The Sunday Best: The Song of the Hysterical Woman

09.04.22

I was bleeding to death.

Six days postpartum, I was sitting on the toilet — blood gushing from my body, percolating with large, golf ball-sized clots — round brush in hand, giving myself a blowout.

My phone blared the forgettable hold music used by my OBGYN. My Mom was on her phone, calling my husband back from the grocery store. My infant daughter was resting peacefully in her bassinet ten feet away. And fresh from the shower, my morning routine had been rudely interrupted by death.

In a moment when I had lost all control, at least I could ensure that my corpse would have a great hair day.

Seven minutes later, I was in the passenger seat of our sensible family car telling my husband not to rush, as he accelerated through the school zone near our home, cursing at the other drivers.

“It isn’t going to matter. We’re going to have to wait at the ER. Please don’t kill us on the way to the hospital.”

But he didn’t believe me.

Surely, you could walk into the emergency room, tell the triage nurse that your wife had been bleeding profusely for thirty-plus minutes and someone would immediately come to your aid. There would be no waiting.

But there was a wait. A long one.

For almost two-hours, we sat in the lobby of Sacred Heart Hospital. The emergency room waiting area is the great equalizer. Rich and poor. Housed and homeless. All races, all religions, all political persuasions. No one is seen until it’s their turn, and no one knows when that will be.

When we finally made our way back to the glass-walled exam room, it was like a war zone. The security guards outnumbered the doctors. A nurse checked my vitals, hooked me up to the monitors, typed some notes into a computer, and left. I didn’t see him again for almost two hours.

The ER attending appeared some time later. The bleeding had slowed, so he wanted to do a pelvic exam. He'd send a nurse to get the appropriate instruments and come back. Nearly an hour later, he hadn’t returned.

I could feel the maternity-size maxi pad I was wearing had soaked through. I hadn’t brought an extra. Even in my cynicism about American healthcare, I never assumed that I would be waiting for treatment for almost four hours.

I paged a nurse. He brought a diaper. I asked for help to the restroom. The nurse huffed, signaling his displeasure. Was I sure I needed to go to the bathroom? Couldn’t I just pull the curtain and change the bloody pad in the exam room? Surely, my husband could help me.

I started to cry.

Pregnancy is a hideously undignified experience. By the time you’ve given birth, so many people have seen your naked vagina that you don’t even flinch when the twenty-something resident lifts your gown without asking to check your cervix. But stripping down in a glass-walled room, bleeding onto the hospital floor feet from an old man in a purple Hawaiian print shirt who had come to the ER for “10-out-of-10” pain, but was somehow eating a sandwich…this was too much.

Sensing my husband’s rising anger, the nurse unhooked my monitors and started walking me toward the door, but we didn’t make it to the restroom.

The bleeding had indeed slowed, but not because my condition was improving. The blood wasn’t flowing because, during my two-hour exam room lie-in, four, chicken-cutlet size blood clots had dammed up the exit. So when I stood up, the clots, the blood behind them, and the underwear which could no longer hold it all fell from my body onto the floor in full view of the nurses’ station, the waiting room entrance, and the all male care team who had been ignoring me for hours.

Now, I had their attention.

Like most millennial women, I was taught that “hysterical” females were the easiest to ignore. So I had been reasonable, polite, and patient with my emergency room captors, even as my husband begged me to stop being so calm. He was sure that my cool demeanor was the reason my pain, my bleeding, my dying, wasn’t being taken seriously.

Looking back, he was right.

It’s the ultimate Catch-22. Act hysterical and you’ll be diminished and ignored. Don’t act hysterical and the monitor attached to your finger will be more concerned about your resting pulse of 46 than the doctor whose supposed to save your life.

Now that I had finally proven that my ER visit wasn’t an overreaction to regular postpartum bleeding and that my spastic pulse wasn’t just “white coat anxiety,” my condition finally warranted treatment.

But it was the wrong treatment.

After a vaginal delivery, you’re supposed to be on pelvic rest; nothing is supposed to go in of your vagina for six weeks. So the plastic speculum expanding inside of me felt like 1,000 red hot pokers being wielded by 1,000 tiny devils.

I was in so much pain that I bit through my KN95 mask into my forearm, barely noticing that the infamous privacy curtain was only partially closed. My husband tells me that I screamed as the speculum was removed, but I don’t really remember, because in that moment, I was no longer inside my body.

My denim blue hospital gown was now stained through with blood. The absorbent pad beneath me had surrendered its title. And as the porter wheeled me through the quiet corridor to the ultrasound department, I tried to think of what I should say to my worried husband.

All I could think to say was that I was sorry.

Sorry that I didn’t pitch a fit when the receptionist at my OB’s office told us to go to the ER instead of Labor and Delivery.

Sorry that I didn’t listen to him when he said we should go to L&D anyway and just plead ignorance.

Sorry that I had just made him watch helplessly, while I spent five-hours dying in front of him, keeping my cool, refusing to fight with the nurses or cry out for help, trusting that these men who clearly didn’t give a fuck about me would prioritize my health over that of the pill-seeker next door or the broken arm across the hall.

Sorry that I had risked leaving our daughter motherless because my pride wouldn’t let me play act the role of hysterical woman in order to save my own life.

I didn’t know what to say. So in the quiet of the ultrasound suite, staring at a cheery bear holding balloons someone had painted on the drop tile ceiling, I took his hand in mine and said, “I love you. I chose you. If I die here, you call the managing partner at my firm and sue these motherfuckers.”

The ultrasound revealed that not all of the “products of conception” had passed from my uterus post-delivery. Retained products of conception is a rare postpartum complication, occurring in less than one-percent of full-term pregnancies. But when it happens, the prescribed treatment is an emergency D&C.

After nearly six, unproductive hours in the ER, things were finally moving with the speed my husband believed I deserved. Within thirty-minutes, I was in pre-op, listening while the on-call OB explained the risks of the procedure — infection, infertility, death — and the risks of delay — infection, infertility, death.

The procedure would take less time than I spent waiting in line to check in at the ER. It was now 9:00pm, but if my bleeding slowed post-procedure, I would be home in time for the nightly news. After all, it was a holiday weekend, and bed space at the hospital was at a premium.

I felt like the bottom had dropped out of the world. I spent half-a-day trapped in a waking nightmare, and in the same time it would have taken to order a pizza, it could all be over. My odyssey through the fiery hoops of American healthcare seemed so deeply, painfully unnecessary.

I signed the form. Kissed my husband. And let them wheel me away.

As they pushed me to the operating room, I caught a glimpse of myself in the glass of a darkened cabinet. My hair was a wreck — my bangs were flattened to my forehead with sweat, one side flipped under, one side flipped out. I looked like the Mad Madam Mim, finally costumed for the role of the hysterical woman. But the shift change had come and gone, and my audience had all gone home for the night.

High // Watching my Mom hold my daughter. Seeing how Sloane grins at her as she drifts off to sleep. My only comfort during my ER visit was that if anything happened to me, Sloane would still have my Mom.

Low // See above.

+ My favorite long-sleeve layering tees are on sale.

+ The case against “preventative” Botox.

+ Quiet quitting is about bad bosses, not bad employees.

+ These retinol eye patches are so good they can even handle the underage circles caused by 4:00AM feedings.

+ Maternal instinct is a myth created by men.

+ Why you are not undatable, a primer on feeling worthy of love.

+ Finally, a hair brush you can keep in the shower.

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