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Sympathetic Pregnancies
- University of Georgia Press
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Sympathetic Pregnancies 1 I found myself in a room with nine pregnant women. All of the women were in the very late stages of their pregnancies—very late. Their deliveries past due, they waited in this converted surgical recovery room for their labors to commence. All of them were massive. Their shapeless hospital gowns taking on now the sweeping contours of their swelling bellies and breasts ampli- fied their heft by defining it, the fabric stretched taut across the rounded middles. They all were hugely uncomfortable, in pain, of course, and in various postures of steeping agony—standing, sitting, or splayed in a bed. They had all been induced, that is to say the synthetic hormone pitocin had been introduced into their blood streams via an intravenous drip to spark their bodies into productive contractions. And it was working in spades. The spasms now slamming through them were juiced by the chemical, boosted, turbo-charged. The kick they were receiving packed a bigger wallop than if the body had kicked off on the process of its own accord. This was truly gut-wrenching, a doubled definition of “spike” of pain. Some were hooked up to monitors that spit out a graph paper narrative scored with these mountain ranges of ragged edges that finally climbed and climbed—no denouement but only the inked evidence of one endlessly upward sloping excruciation. I had been told to wait in the recovery room with nine women 103 in the throes of labor by a distracted doctor at the main desk. My wife, on the verge of birthing her first son (birth imminent, the chart had read), stalled in the delivery during the final pushing . She had been whisked off to surgery for a c-section, leaving me alone in the birthing room with the beeping Plexiglas incubator warming up in the corner. “What are you doing here?” an orderly asked as he wheeled in a bucket and mop to begin cleaning. I told him no one, in the haste to get to the operating room, had told me where to be, where to go. “Man, you can’t be here,” he said, “I’ve got to get this room ready for the next one. They’re stacked up out there.” So I drifted down to the desk and to the distracted doctor who told me to take a seat in the recovery room. The women in the room began, in their individual expressions of pain, to come into a communal tune. Each whelp or moan began to synchronize, a kind of round harmony. The sound was transmitted around the room, an a cappella fugue of agony. The women peaked one after the other. The last one subsiding into a whimper just as the next reached a muscular grunt and growl. It was as if there was only one big contraction that oscillated around the room or that, in fact, the room itself rippled in one long ululation of a continuous sustained contraction. Nurses and midwives whispered to their laboring patients to “ride” the contraction, and the cacophony in the room had the orchestrated order of the squealing shriek of a train of roller coaster cars. As each woman emerged from her most recent bout with her body (her body that now was not her body but possessed by these biological imperatives and hormonal accelerants that split open a body to expel another body), each opened her eyes to see me sitting by the door. And as they focused on me, as they waited for the next spasm to grip them, I could tell they really, really didn’t want me there. 2 In high-school health classes, it once was popular to have the students carry around, for days or weeks at a time, ten-pound 104 Sympathetic Pregnancies [3.82.232.31] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:56 GMT) bags of flour. The exercise was meant to simulate the weight of a newborn baby and the sustained lugging to condition the sexually active or soon-to-be sexually active teenager to the consequence of sexual activity, pregnancy, and the consequence of the consequence, live birth. The flour bags would be hauled to classes, held while eating lunch, babysat in gym class. Some students even dressed their bags of flour or pretended to change the bag of flour’s diaper, an apparent mass hysteria to better imagine this potential semiattached dependent human mass. Ten pounds! It is interesting that the birth...