I wasn’t ready to have this baby, but I would have to rise to the occasion

As told to Shoshana Gross

W

hat was I doing here?

This hard white bed and the sterile room were going to be distant memories very soon — obviously. The hospital was a poor substitute for our tiny apartment tucked away on a busy street in Yerushalayim, my solid (if somewhat predictable) computer data entry job, and my new husband learning in the Mir. And at 27 weeks, I still had a long way to go before meeting my first baby.

So when the nurse bustled in and said, “Nechmadah, I’m here to give you a tour of the NICU for when you give birth,” I stared incredulously.

“I don’t need a tour,” I informed her. “I’m not giving birth early.”

She was too polite to laugh.

I was too upset to appreciate her restraint. I wanted my own lump-free mattress, a shower that left me feeling clean, and my regular routine. Was that too much to ask?

But at a routine 25-week ultrasound, my OB had decided that it was. I was floating on blissful dreams of exquisite knits and chubby cheeks, studying the grainy black-and-gray image on the screen, when she frowned and said the words that turned my normal pregnancy into an uncertain rollercoaster: “You have very low fluid. You need to go to the hospital now, and you’re going on bedrest.”

My dreams ground to a halt. The world shrank into one uncomfortable bed, antiseptic hospital odor, and endless lonely days, far from my family. Only one sister lived in Eretz Yisrael, but as the mother of a large brood, she couldn’t visit too often.

The waiting — hours and days and minutes creeping by — was mind-numbing. But even when the doctor looked at my chart, shook her head, and mentioned that she hoped I’d make it to 34 weeks, I refused to let my thoughts wander in any other direction. Clueless by design, choosing total denial as my weapon of choice, I drifted toward my 28th week.

One morning, I woke up clutched by pain like a vise, gripping me breathless, leaving me gasping. It must be a bad stomachache. After the supper I’d eaten the night before, I wasn’t even surprised. Hospital food was clearly the same universal disappointment in the United States and Israel.

But after a full day of unpleasant sensations, I finally told the nurse. She hooked me up to a monitor, gazed at the green lines tracing mountains and valleys on the screen, and shook her head. The doctor strode in swiftly, ordered my transfer to the labor and maternity ward, and the flimsy walls of no-this-will-never-happen crumbled under the weight of my incoming reality.