The Brink of Being by Julia Bueno

Author:Julia Bueno
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-07-01T16:00:00+00:00

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THE EARLY PREGNANCY UNIT WAS, a few months down the line, still lacking in resources for the ongoing emotional support that Carla needed after her third miscarriage, and she had little hope of accessing it through her regular doctor either. Pregnancy loss isn’t singled out for poor emotional support—as a therapist, I know only too well how dire provision is for many mental health problems. But Carla had never felt so badly before. “I couldn’t sleep, but I couldn’t get out of bed either. After a week, I went to the doctor to sign me off work for much longer, but I had to go through everything again, with another locum doctor. She used words that made little sense to me—she asked if I’d had a ‘blighted ovum,’ or if I’d passed all the ‘pregnancy tissue.’ She didn’t use the word ‘baby’ once.”

Our spoken medical vocabulary is derived from its written scientific language—and in the context of miscarriage, there are many words that can miserably fail to capture a woman’s understanding of her body, her baby’s body, and the fraught processes that separate the two. This language continues to evolve, but not comprehensively or universally yet, and words do leak out that disturb and hurt—“fetal demise” or “hydatidiform mole” can’t ever describe the death of a yearned-for baby.

I still can’t shake off one particular verbal exchange. After my miscarriage at around sixteen weeks of pregnancy, I lay on a hard plastic bed with my knees bent and my heels near my bottom, while a harried doctor examined my cervix and assessed the state of my womb. She ignored my tears and David’s equally obvious distress. While David did his best to soothe me, a paper sheet did its best to absorb my blood as it steadily made a large ragged shape around me: as miscarriages are prone to do, this one had rendered me completely vulnerable. Even though hospitals were familiar to me by then, I was far from used to being at the behest of “medical expertise,” and no more used to my body taking medical precedence over my tormented mind.

Turning away from my shocked gaze and holding a gray cardboard dish in her hand, my doctor told me that I had to wait further for “the products of conception to be fully expelled,” and then left the room. I literally didn’t understand what she meant—it seemed that my womb was producing things other than a baby. She was a doctor, after all, and clearly knew best. Centuries ago, it was thought women could produce “products” from their wombs, such as gristle or fruit; one German doctor wrote in 1788 that “not everything that comes from the birth parts of a woman is a human being.” A little earlier, in 1726, Mary Toft, of Godalming, England, managed to convince the royal surgeon that she had given birth to animal parts and rabbits, before being rumbled as a fraud and imprisoned. While I wasn’t worried that

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