Holding Silvan (2 page)

On the whiteboard behind Shelley's desk, I'm shocked to see my last name listed, proof that parenthood is not going the way I had imagined. Baby Boy Wesolowska, the whiteboard says, though our son's name is Silvan Jerome Fisher.

 

DR. A IS a strapping man, almost-handsome, with steady, almost-kind eyes. Almost, I say, because he is not my baby and
my baby is everything in the world right now. Anything else can only be almost. Dr. A speaks to us clearly and intelligently as Silvan's neonatologist. We stand by the side of Silvan's bassinet. Unlike many of the babies in bassinets around him, Silvan is plump and whole. Still he looks odd, lying by himself under a heat lamp.

Dr. A speaks with optimism but with an honesty that admits the unknown. His first diagnosis is best-case. “We have no evidence so far of anything but what we call subdural hematoma, a blood clot under the skull.” He says this happens sometimes during labor. After all, he reminds me that I pushed for several hours to get the baby around my pubic bone. Pushing for several hours is not uncommon with a first baby, but it's not ideal. He holds up his hands to show us the plates of a baby's head, and how they are still mobile, moving like continents. They are supposed to be this way, but sometimes when they crunch together in the birth canal they cause bleeding which leaves clots. These clots will shrink with time.

“This may cause seizures for him later in life, or it may not.”

With motherly pride, I assume it will not. And if it does, well, people live with seizures. My father, after whom Silvan has taken his middle name Jerome, had two seizures in his twenties. Though the seizures alarmed and embarrassed him, he went on to marry, have four children and a significant career.

And yet, as I hear the news, I feel faint. I say, “I have to sit.” And then I add, “It's not because of what you're saying.” Already, I know it's important for this man to know that he can speak to me straight, that I don't need to be coddled. I like honesty. But I do feel sick, woozy, and nauseated. Perhaps it's a postpartum hot flash. “I just gave birth,” I remind him, apologetic, as someone wheels a stool my way.

 

THE NURSES TAKE over for a while. One brings me a little square of flannel. “Tuck this inside your bra or somewhere close to your skin and wear it for a day, then bring it back. We'll put
it by your baby's nose so he can smell you while you're not here. That will comfort him.” Another brings me bottles and shows me a room where I can pump milk.

“I know he can't nurse right now, but when he's better, we'll start with the first bottles and go on from there so he doesn't miss anything. That will also keep your own milk supply up and ready for him.”

I am stunned by their solicitude. Prior to his birth, friends promoted home births to me. Hospitals, they told me, were sterile, stressful places that ignored the wisdom of a mother's body. At home, they seemed to think, nothing ever went wrong. But I liked my obstetrician, trusted her to trust me to give birth naturally. And I'd succeeded. For sixteen hours, I'd imagined ocean waves arriving and receding, getting high on my own endorphins as my body moved through novel pain, and then I'd pushed the baby out … but instead of being alert and drug-free, he'd been limp and silent. The triumph of that natural labor is now separating from the outcome as if the two events are unrelated. If this happened to him in a hospital, I tell myself, it could have happened anywhere. At least I'm not facing the blame for having risked a home birth; at least they're treating me well, as if I am necessary and important, as if I am his mother. Because I am his mother, even if he is not in my arms.

 

WE RENT A breast pump to take home. That first night without him, I wake myself every few hours as if I have a newborn waking me, and sit in the dark living room, open my robe and put the suction cups on; the industrial-strength whirr and thump begins, the milk flows, my womb cramps as it's supposed to do in the early days of nursing, and I cry. My sobs mingle with the whirr and thump until David distinguishes the human from the machine and leaps from bed to wrap his arms around me.

Over and over David leaps from whatever he is doing, sleeping, eating, talking on the phone, to comfort me, in the shower, over breakfast, in the car. He stops what he's doing and focuses on
me. He's the one who returns phone calls, tells neighbors the news while I huddle over nothing in the car. He finds us gowns to put on at the hospital, gets us glasses of water to drink at Silvan's bedside. He tends to me so I can tend to our son. He's always been good at tending to me. Ever since we met, I've known I could rely on him. This time, he hasn't stopped moving since my water broke and he rushed around the house, putting dishes in the sink, packing my toothbrush, timing my contractions until – minutes later, it seemed, though David says it was an hour – it was time, I put on my old brown corduroy coat that strained at its buttons, and we went off to the hospital together.

 

EXCEPT TO SLEEP, we hardly leave the hospital for the next few days. For hours and hours we are out of contact with everyone but immediate family – David's father and stepmother, my mother, my brother and his girlfriend, David's sister and her boyfriend – who gather in the hallway outside. I was already on maternity leave when I went into labor, but David has to call his boss that first morning home, and his boss tells him to forget the world of work. How grateful we feel.

Only two people are allowed at the baby's bedside at a time. We take turns bringing them in. Sometimes we let two people in together while we take a break. We break for the bathroom, for food down in the cafeteria. On the second afternoon, we actually leave the hospital for lunch while Silvan is off for a test. David thinks this is a good idea because the hospital food is so bland it's hard to eat and because it will distract us while Silvan is in other people's hands.

Going out is torture. All these people eating on their work breaks, choosing between rye and sourdough as if life itself hangs in the balance.
Just choose and eat, you fools
, I think,
because back at the hospital real life is happening
.

Indeed, on our return that day from the deli, we find ourselves holding the doors of the elevator for a baby on a gurney. We stand back against the walls, one on each side of the elevator
while the baby's bed is wheeled between us. I hardly want to look. My own misfortune is enough to bear. But David says, “Look, it's Silvan.”

“No it's not,” I say, almost scornful, for how can he know better than me?

“Yes, it is.”

“No it's not,” I say with certainty, talking over the baby's bed, for when they first wheeled Silvan away after birth – “just for a few minutes” – they'd stopped to show him to me, the very baby I'd hoped for, looking not at all like me but like his handsome father: a head of dark hair, eyes ringed with heavy lashes, broad pink cheeks tapering down to fat red lips etched against the olive of his skin. When we first came to this second hospital, wasn't I the one – bursting with pride – who found him in his bassinet while David said, “But how do you know that's him?” Surely David is confused because newborns all have the same strange, squashed faces, the same upturned noses. Is it even possible for a baby who was just inside of me to be out here, unrecognizable?

“Excuse me,” David says to the hospital staff who have been ignoring us, looking straight ahead. “That's Baby Boy Wesolowska, isn't it?”

They agree, but warily, as if we might be baby snatchers, or as if we've caught them wheeling our baby around the hospital for fun, or as if they've learned bad news. I can see this last possibility now, because that is how the next technician behaves a few hours later. At first she seems glad to see us arrive. Silvan is in bed, electrodes stuck all over his head, asleep. She assures us the EEG will not hurt him. She says we can help. She's very friendly, telling us how cute he is, cooing over his calm, cute body. I assume he's so quiet because of the phenobarbital he's been given since the seizures of his first night. He's always asleep. She opens her laptop. She herself grows quiet as she studies the patterns she reads there.

“Okay,” she says pleasantly, “would you mind stroking him a little?”

With pleasure, I rub his chest, his arms.

“Okay,” she says, “a little harder.”

Still, I stroke him softly.

“Could you pinch him?”

David pinches him.

“A little harder,” she says. And then, “Did you really pinch him?”

Suddenly, she closes her laptop. She refuses to make eye contact. She leaves saying nothing at all.

 

DESPITE OUR HOPES, the news grows worse. By the third day, we know the seizures are due to more than hematomas; they will not just go away with time. There is evidence now that Silvan has suffered some greater “insult” to his brain. We want to point out to the doctors that they are being inconsistent. We want to hold them to an earlier diagnosis, as if to a better deal advertised in that morning's paper. We want to go back to those first few minutes after birth when we thought the only thing wrong was a slight distress, a slight lethargy. We want our only disappointment to be that he could not lie on my chest right away. We want to be relieved that, after wheeling him off for those “few minutes” to aspirate his lungs, they were able to bring him back lusty and strong enough to nurse.

We would settle for that.

Instead, we have a baby who was born, who nursed and cried, but who is now in a coma – this word has been used at last – and who may die before we even know what's wrong with him. Though he seems simply, sweetly asleep, he may never revive. We wake on our third morning at home to the ringing phone. My heart hammers as David answers. But no, I can tell from his end of the conversation that the worst has not happened. Silvan has not died before I could get dressed for the day and see him again. But what David says is scary enough.

“A meeting with a neurologist?”

And, “At one o'clock?”

And then, “Can't you tell me now?”

I'm out of bed, packing a bag to take to the hospital, sanitary pads, the squirt bottle for my healing stitches. When David gets off the phone, he says, “The EEG did not look good.”

“But what does that mean?” I ask.

“Brain damage?” David says as if posing a question.

I'm facing him but now my head turns away, then my torso; I am falling on the bed and all I see is a grey kaleidoscope, slowly closing on the last spot of light at the end of the tunnel: “I can't go on,” I say.
This is what my mother felt
, I think,
lying at the bottom of the basement stairs after hearing that Mark's body had been found
. But, even as I have this thought, the sensation passes because I am not my mother, my son has not killed himself, my husband is not about to die, and already I can see myself from the outside, already I'm mocking myself for melodrama, because I have lived through tragedies before, and this is not a tragedy. After all, my baby is waiting.

 

ONE O'CLOCK. We sit side-by-side, close but not touching. I can't touch David. The situation feels too dangerous; I feel my brain crouching down, ready to spring. Intellect is how I deal. Crisis speeds my thinking. We are in an ugly room, narrow as a hallway, with a too-big table shoved inside it, a box of tissues in the middle, a blur of faces. Dr. A is there, a resident, a social worker, a nurse, half a dozen more at least. I'm not looking at them. I am looking only at the new doctor, the specialist, this neurologist, who is now in charge it seems. This is her meeting. She looks twenty-one with her smooth blond hair hanging free. She looks as if she'd been a girl who once was popular and consequently had downplayed her brains until one day it occurred to her that she didn't have to choose between looks and brains, she had enough of both to conquer the world. Here she comes, ready to conquer ours.

“The infant was transferred to this hospital after observed seizures. The initial impression was subdural hematomas…” she begins, and then the words keep coming from her, medical terms, “basal ganglia” and “thalami” and “sagittal sinus.”

I try to stop her. I say, “What does that mean?” but she keeps on talking as if I've said nothing. She seems to think she's addressing a panel of experts and not two parents whose need to understand is urgent. The room feels very bright. She talks about “burst suppression patterns” and “EEGs.” Again, I say, “What does that mean?” but as in a dream where one cannot get the words out, she doesn't seem to hear me. At last she gets to what really matters to us. The prognosis. She says, “Physical and mental impairment.” She says it unadorned like that and stops.

“Could you describe what you mean?” I ask.

For the first time, she looks at me. “It could just mean stiff limbs,” she says stiffly, as if I'm forcing her to speak a language she barely knows.

“Stiff limbs is fine with me,” I say.

“… and he won't be a straight A student.”

“Well that is not acceptable,” I say. It is my humor, my father's humor, dark, deadpan, so close to the truth it glances off it like a spear, a humor that sometimes got him into trouble when it rattled to the ground uncaught. No one reacts.

“But it could be much worse than that,” she says, smooth and unsmiling.

It's hard to imagine this woman has suffered. Her children, whom she has not yet had, will, of course, get straight A's like her and I hate her for it – such is the venom of grief as it begins to spread inside me.

We go back and forth, asking questions, but she will not commit; she keeps holding out hope like little bits of candy, until I've had it. She's sugar-coating something terrible. I say something to this effect. I say I want to know what one can do for a baby whose life has been saved for a life that is not really life at all. I use the word euthanasia; I know it is illegal, I say,
but what else is allowed? There is cold shock in the room. Or perhaps the shock I feel is my own. I feel it in my chest, a flutter of my heart as though I'm in danger of falling, but all I want is to move away from the slippery ice of hope to truth.