Assaulted By Joy : the Redemption of a Cynic by Stephen W. Simpson

Author:Stephen W. Simpson [Simpson, Stephen W.]
Format: epub
Published: 2010-05-02T20:00:00+00:00

6

One, Two,

Three ...

Four?!

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DR. BRUNDAGE’S FACE WAS A COLOR I’D NEVER SEEN

before, something between dirty poodle white and dead canary yellow. He leaned back in his chair and put his hand over his mouth. I looked at the ultrasound monitor again. The three pulsing circles were still there.

“Do I see what I think I see?” I said.

“What do you see?” Dr. Brundage asked, his eyes never leaving the monitor.

“It looks like three.”

“Actually, there’s another one up in the corner. I think it’s four.”

Shelley jerked up from the examining table. “What?” she shouted. “You’ve gotta be kidding me!”

Dr. Brundage called in his wife, Linda, a veteran obstetrics nurse. She gazed into the monitor, the only one who didn’t look ready to pass out or vomit.

“Yep,” she said. “That’s four.”

Shelley was only five weeks into the pregnancy. She’d come in for an ultrasound because her hormone levels were unusually 128

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One, Two, Three ... Four?!

high, sometimes the sign of an ectopic pregnancy that would miscarry. Shelley had already suffered two miscarriages, so we arrived at Dr. Brundage’s office steeling ourselves for the worst. Two miscarriages in less than a year had left us in a depressed stupor. I didn’t know how we would survive a third. After the second miscarriage, we bought another dog to ease the pain. What was I supposed to do if Shelley lost another baby? Buy her a Shetland pony? Another failed pregnancy would be nothing less than devastating.

After the second miscarriage, Dr. Brundage prescribed Shelley the lowest dose of a drug called Clomid. It’s designed to regulate ovulation cycles. According to research, the incidence of twins is only slightly higher on Clomid. When Dr. B gave Shelley the prescription, he said, “Don’t worry, this doesn’t give you litters of kids.” Famous last words.

We had begged God for a child. Friends and family all over the world were praying for us. Patti Jackson, the wife of our pastor and mother of twins, said she was praying for “babies, plural.” I thought nothing of it at the time (though all prayer requests go directly to her now). After all this praying, pleading and pestering, it seems that God’s response was:

“All right, already! They want kids so bad? Quadruplets will shut them up.”

Instead of facing another miscarriage, we were staring at an ultrasound screen with four little circles. Four little globes of life that flipped ours upside down. As we left the office, the staff didn’t know what to do with us. There was a lot of awkward laughter, sighing, and head shaking. We shuffled out of the office in a fog, reeling from this surreal blow to our lives. 129

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Assaulted by Joy

• • •

It hadn’t been an easy year. After one of the miscarriages, Shelley had to endure a “D and C” procedure where they surgically removed the remains from her uterus. She no longer enjoyed the news of friends’ pregnancies, and she loathed the sight of mothers with newborns. We skipped church a few times so Shelley wouldn’t have to be around our pregnant friends.

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