I started writing this book as a way to heal from the ordeal of having a second (non-multiple) baby with an extended Neonatal Intensive Care (NICU) stay. Also, the helplessness and trauma I felt during her horrific birth triggered memories of a repressed rape and other traumas I had pushed aside so that I could raise my children efficiently.

I hadn’t dealt with any of the traumas in any sort of healthy way and began suffering from a severe case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). This book chronicles the journey of my healing.

“After great pain, a formal feeling comes-/The Nerves sit ceremonious like Tombs-/The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore’/And ‘Yesterday or Centuries before’?

The Feet, Mechanical go round/ A Wooden way/Of Ground, or Air, or Ought-/ Regardless grown, / A Quartz contentment, like a stone-

Tis the Hour of Lead- /Remembered, if outlived, / As freezing persons, recollected the Snow-/ First-Chill-then Stupor- then the letting go-”

-EMILY DICKINSON

Preface

I am on a hard, cold gurney that is being pushed by several people. I can’t see their faces or count their numbers. The voices that are speaking I can barely hear or comprehend over the sound of the hospital machinery and the panic alarm of my own brain.

I want to leave.

This isn’t happening.

I search for an escape, but there isn’t one. The gurney reaches its final destination of the cold, sterile OR and I am surrounded by different unfamiliar faces and medical tools that will soon be determining my fate. There is no time for introductions. They begin their work; which is to numb me, cut into me and retrieve a tiny, preterm human infant from the cavity their instruments had created. I didn’t even feel the needle in my spine. The words “placental abruption” hang angrily in the air.

Who are these people?

I am shaking and I don’t know why. I can’t control it. It is involuntary, same as all else happening around me.

They pull her from me and show her to me. I don’t feel anything except the numb shakiness their medicine endowed me with. This is all I know of childbirth. There was no joy. No feeling of accomplishment. There was only the numbness, coldness, and the black, dreamless sleep that arrives when the opioids flow in the blood. I wake and they tell me about a small being I created, knitted from the sum of my parts, and all I can think of is escaping back to the oblivion because I can’t be here.

I can’t be here.

I hope you enjoyed and stay tuned for more!

Happy Healing,

Megan