Chapter Twelve
Lola texted a four-leaf clover, a duck, and a lipstick kiss. By which I understood her to be wishing me luck at the gynecologist.
I was getting so good at emojis.
Dr. Kim had assembled a team. I saw why she needed one, not so much a team of doctors as a team of superheroes, and not so much the heroic part as the variety.
Like how you need one guy who can fly and one who’s extra strong, one who can shoot webs from his fingers and one with a magic suit, because no matter how impressive the power, it’s insufficient on its own or in all situations.
Dr. Kim was a GP, a little bit of everything.
But I was a puzzle, so we also needed an OB-GYN and an oncologist, someone who could do hormones and someone who could do blood, someone for bones and someone else for joints, an expert on aging and another on fertility.
There was a psychiatrist, a physiatrist, even a nutritionist, though no less than a team with actual superpowers would stand a chance against the food at Vista View.
They quizzed and questioned, withdrew some fluids and injected others, measured and collected, thumped and probed.
They looked everywhere. They were quite excited.
It was like I didn’t even have to be there, at once the focus and locus of all their heightened, frantic attention and also completely beside the point.
Then, at the gynecologist, it became clear just how far beside the point. That’s where it all started.
Alice had to pick us up and drive us there, me and Moth, like she was running carpool.
I didn’t like to be a burden, but turnabout is fair play, and anyway, I wasn’t the one who’d taken away my license.
Darcy and Max met us there. Dr. Kim came to the waiting room herself to bring me back, but in the exam room was a man I’d never seen before.
“Dr. Blankman.” He held his hand out, but it seemed as much to pull me in as to introduce himself.
Blankman was the perfect name for him. He was your standard-issue old white male physician, salt-haired, clean-shaven, with the air of someone who’d only considered himself mistaken about anything on two or three occasions over the past decade.
I have had many Dr. Blankmans over the years, though this one, old as he was, was still probably five or ten years younger than me.
He looked me up and down. “Come in, come in.”
Dr. Kim was no doubt as used as I was to the phenomenon of old white male doctors.
“Dr. Blankman is head of gynecology here,” she told me.
Even when I was young and most doctors were men, I hadn’t trusted the ones who went into gynecology.
“He’s been eager to meet you and consult and help us figure out next steps. ”
Eager? The man looked like he wanted to devour me.
It was too early, he explained, at only eight weeks, for an abdominal ultrasound to tell us all we needed to know, so we would do a transvaginal one.
The kids were in the waiting room, but Moth had come back with me, and I wished they wouldn’t say “vaginal” in front of him.
Just because you’re sleeping with a man doesn’t mean you want him thinking about your vaginal.
Once I was undressed and in the stirrups, though, I found I no longer cared.
“I don’t want to see,” I told Dr. Kim firmly.
“Or hear either.” There hadn’t been ultrasounds back when I was pregnant—before—but I’d gone with Darcy to one of hers when Edward was at a conference in Shanghai, and obviously I’ve seen them a million times on TV like everyone else.
I didn’t want that thing where you see some amorphous white lines on the screen and suddenly realize what it means to be a mother.
I had already been a mother for five decades and had a pretty thorough hold on what it meant.
“No problem.” Dr. Kim squeezed my hand. “I completely understand.”
They fiddled around down there, and it was cold and slimy and uncomfortable and nearly unbearably awkward.
I heard Dr. Blankman draw his breath in hard.
I heard the doctors whispering and tapping the screen.
They sounded excited rather than dispirited, which made me dispirited rather than excited, like when they told you some test or other was positive, by which they meant negative.
So maybe this was just the way with doctors.
“Cones or milkshakes,” Moth said.
“What?” He looked out of focus, and I realized it was because my eyes were wet.
“On the way home. When we stop for ice cream. Do you want cones or milkshakes?”
“I don’t want ice cream.”
“Don’t be daft, everyone wants ice cream.”
Now that I thought about it, something cold and sweet and easier to swallow than being pregnant at seventy-seven did sound nice. “Milkshakes,” I answered.
He nodded once. “Sponge or cloth?”
“For what?”
“Car washing,” he said like this was obvious.
“You have to be more specific.” I saw that he was just trying to distract me, but this was important. “You can’t use one tool for the whole job.”
“Books or—”
“Books,” I said.
“Molecular orbital theory or valence bond?”
“Surprise me.”
Eventually, finally, Dr. Kim told me to get dressed then invited my children to meet us back in her too-small office.
There she broke the news. “This pregnancy continues to be—”
“Extraordinary,” Dr. Blankman interrupted. “It’s the most extraordinary pregnancy I have ever seen.”
He was glowing. Maybe he was pregnant too. It didn’t seem out of the realm.
“—healthy.” Dr. Kim finished her sentence. “This pregnancy is progressing normally at the moment. You’re meeting all the benchmarks we’d expect at eight weeks. Of course it’s still so early, and miscarriages at this stage often occur without warning signs or prior symptoms. But this, uh …”
“Baby!” Dr. Blankman supplied. He was bouncing on his toes in the corner. Moth and I had the two chairs, so everyone else was standing and cramped, but had there been more room, Dr. Blankman looked like he could fly. “This baby is growing and healthy and meeting every developmental milestone.”
I heard a groan. It was coming from my mouth. Moth squeezed my hand. Dr. Kim looked pained.
“It’s not …?” I started.
“Not yet,” she said.
So intervention would be required after all.
I didn’t know a lot about the procedure except that it was simple and straightforward in early stages.
I wished all this had resolved on its own, but it would be okay this way too.
I was used to medical procedures, as used as you get anyway to needles, syringes, instruments shoved inside you, instruments you got shoved inside.
I anticipated being home and well again by midafternoon.
I anticipated stopping on the way back to Vista View for Moth’s milkshakes because already my nausea was ebbing.
“When can we do it?” I said.
“Do what?” said Dr. Kim.
“The abortion. Because you’re saying it’s not going away on its own, right? So isn’t that the next step?”
Everyone looked at her.
“I’m afraid”—she cleared her throat and lowered her eyes, which was unlike her—“it’s more complicated than that.”
“If her body can handle a pregnancy,” Alice said, “surely it can handle a first-trimester abortion.”
“Can’t you just give her that pill, even?” Max said.
“She can stay in my guest room tonight,” Darcy added, “in case she has cramping or whatever.”
“The procedure itself is not what’s complicated,” Dr. Kim said quietly.
“Then what’s the problem?” Darcy demanded.
But all at once I knew. And I could see Alice coming to the same realization.
“Texas,” said Dr. Kim.
It’s possible I passed out. I felt like I had.
But when I blinked and shook my head and looked around, no one seemed alarmed or concerned or even necessarily to remember I was there.
I might have thought that I’d died, that such indignity and indignation had been the death of me and now I couldn’t be seen because I was a ghost. But I don’t believe in ghosts, and anyway, I don’t need to be dead to be ignored by my children, let alone the medical establishment and the state of Texas.
“Medical exception,” Alice was saying.
“It’s not that simple.” Dr. Kim was leaned up against her desk, shaking her head. “The criteria under which a patient qualifies are both complex and inexact.”
“They’ve written the law that way on purpose,” Alice hissed, “to make abortion effectively illegal while still claiming there are exceptions for the life of the mother.”
“I agree,” said Dr. Kim.
“And they didn’t do it because they care about the life of the mother. They did it so the law doesn’t get struck down.”
“The legal and regulatory framework is unfair and, I would argue, unethical,” Dr. Kim said simply. “We are, unfortunately, constrained by it anyway.”
“But there are exceptions in cases where the pregnancy poses risk to life, which surely must include this.” Alice was waving at me but not looking at me.
Dr. Blankman leaned forward from his corner. “Your mother is not in immediate danger. She’s not crashing or bleeding out. She’s not even in pain. She seems, in fact, to be having an entirely normal pregnancy.”
“She’s seventy-seven.”
“But apart from that.”
But apart from the eruption, how did you like living in Pompeii?
“There’s no way she can have a baby.” Darcy subbed in. “She already has high blood pressure. She already has elevated liver enzymes. A pregnancy would kill her. Of course it would.”
“We have insufficient precedent here,” Dr. Kim said gently. “So there’s no data to—”
“We don’t need data,” Darcy insisted. “We need common sense. She’s nearly eighty.”
“Is there …” I cut in then trailed off then tried again. “Is there a checklist I can see?”
“Of what?” said Dr. Kim.
“Or the rubric. The rules.” I wasn’t saying this right.
She leaned toward me. “I’m not sure what you mean, Pepper.”
“Can you show us the list of conditions or symptoms or whatever you have to have to meet the threshold where you’ll preserve the life of the mother?”