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On Thursday, September 6, I went to my obstetrician for an ultrasound.
I was twenty weeks pregnant with my second child. My first, a little girl,
was nineteen months old and had a head of curly brown hair. Up until two
weeks before, I’d kept a list of all the new words she said and when she
said them. I stopped keeping track after she spontaneously launched into
a rendition of Macho Man in the park one day. So much for my Pure Disco
CD.
I was sure my new baby would be a girl, too. I was one of three sisters,
and my husband was in a minority is his family - two brothers, three sisters.
I didn’t mind the idea of a second baby girl. I kind of liked it. I had
a whole closet full of pink dresses I’d bought in a previous prenatal shopping
frenzy, which Sofia rarely wore (interfered with crawling, showed the Gerber
sweet potatoes). I had tried to prep my husband. “You won’t be disappointed,
right?” I nailed him every chance. “I’ve got a girl feeling.”
So I was surprised when the ultrasound technician, after carefully
listing body parts, mentioned one I was unfamiliar with. “Here’s its head.
Here’s its spinal cord. There’s its foot. There’s its scrotum.”
A neon teddy bear was the only light in a dark room. On a chair next
to the table where I was stretched out with goo on my round belly, my husband
Juan held Sofia, who squirmed and tried to crawl into my lap. She couldn’t
understand why I wasn’t able to play or give her juice. Before the ultrasound,
taking her along had seemed a great idea.
Scrotum. “Wait a minute, that’s a guy thing, right?” I said. Last
I checked I didn’t have any scrotum.
The technician, a round woman in her forties with feathered, Princess
Di-hair, nodded and pointed out other body parts as she measured them.
But I wasn’t counting toes or fingers, I was trying to figure out what
to do with all those pink dresses.
Finally, the technician gave us some pictures of our new little guy,
(he looked a bit like ET) and told us the doctor would be in to go over
the findings. When she went away, I picked up my thrashing daughter and
turned to Juan, who was happily nienering me. “You were wrong, you were
wrong. Hah!”
Then the doctor, not my usual OB, but the one I’d come to think of
as Dr. Ultrasound, came in and fiddled with the goo on my stomach.
“Let’s just see what we have here.” He took a picture of my son’s head
and turned off the equipment. “He’s got what we call a choroid plexus
cyst. It used to indicate Down’s Syndrome but it doesn’t any more. Let’s
make an appointment to see you in four weeks. OK? Don’t worry.”
And then he was gone.
Afterwards, Juan took Sofia to the car and I talked to my regular
OB. When she said don’t worry, I tried really hard to believe her. After
all, she’d gotten me through this once before. Even given me great drugs
at the right time.
In retrospect, I suppose there’s no good way to tell a pregnant lady,
“You’re fine but your baby has this thing on its head.” Of course I went
home and worried. And worried. And worried. OK, no Down’s. Fine. But
something growing on his brain? What about other developmental disabilities?
What if this thing didn’t go away but grew and grew? Then I knew, just
knew for sure, that it was my fault for drinking Diet Coke when I should’ve
given it up months ago.
My first ultrasound was on a Thursday. The next Monday I called my
OB back and asked her some more questions: These things go away, but when?
Will he be disabled in some other way? Was it something I ate? Finally,
she said, “Look, maybe you should get a second opinion.” And gave me the
number for the fetal care unit of Evergreen Hospital, a place that had
more sophisticated ultrasound machines and a genetic counselor. I didn’t
know what a genetic counselor was, but it sounded like someone with more
time to spend with pregnant ladies with questions. I hesitated but not
too long. I trusted the diagnosis, but it wasn’t enough for me that someone
said cyst and Down’s and then sent me away with a pat on the head.
My family and I live in Seattle. We’re surrounded on one side by
a great big body of water, and the other by a huge mountain range. Sometimes
this landscape makes me feel secure and embraced. Sometimes it just makes
me feel isolated and out of step with the rest of the world.
So the next day, when two hijacked planes rammed the World Trade Center
in New York and a third took out a good hunk of the pentagon, I spent most
of the day in disbelief. There were no tangible signs of the attack in
our part of the world yet. Sure, they’d closed all the skyscrapers and
malls and Sea Tac Airport, but I since I didn’t work I hadn’t had the day
off. I hadn’t had to sit in traffic. Above all, I didn’t know anyone who
was missing. The news was filled with clips of an airplane the moment it
impacted with the second WTC tower, over and over again in super slow motion
until it didn’t seem quite real, more like a movie effect. It all seemed
so strange, so faraway -- 6,000 missing faceless people on another coast
was one thing; that the child that was kicking me and keeping me up nights
might not ever be normal, that was something I could believe in. That was
real.
Everywhere I went I saw babies with something wrong. On the local
playground was a little guy, barely able to crawl, wearing a helmet as
he careened around the sandbox. In Barnes and Noble there was a baby, not
more than two months old, with a lot of stitches on his head. I looked
away. Took my daughter for chocolate milk at Starbuck’s where I repeatedly
ran my fingers through her soft hair. But these children came back to
me at night with the impact of steel on steel.
My genetic counselor at Evergreen Hospital was a named Kathleen. She
was younger than I was, in her late twenties with straight brown hair and
glasses. As she called me out of the waiting room, I noticed she was carrying
a pile of charts and books, the title of one was simply, “Genetic Counseling.”
Until that week I hadn’t realized that the job even existed, let alone
was something you could have textbooks for.
She herded me into a cramped industrial-looking office she called,
“The Annex,” and seated me at a round conference table.
“So,” she said, looking at what I guessed was my chart. “Any questions?”
“Is my baby going to be disabled?” I smiled and tried not to appear
nervous. I hadn’t meant to be that direct. In response, she pulled from
her pile a blank piece of paper and drew a picture of the brain and showed
me where the choroid plexus was, and how it was a place that manufactured
spinal fluid, and showed me how the cyst was a sac of fluid within a sac
of fluid, and how it didn’t touch the brain tissue at all. No interference
with development.
“Five years ago the thinking would’ve been different. We thought there
was a direct correlation between these cysts and Down’s. We would’ve had
you in tears. But now, the thinking is that if there are no other abnormalities,
this really doesn’t mean much. Your baby has no other abnormalities.”
From the way she said, “we would’ve had you in tears,” I knew that
being a genetic counselor must not be fun all the time. I didn’t know
much about fetal care units, but my guess was most pregnant ladies didn’t
come here unless something was wrong. Really really wrong. I wondered
what she said to those women five years ago. I wondered what she said
to the women now - the ones with other abnormalities.
She paused from drawing and looked me in the eye. “Everything on
your chart indicates normal growth. Your bloodwork came back as low a
risk as I’ve ever seen. Only a 1 in 470,000 chance that the baby has Down’s.
On the other hand, there’s a 1 in 200 chance of miscarriage during an amnio.
More risk than you’re worth, frankly. In fact, you’re really kind of boring.
I feel totally confident in reassuring you that your baby is fine.”
I had another hour left to go in the fetal care unit, including another
ultrasound where once again the cyst showed up, but it somehow didn’t worry
me so much. I didn’t need to see or hear anything other than my genetic
counseler looking me in the eye and telling me that everything was all
right.
I came home and fixed lunch and turned on the news. As Sofia and
I ate leftover pizza and grapes (peeled for her, whole for me), I watched
reports of airport closures, even mention of how in Sea Tac vendors in
the airports were going with plastic cutlery from now on. Sniffer dogs.
FBI busts of houses in South Florida. Well-coifed reporters in New York
wearing surgical masks complaining of the smoke. Surveys about fear in
a classroom at Marquette University.
Then they cut to a reporter in Lower Manhattan who was standing by
a doughy-looking man in shirtsleeves holding a flyer.
“Now tell me why you’re here today,” the reporter said. She was not
wearing a mask. Neither was he.
“It’s about my father,” the man said, in an accent I couldn’t place.
He was from a borough I’d never seen. “He was working in the tower and
we haven’t heard from him since Tuesday morning.”
“Where did he work?”
“On the observation deck. 110th floor.”
“When did you last hear from him?”
“He called us at 9:15 Tuesday morning after the first plane hit, and
said he was with about thirty people and not to worry, he was sure he’d
be home.”
“And what happened when you came down here?”
He pointed to an armory across the street from where they were standing.
“My mother thought she saw his name on a list of survivors through the
internet. So I came down here and was assigned a case number. But so far
no luck. He isn’t in any of the hospitals.”
“And what are you feeling now? Are you hopeful?”
There was a pause.
“My father was not the type of guy who would’ve abandoned thirty people.
In 1993 when the car bomb went off, he helped a pregnant lady down the
stairs.”
I turned the TV off.
I’d thought I was stronger. I thought that my counseling would enable
me to see more clearly. But as this man told of his father helping a pregnant
lady down the stairs, and how that meant he’d given up hope, once again
I had to look away. I picked my daughter up out of her high chair and
took her to her room for a nap. Before I put her down, I read her about
five stories about furry animals and held her a little too long.
After she was asleep, I wondered what it must’ve been like in that
New York armory -- the one with the family lost and found. Did he sit
across from some competent-looking brown haired woman? Did she ask for
dental records? Maybe a toothbrush or comb for DNA samples? What did she
say to him when he told her his father had been on the 110th floor? My
guess was this man didn’t hear, “I can reassure you with all confidence
that your father is fine.” So then, what did he hear? What can you offer
someone in such a moment?
Days before, when the cyst first turned up, I never thought the result
would be this one - my child would be OK, but other people’s families,
lots of other people’s families - would not. And I wanted to find this
man on the TV and offer him something, but knew I have nothing to give.
No reassurances. Thanks to my condition, not even any blood.
I stare down at my child as she sleeps, and kiss her. Then I fly
to him, this man with the missing father, bringing with me my mountain
ranges and deep seas, and I embrace him and tell him: You are not alone.
Halfway across the world where the worst fallout from the attack is
plastic cutlery at the airport pub, we are thinking of you.
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