitted with a plastic bracelet on her wrist to prove it, then poked and prodded by hands—so many hands—before she was wheeled into a room on the third floor, in the maternity ward.
Liz flinched each time a nurse tried to insert a needle into her vein for an IV.
“I’m sorry,” the nurse said. “Let’s try the other arm.”
Liz looked down and saw that her arms were so swollen, they were deflecting the needle’s path like they were made of rubber.
Her left arm bore the evidence of the failed attempts, little circles of blood sprouting up in a pointillist pattern.
Finally, the nurse was able to get the IV started on her right arm, and then Dr. Rosenblatt appeared, now outfitted in scrubs, to explain Liz’s options: They could induce labor or schedule an emergency C-section.
He detailed the pros and cons of each, but stressed the urgency of getting the baby out as soon as possible, to protect both the baby’s health and her own.
Liz listened carefully to the medical jargon, and then she burst into tears.
“You’re going to be all right, Liz,” Dr. Rosenblatt said. “I’m in the business of bringing people into this world, not allowing them to slip out of it.” He gave her a sturdy nod, then told Liz he’d give her a few minutes to think about it and stepped out of the room.
The nurse rubbed Liz’s shoulder with a caring, maternal air, which only made Liz cry harder.
This scenario hadn’t been covered in Dawn’s class, or if it had, Liz had unwisely skipped that lesson.
What if, in attempting to avoid Victoria, Liz had contributed to her own doom?
The nurse retrieved her phone, and Liz tried calling Preston again, but he still wasn’t answering his cell.
When she called the office, Liz reached his assistant, who told her that Preston was off-site for the agency-sponsored US Open viewing event.
Liz had forgotten about that. “Do you want me to leave word?” Preston’s assistant asked robotically.
Liz asked her to tell Preston to call her as soon as possible.
She wondered if she should’ve gone into detail, but she couldn’t handle the thought of Preston’s assistant transcribing a message about his girlfriend blowing up to the size of a sumo wrestler, and being diagnosed with a life-threatening complication, and facing the task of making a critical decision about how she was going to bring their child into the world.
“Have a nice day,” Preston’s assistant told her, and Liz almost laughed.
She hung up, and the nurse asked Liz if there was anyone else she could call. Liz’s eyes danced around the room frantically. She hesitated for a second, but then she reached for the phone.