Moonface (16 page)

Chapter Sixteen
Moonface Exhibits her Death-Defying Tolerance for Pain while in the Company of a Tail-Chasing Dog

B
irdie keeps getting better. My parents, in-laws, and Charlie all report that our little bird continues to grow, giving the doctors nothing remarkable to discuss. Her isolette is slowly being stripped of the various apparatuses that once crowded it: the glaring bilirubin lights, the mask that covered her face and helped her breathe, and a feed tube, which stayed in surprisingly long despite her many attempts to tear it out. She is free of all of them.

“You just ought to see her, Moonface. She is a feisty one,” Charlie says, his whole body abuzz as he speaks. He shows me a video of a NICU nurse getting her ready for a bath. Birdie has a petite frame and scrawny arms, but she doesn't seem to know it. She hangs on with her little monkey hands to the top lip of the isolette as the nurse tries to take her out. She cries like a hungry cat as she feels the cold air outside her protective synthetic womb.

“She is three pounds now!” Charlie says, pointing to her wriggly body on the screen. “An ounce since last week!”

As the Little Bird is gaining her strength, I seem to be losing mine.

I am putting on weight, too, but not the good kind. i am already twenty pounds heavier from the pregnancy, but since my kidney isn't functioning and can't filter out the wastes normally, I am holding fluid under my skin. It feels like an inner tube full of water hangs around my hips. My legs are heavy, making it difficult to swing them over the side of the bed and go for a walk. The poor phlebotomists who have to draw my blood every day spend most of the morning pushing the thick skin around my arms, looking for a vein.

The doctors—all of those who have been following my case— decide that they will put me on dialysis, hoping that getting some fluid off my body will jumpstart the kidney. But I resist the notion every time they bring it up because dialysis has always been an end point for me, and I interpret starting dialysis as pronouncing Charlie's kidney dead.

“No, it's only temporary. It's not forever, just for now, or for a while, you know,” says one of the doctors. He is a short, pudgy guy with caramel skin and bushy hair, who seems smart enough, but when he speaks, his voice is breathy and light, and his sentences remind me of a dog chasing his own tail—a lot of energy spent but only wearing away the same spot in the ground. “The blood results show that your creatinine is decreasing to 2.5,” he says, “which is better than what it was, whereas it was 2.8 earlier. So it's good that it's 2.5, but it could be better. But it's definitely better than 2.8, so we'll keep watching it.”

After he leaves the room, I always have to ask Charlie to clarify what he said. My father says that part of my confusion is probably because of the fluid I am carrying around. “There is waste in your blood, so it's clouding your brain. You need dialysis to clean up your whole system,” he says.

Here we go again
, I think. Dialysis is one of the reasons I wanted to get a kidney transplant in the first place. It all comes back now, those mindless hours spent tied to a machine. And that catheter!

Charlie says that I should just do it, that it might help the kidney come back. “And besides,” he says, poking at my puffy hips, “it will help you get rid of this weight. I know somewhere in there, my Moonface is still around.”

As they wheel me into the procedure room, I tell the anesthesiologist, “Just put me out. I don't want to feel a thing.”

I don”t know which is more lonely here-the early mornings or the late nights. Nights are maybe easier because, after my parents and Charlie leave, if I'm lucky, I have sleep ahead of me. If I'm lucky, I don't have to be awake for hours. Not until someone wakes me up to draw my blood or take my vitals.

In the morning, I wake up to a gray room and to the sounds of carts, machines, and wheelchairs moving up and down the hall. My father has taped pictures of the Little Bird on the cabinets under the TV to remind me what she looks like, and why I need to get out of here. Mornings are harder maybe because I have to last the whole day long in this place. I've got a whole day of nothing ahead of me.

I am a greedy girl. I should have been thankful enough not just for one transplant but for two. But no, I wanted more. I don't know how I thought I could give birth and get to walk away without a scratch, without putting Birdie, me, or Charlie's kidney in danger. I was living in a fantasyland. It hurts my head to think about that now. The tightness crawls down my neck and over my chest.

“How would you rate your pain?” a nurse, who seems hurried, says late in the morning. I've been up for hours waiting for her. She checks my IV to make sure the anti-rejection medicine is still flowing from the pole.

“Ten,” I tell her. “Eleven,” I say, just to be sure.

“Let me see what they've ordered for you,” she says. She comes back with the syringe and pushes the drug into my IV, and I wait for my shoulders to relax. I let out a groan as the medicine travels through the veins all over my body.

By the time Charlie comes, I am numb to everything—the sounds outside, the smell in the room, the light coming through the blinds. I am so tired that I can barely open my eyes.

“Are you there?” he asks.

“I'm sleepy,” I whisper.

“I brought you pho.” He holds a clear cylinder steaming with my favorite Vietnamese soup.

“Mmm,” I say, slurring, barely moving. “You know it feels good.”

“I've brought video of Birdie,” Charlie says. “Mm?” I say before closing my eyes and drifting off, leaving Charlie to spend his entire lunch break with his sleeping wife.

The tail-chasing doctor comes in and updates me. I think. “Your creatinine has not decreased much from the range it's been holding, and the fevers haven't stopped. We could biopsy you, or give you an ultrasound, or chest x-rays, but a biopsy will tell us what's going on with your kidney. An ultrasound, not so much.

But maybe that would help us determine the origin of the fever. I think a chest x-ray might be good.”

“So, is the medicine working or not?” I ask. I just want to understand what the hell he is saying.

“We don't know yet.”

“Do you think the kidney is coming back?”

“We'll probably have to do a biopsy eventually to know for sure,” he says, though he sounds very unsure. “So, am I getting a biopsy?”

“Not right now,” he says.

“Ultrasound?” I ask. I don't have the energy to fight with him over the tests.

“Yes,” he says. “Today.”

The next thing I know, I am sitting in a wheelchair in nothing but a ghostly hospital gown. They perform ultrasounds in the basement of the hospital, and the waiting room is a weird hallway that seems to exist outside the world, as people, not just patients or hospital staff, cruise past on their way to the cafeteria. Construction crews, bus drivers on breaks, schoolchildren. I watch the waves of people move past me. I wait. And I wait.

The technician who has run tests on me before this recognizes me right away: “I thought you'd be out of here by now.”

“Don't get me started,” I tell her. She works efficiently, running the same probe over the same area that she did previously. And before too long, I am back in the hall waiting for someone to transport me back to my room.

“Someone will be here to take you up shortly,” the receptionist says, pushing my wheelchair closer to the wall.

And now I wait.

A TV in the hall blares a Mexican
telenovela
, which engulfs the voices of some of the other waiting patients. It seems like I've been waiting forever. I clear my throat loudly to get anyone's attention. There are women behind the nurses” station talking about the crab season in Maryland, and I wait, and while I wait, another wave of workers passes me, one of them pushing a tall metal cart of linens with a loose wheel. I think I'm never going to get out of this basement. I think that if I get out of this basement, I could possibly go upstairs, but it doesn't matter because I don't think I will ever get out of this hospital. And that baby, what if that baby never has a mother? What if I died right here in this hospital? I've thought about dying before, of not waking after an operation, of the funeral I might have and who would be there. But this was different. This time, someone—a helpless, lost being—is looking for me, is waiting for me. That is what I am thinking now in this hallway, with the crab discussion happening in the background. I think I could die here, and no one would find me, not my parents, not Birdie, not Charlie. And now I am suddenly aware of my breath, which is sharp, stabbing at my chest, and while I try to slow it down (
deep breath
, I think,
deep breath
), suddenly from my mouth comes the ugliest sound I think I've had ever heard myself make. “
Urgha!
” It wavers in the air like a deflating balloon. And I don't think it was loud enough for anyone but me to hear, but before I know it, it comes out again, louder. Then suddenly, the nurses call out from the desk. “Miss, you all right, miss?”

“When am I getting out of here?”

“Soon, we're just waiting for you to have two more x-rays.” Exactly then, tears stream down my face again, and the crab ladies scramble to find someone to push my chair upstairs.

Was this a mistake? That is the question that keeps reemerging when I sit in the room. When I'm back from the basement and suddenly back in the bed I've been in for three weeks. I hate myself for considering this question, for even entertaining the thought. How can I think that brilliant, shiny little baby could possibly be a mistake? That she could be anything other than alive, breathing, and loved in this world? And yet, I think, if I lose this kidney, if I lose the one thing that Charlie entrusted with me, maybe it was the wrong decision to get pregnant.

My father rushes into the room. “Babe, your daughter is going home!” His eyes are glassy like marbles, and his laugh is girlish.

“When?” I ask him, trying to smile.

“Today,” he says. “Tonight, I should say.”

This is good news
, I tell myself. She was supposed to stay in the NICU for three months past her original due date in June. And now, in the middle of May, she's going out into the world without me. In a few hours, she'll see our home, the home that Charlie and I have made for her. The room suddenly gets crowded. Charlie comes in and says, “Did you hear the news?”

“Yes!” I say, feigning excitement.

My mother is on a cell phone with my mother-in-law making a list of all the things they need to buy before tonight. “Changing table,” she says. “Oh, and diapers, formula ... Charlie, do you have any bottles? ... I will check to see what they use at the NICU.”

Charlie and my father make arrangements over keys and when Charlie will drive her and who will spend the night helping him. A nurse comes in to check on my IV fluids. I watch them all from my bed, and I want it all to stop. I don't want Birdie to go home without me. I want to be there. I want the world to stop until I get out of here. If I get out of here.

They leave in a hurry, kissing me on the forehead on their way out. “I'll be right back,” Charlie says. “I'm just going to install the car seat. But I'll be back before I pick her up.”

As soon as he leaves, I press the call button and tell the nurse on duty that I am in pain. I just want that feeling in my shoulders again.

When Charlie comes back, I'm out of it again.

“Did you take another one of those pain meds?” he asks.

I nod.

“Hello? Can you even speak?” he says, his jaw tensing up. “Enough of this. No more.”

He presses the call button and asks to see my nurse. I hear him tell her that I can't have any more of this medicine. He won't allow it.

“It's written in the doctor's orders,” the nurse says. “I'm her husband, and I'm telling you it's making her crazy,” he says.

Birdie has been home for four days. She has had a parade of visitors, and my parents tell me that my niece Genevieve has tied pink balloons all along our brick porch to celebrate her arrival.

Charlie reports back from the first ride home from the hospital with his baby girl in the backseat. He says he is convinced that 65 percent of the drivers on the road are completely drunk and trying to kill him and his daughter. A guy nearly sideswiped her side of the car on Roland Avenue, he says, and I imagine Charlie taking big, exaggerated turns so the car doesn't come near the curb, and I picture him driving cautiously slow, like an old man, down a busy street with the cars honking at him, unmoved by other drivers” curses and gestures. He says he got her home safely, and with his mother's help, learned how to spend the night giving the Little Bird tiny bottle feedings every few hours.

I am happy that he is learning the ropes, but I am so jealous. Even though I know I am alive, I feel like I am dead. I feel like I died in childbirth, and Birdie will grow up to be one of those motherless children who has to be raised by someone other than the woman who gave birth to her. What good is a mother if she is not there, if she misses those vital first days? Birdie needs to come home, but I do not want her there without me.

This illness is making me selfish. Shouldn't a mother be selfless? Shouldn't a mother want what is best for her child? This illness is making me cruel. Is this the person I have become?

The doctor who speaks in whispers and circles has stopped coming around, and another doctor—a young, good-looking Chinese man—enters the picture. Before he speaks, he walks into my room in his lab coat one night and paces back and forth by the foot of my bed. He rattles the change in his pockets. Behind him, a fluorescent light is shining on Birdie's picture, her little face.

“I'm feeling a little pessimistic about this kidney coming back,” he says. He stops his pacing and looks at me squarely across the bed. “I think we've tried everything we can.”

At first, when I hear his words, I only feel relief. I am losing Charlie's kidney and the first thing I think is: Let it go. I can feel my shoulders fall.