Perfectly Human

Nine Months with Cerian

Plough Publishing House

Contents

The Day of Trouble

There are two entrances to the Women's Center at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. We took the top one. I glanced at my watch as we entered the lobby. My calculations had been precise. I had ten minutes to spare before my routine twenty-week ultrasound scan in the Prenatal Diagnosis Unit. I had dropped the children at school, driven to the supermarket to do the week's shopping, rushed home, crammed the food into the cupboards and begun preparations for Hannah's birthday party later that afternoon. All day I had been reminiscing about the birth of our eldest exactly eight years before. Hannah was born in Canada on Vancouver's North Shore in a room that overlooked the white-capped mountains of Grouse and Seymour. I remembered the mountains as I struggled to purchase my parking ticket.

My neighbor was on the seventh floor of the John Radcliffe, having given birth to her third baby thirty-six hours earlier. I headed straight for the lift, abandoning my mother in the lobby. I found Adrienne was sitting up in bed like a queen, radiant with the relief and joy of her son's arrival. I held him in my arms and realized with a surge of excitement that this would soon be me. I laughed out loud as I headed back to the ground floor. Next time I visited the seventh floor I would have my baby with me.

The waiting room was surprisingly full for a Monday afternoon. My mother set up her laptop to catch up on some work. Paul would have done the same if he had been here, instead of in a client meeting in London. He and I had never been sentimental about ultrasounds. The first time we had seen Hannah on the screen in the Lion's Gate Hospital in Vancouver, we both reacted to the bizarre unreality of seeing our child for the first time through the intrusive medium of technology. Our friends told us this would be the moment of bonding, but we had struggled to tell the difference between a head and a foot, our eyes flitting back and forth between graphs and cursors. The image on the screen bore little relation to the clear mental picture we had of our child. We vowed never to have another ultrasound scan and we discussed the ethics of prenatal screening all the way home in our clapped-out Dodge Omni. Such conversations came naturally to us during our student days.

Perhaps I was mellowing with age or maybe the exhaustion of two small children had taken the edge off my idealism; either way I could barely read the magazine in front of me I was so excited to see our baby by whatever means.

The doctor called my name and I got up to follow him. He asked my mother to join us. Not wishing to overstep any grandmotherly boundaries, she was reluctant at first, but sharing my enthusiasm she did not take much persuasion.

It was dark in the room and I remember the dull pattern on the curtain around the bed and the sharp cold of the jelly as the doctor squeezed it onto my bump. I made a joke about twins.

And then I saw the foot. There were no shifting lines this time; even the toes were distinct. The baby seemed for an instant to look straight at me. I could see the detail of the face. I caught my breath, silenced by a sudden rush of love and connection. I now knew what those friends meant by bonding. With Hannah it happened when I saw the bright blue line on the home pregnancy test, and with Emilia when I first held her in my arms after an arduous labor. I smiled at myself, unashamedly sentimental laying there oozing love at the screen.

"It makes it all worthwhile, doesn't it?" my mother said, reflecting my own thoughts and referring to the acute nausea that had dominated the pregnancy up until this point.

But the doctor's cheery voice gave way to a clipped monotone. He left the room and returned with a female technician. I assumed he was simply inexperienced at doing ultrasounds, and I shuffled into a sitting position and looked at my watch. I'd seen everything I wanted to see and it was time to get home to prepare the party. I bristled with irritation as the woman redid everything the doctor had done. If we didn't leave soon, there would be no time for Paul to play an extended game with the girls as planned, and to read an extra chapter of Narnia before bed.

The woman put her hand on my arm and said the words that every expectant mother hopes she will never hear: "I am so sorry. There is something wrong with the baby. We need to fetch the consultant."

"But there can't be," I responded immediately. "I saw the face. The baby looks fine to me."

She shook her head and squeezed my arm.

I went cold all over. The rational part of my brain observed this creeping paralysis from a distance with a strange forensic clarity. How could this be? God knew I could not bear this, not after all I'd been through.

"Mum, I'm terrified." I whispered.

"I'm going to pray." The edge in my mother's voice suggested she was no less afraid than I was, but the discipline of years had made prayer reflexive.

I was so glad she was there. She hadn't planned to come to the hospital with me. I'd told her I was quite content to have some time alone, but she'd run after me as I shut the front door. "Hang my emails! Let's make a jaunt of it. I'll drive so you can relax and get your energies up for the birthday party."

I heard footsteps in the corridor and the lowered tones of serious discussion. Somehow I had to pull my mind into gear to ask all the right questions – the questions Paul would have asked had he been there.

The consultant sat down beside me. He checked the notes before he spoke – evidently, my name had not featured in the relay of information behind the door. A number of people stood behind him peering over his shoulder at the screen. Using the cursor and his finger for reinforcement, he highlighted different points of the tiny person inside me and murmured incomprehensible numbers at the group.

"I have to tell you, Mrs. Williams, this baby will not live. It has thanatophoric dysplasia, a lethal skeletal deformity that will certainly result in death shortly after birth. The chest is too small to sustain the proper development of the lungs. When the baby is born it will not be able to breathe."

I concentrated on the medical terms, repeating thanatophoric dysplasia over and over again under my breath. I wanted him to stop speaking but I was too afraid of forgetting the words. I shouted at him in my head: "This can't be true. You must be mistaken. You've muddled my body up with someone else. This is not my baby. It must be a fault on the screen."

But the consultant left no room for misunderstanding, the implications were plain, and I found myself nodding like everyone else in the room, intimidated by the finality of his words. "I suggest you come back with your partner in the morning and we will talk further about what you want to do."

It was not until I sat in a side room with a second consultant that I understood what was meant by "what you want to do." I listened while the doctor suggested dates for a termination.

Dazed, we made our way back through the waiting room. It is strange the detail one remembers in moments of crisis; the blond child on the floor playing with a tractor, the girl in the bright red maternity dress drinking from the water fountain, the look of pity on the receptionist's face as she watched us leave. At the exit we passed a woman leaning on her heavily swollen stomach between long drags on her cigarette. I could not speak.

My mother took my arm and steered me to the car. I crumpled into the passenger seat remembering the delight on Paul's face when I had told him I was pregnant for the third time. We'd waited so long for this. I thought of the party balloons already taped to the letterbox and I thought of Adrienne with her arms full of her son. An aching emptiness enveloped me. Every line of thought ended with the same conclusion: "Thanatophoric dysplasia; this child will not live, it will not live ..." Around and around it went in my head like a mantra.

Shivering uncontrollably, I wrapped my arms around my body and wished that I could disappear. I was going home to face the hardest decision of my life.

Pineapples and Amethysts

If praying somehow constitutes a beginning, then Christmas Day was certainly the start of it. It was then that Paul and I asked God to give us the gift of another child. December 25 has particular romantic connotations for us. Paul's uncle was the pastor of a small village church in Kent. The family had come up from Dorset to celebrate together. My family had been attending the church for some years and I had heard a great deal about "the nephew" who was studying politics, philosophy, and economics at Oxford. I did not realize at the time, however, that he had also heard a great deal about the serious girl with long blonde hair and masses of brothers and sisters who was on her way to study history at Oxford.

Paul sat four pews in front of my sprawling family. We were so many that we took up two rows forming a human bloc on one side the church. Half of us were presided over by my mother, and the other half were supervised by my harassed father. I sat sandwiched between Naomi and Justyn on this particular morning, with my youngest brother Richard squirming on my lap. At the end of the second hymn Paul turned around and our eyes met for a second only. I hid behind Richard for the rest of the service, overcome by shyness.

Exactly seventeen years later we stood in the pouring rain halfway up a Welsh hillside searching for an ancient Celtic pilgrim site. For some reason it mattered to us to pray for another child at this particular site. My historical zeal matched Paul's keen sense of Welsh ancestry and we pressed on up the hill regardless of the rain.

The fact that Christians had been praying on this hill for the best part of two millennia was lost on the rest of the family, wet, cold, and hungry for Christmas turkey. "Can't you pray by the wood burner," they pleaded.

"Of course we can," I said, "but it wouldn't be ..." I struggled to find the right word, "as poetic." Paul and I had been waiting five long years and we were not going to be thwarted.

After Emilia was born, the doctor told us that we would be extremely unwise to contemplate having any more children. A long-term back injury had become acute as a result of the pregnancy. I had spent three months in bed after Emilia was born but it was a year before I could lift her into her cot at night. If my disc were to prolapse again I was likely to face major back surgery. We waited, and meanwhile I watched my friends have their thirds and fourths, lifting them effortlessly from car seat to stroller, into swings at the playground, wielding vacuum cleaners and stooping at the end of the day to pick up toys without even bending their knees. Some of them began to ask if Paul and I had given up on having more children. Slowly, I revised my expectations and reassessed the enduring assumption Paul and I had harbored since we were first married, of having at least four children.

It felt like a declaration of defeat when I finally admitted I needed sustained help to cope with the two I already had. It was at this stage that Emma came to nanny for us. We had known Emma since she was eighteen. She and her family had been part of our church in Oxford and we had observed her gentle consistency over the years as she had served as a nanny for one family after another. I could hardly believe our good fortune when she agreed to come and work for us. With inimitable efficiency she took on a large part of the physical work of caring for the children while I immersed myself in work. Spending three years teaching at Birmingham University before returning to Oxford to take up a History Fellowship at one of the University Colleges, I persisted with my back exercises and we continued to hope.

And, after five years, we reached Christmas Day and the wet pilgrim site. I know that God can hear prayer anywhere, but there was something special about that hillside and perhaps God saw the funny, earnest side of our kneeling there in the mud, holding the ancient cross, carved in the rock over a thousand years ago.

A month later, when we'd fully recovered from the colds we contracted in Wales, I was able to tell Paul he was going to be a father again. Hannah and Emilia were delirious with excitement and so was Emma.

It was with a touch of triumph that I told my closest friend our news.

"Janet, I'm pregnant," I said it abruptly in the hope I might surprise her.

"I thought you might be," she replied, as astute as ever. Her slow smile and the twinkle of humor in her eyes betrayed a coincidence of timing which reduced us both to helpless laughter. "So am I," she whispered.

We'd had our first children together. We'd read all the same books to prepare, we wanted the same things for them, and we worried about them with similar levels of intensity. Janet's eldest, Josie, and Hannah were in the same class at school, as were Emilia and Janet's third daughter, Becky. Our husbands relished the long established tradition of enjoying a celebratory drink together after the birth of each of our daughters. When Hannah was born Mark and Janet flew all the way to Canada with three-month-old Josie. Any other friends requesting a three-week stay in our small student apartment just after the birth of a baby would have met with a flat no; but not these friends. We had known them since our undergraduate days at Oxford. They were more than family to us.

Janet and I spent the rest of the day making plans, discussing due dates and anticipating the exploits of the next two. The children retreated to the sandpit at the bottom of the yard, and Paul and Mark found urgent business to attend to elsewhere.

But then I started to be sick. I vomited first during a tutorial on Gladstone's foreign policy. I just caught a glimpse of the student's bewildered face as I fled from the classroom at high speed. I sprinted down the corridor past the senior common room where, to my horror, the principal, the senior tutor and the college secretary were assembled for a meeting with the door open. They looked up disapprovingly, probably expecting to see an unruly undergraduate. I tried to slow my pace to a composed walk but with one hand pressed over my mouth I was anything but convincing.

Little did I realize then how many more embarrassing moments were to follow. When I returned to my study, I told the student it was something I'd eaten – it was true in a manner of speaking.

"Shall we carry on?" I mumbled, still tasting the vomit in my mouth with the distinctive metallic aftertaste of pregnancy.

"Where were we ...? Yes ... To what extent can Gladstonian Liberalism be defined in terms of a distinctive foreign policy?"

"Are you all right, Dr. Williams? Do you want me to come back later?"

"Not at all! I'm absolutely fine." I said it rather too brightly. I tried my best to navigate my way around the late nineteenth century while the room heaved and the bookshelves swam in front of my eyes.

When the same thing happened twice the following week, the student began to eye me with suspicion. By the eighth week of pregnancy work was impossible. I barely moved except from my bed to the toilet to empty my sick bowl.

"Be thankful," people kept saying. "Nausea is a sign of a healthy baby." So I tried hard to be grateful imagining the baby literally brimming with good health while I wasted away. When I started to vomit on my own saliva there was nothing else to do except lie in hospital being intravenously rehydrated. It would not have been so bad if I could have read, but the words would not keep still on the page. I reeled like a novice sailor on the high seas.

When I look back I'm surprised to find that this period of intense and incapacitating sickness lasted only three months. It felt like a lifetime. Perhaps if I had known then that this is exactly what it was, I might have treasured those days more.

All this time to pray, I wrote in my journal, but I don't know what to say. I asked God to stop the sickness nearly as many times as I was sick. Visitors were quick to offer theories but hyperemesis is impossible to understand unless you've been through it. Sissel, my Norwegian friend, was one of the few people who really understood. Even after twenty years she had not forgotten the horror of it. "You feel so absolutely ill, like the worst sick bug you can ever remember lasting for months on end, but technically you're not ill so everyone thinks you're complaining. It is so frustrating."

"And it's not fair!" I stormed at her. "I thought we were meant to bloom in pregnancy!"

She laughed: "Another myth people put on women, I'm afraid."

I resented the fact that the small statistical minority upon whom that myth was founded seemed to cross my path with unnatural frequency, and I ranted at the injustice of men who – from my perspective – enjoyed the best moments of the procreative process but successfully avoided the painful consequences. Paul's eyes would crinkle into an ironic smile after such rants as he quietly washed out my sick bowl and prepared for yet another scintillating evening listening to my lament.