Still by Emma Hansen

Author:Emma Hansen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Greystone Books
Published: 2020-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

ON HALLOWEEN THE blood is gushing—it feels satirically appropriate, somehow. It’s day thirty-three of the never-ending period, and so Aaron and I make our way to the hospital. I feel ridiculous, going to Emergency for a period. The waiting room is packed full of bodies in various conditions of discomfort, from broken limbs to pale faces. I immediately feel guilty for taking time away from them.

The admitting nurse takes us into a cubicle to get our history. I start to recount the facts, beginning with Reid.

“Oh!” she shouts before I’m done talking. “I think I know who you are!” She peers up from her computer. “You’re the couple whose birth story went viral, right? I saw it on the news.”

“Yes,” I say. “That was us.”

She offers her condolences, in a polite and professional way, then asks me a series of questions. “Could the bleeding be a miscarriage?” she wonders. And, “Are you sure it’s lasted thirty-three days?”

“I don’t think it’s a miscarriage,” I respond. “And I’m sure, it’s been thirty-three days.”

After admitting, I’m examined and scheduled for tests and a pelvic and transabdominal ultrasound. When I take out my tampon, after the tech leaves the room, blood gushes out of me and hits the floor. Large clots speckle the polished concrete. I frantically run to the paper-towel dispenser on the wall, holding the paper sheet between my legs as I crouch down to wipe the ground clean.

The doctor looks at the results immediately after the ultrasound. There is fluid in my fallopian tubes, which is abnormal, but likely because of how much I’m bleeding. I notice the look on the doctor’s face change from sympathetic and disbelieving to sympathetic and curious.

No one ever mentions that every one of the health issues I’m experiencing might be because of grief. In fact, it won’t be until I read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking that I first hear that grief can manifest in physiological disruptions. Didion quotes the Institute of Medicine as saying that grief can cause “changes in the endocrine, immune, autonomic nervous, and cardiovascular systems.” She herself experienced these changes at New York Hospital on the night her husband died. When remembering how cold she’d felt, she said, “I was also cold because nothing in my body was working as it should.”

Is this true? Is there really a physiology to grief? And if so, why did no one tell me?

My body doesn’t need any telling; it is simply acting out my grief, showing me that my heart is breaking. The doctor mentions that a diagnosis of postpartum thyroiditis is highly likely. It begins with an overactive thyroid but usually ends up as hypothyroidism, an underactive thyroid. They don’t connect it to the bleeding. They don’t connect anything to the grief. No matter; I won’t be allowed to continue trying to conceive, they say. It’s too dangerous for me and for any potential baby. My body has actually become the hazard I felt it was in the weeks after Reid’s death.

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