“There was so much blood!” The urologist is downright gleeful. “The nurses were totally freaked out!” This is in hindsight, and he wasn’t even there. He heard the story second-hand, after being called in. I am lying on an ultrasound table seven weeks after my first daughter was born, and the doctor seems to be telling me my kidney looks fine. The torn ureter has repaired itself.
Seven weeks earlier, I lay on the surgery table after an emergency C-Section. I was sliced open in layers, only a blue sheet shielding me from that numb lower half of myself, when a stab of pain shot through my shoulder. “It hurts,” I alerted the anesthesiologist, who stood at my head. “It hurts a lot.” It was reflected pain, he told me. Referred pain. It was, I learned later, all that blood. My shoulder told my brain what my abdomen couldn’t: the uterus incision had torn, and my left ureter had ripped along with it. (“There was so much blood!” the urologist exclaims happily again.) The nurses wheeled me down halls and through doors toward my second unplanned procedure for the day, every threshold a fresh stab of pain: bump, bump.
In doctor-speak, a threshold is the point at which physiological effect takes place. On one side of the line, there’s no pain; on the other side, you feel it. On one side of the threshold, you’re awake; on the other, you’re gone. The urologist arrived to take care of my mangled ureter. The needle entered my arm above the wrist; the plastic mask covered my face; the doctor asked my home address. I fumbled toward the end of the road name and was over the precipice of unconsciousness before I reached the zip code.
A threshold is the border between here and there, between one reality and another. A precipice, on the other hand, is a narrow ledge on the void of – who knows? Is there black emptiness beyond the edge? Bone-cracking rock? For hours I pushed; the baby wouldn’t come. We were on the edge. Then I was on the table; I was half-numb; I was powerless under the blessed knife. My muscle tore. The baby breathed air. Ravage and rescue came in the same stroke. There was so much blood, and I knew nothing except that my shoulder really, really hurt.
~
“Fine,” our pastor told us when we approached him for marriage counseling. “If you must read something, read this.” He handed over a narrow volume: The Mystery of Marriage by Mike Mason. When people get married nowadays, especially those of us in the church, there is no shortage of instructional books. “Prepare yourselves!” We were no different. We wanted to be informed and ready.
Our pastor took a different approach. Did he laugh to himself as he closed the door behind us that day? In the car, I flipped the pages, and this was the first passage I read: “All in all, it is impossible to say whether the ultimate effect of marriage or of children or of love itself is actually to hold death at bay outside the charmed, glowing circle of shared life, or rather to bring death overwhelmingly nearer.” Some marriage book!
I was reading another book at the time, the strange novel Lilith by George MacDonald. The main character, named Vane, dreams he is in the middle of a lively dance hall. But when he peers more closely at the dancers’ faces, he sees skulls. The dancers are all dead, and, most distressing, none of them seems to know it. Vane is horrified, but he is also standing on the threshold of truly knowing himself. Isn’t it true? The knowledge we need most isn’t when to push (though at the right time, that can help); it is the knowledge that we may not be able to push well enough, and it should come as no surprise when we can’t. Death is at the door, in the bridal chamber, at the foot of the labor and delivery bed.
~
Knowledge is power, or so the lingo goes. The more you know about childbirth, the better you can labor and deliver. “You can do this,” say well-meaning mothers who have successfully pushed a soul out into the world. “It’s what your body was made for,” friends reassured me beforehand. In her book Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother, Beth Ann Fennelly quotes from the Sharon Olds poem in which “I have done this thing, / I and the other women this exceptional / act with the exceptional heroic body.”
I think of this as Goddess Speak. It is solidarity talk, and it can build up or tear down in spades – or perhaps by C-sections. For those of us who can’t do this thing, who gather up all the information we can and enter into the first pains of labor with a birth plan, but then, against all expectation, end up on the table, wounded and weaker than we thought possible – for us, what hallowed ground on Olympus remains?
When I was four months pregnant, another doctor – an endocrinologist – warned me that pregnancy is dangerous. “Women go into pregnancy too lightly,” he said. “Women die.” A tad insensitive, but I don’t disagree. Perhaps we should not be so surprised when our deliveries don’t go as planned.
This is not to say that getting knowledge and developing a birth plan – or any kind of life plan – is a bad idea. It is not to say that the body, even in its weakness, is not something to marvel at, or that those who succeed in heroic physical pursuits should not feel for a moment glorious. But I am one of the ones torn, and I wonder how it is that we survive this bone-wracking, death-threatened mess of life at all. It seems a miracle, and an enormous mercy, that we didn’t crumble into dust the moment we crossed the threshold of Eden, heading the wrong direction – out of paradise.
~
To repair a ureter as damaged as mine, torn but not severed, a stent will do. After expounding on just how much blood pushed me so close to the brink, the urologist removes the stent, runs the ultrasound, and confirms that the ureter has healed – hallelujah! But I’m not out of the woods yet. I am at risk for stricture, and the danger is urine backup in the kidney. If the kidney constricts (I am sure mine will), the symptoms will be silent, so I must keep coming in for ultrasound checks. “See you back in a month!” He breezes blithely down the hall. I live my daughter’s first year in fearful certainty that I am walking around with a bloated kidney, slowly poisoning myself from the urinary system outward while I go about my normal life of cooking, cleaning, reading, and changing diapers.
I am fine, it turns out. These days, with stents, the success rate for a healed ureter is high, maybe 88%, and it looks like I fall soundly within that count. The stent itself is an ugly thing, as rubbery, sinuous, and garishly green as it was painful to live with, and long enough to beggar belief. After the miserable minute it took the urologist to pull it out (I counted the seconds), the nasty synthetic tube lay on a metal tray next to the soap dispenser, a serpentine s-curve. This is what had been inside me all these weeks? This was the agent of my repair? I turned my head. I could not comprehend it.
~
If knowledge is power, consider me strong. I do comprehend this one thing: I lie on the surgery bench, in the recovery bed, on the clinic table next to the excavated green stent, and I know the Goddess Speak is a lie. It is no comfort that my body was “made for this.” Perhaps it was once, long before my particular cells were knit together in this present time and space. But then the fruit hung ripe from the tree in Eden, and Adam and Eve – well. You know. I think maybe we’ve lost our knowledge of that particular story and its ramifications, far-reaching as they are.
My medical sources tell me about the kind of injury I sustained during the C-section: “less common than injuries to the bladder or rectum, ureteral injuries are far more serious and troublesome and are often associated with significant morbidity.” Significant morbidity. The shocking thing is not that we die, but that we ever survive. The surprising thing should be not that I am weak, but that these flesh-encased bones might sometimes be strong. Even more surprising? This comes as good news.
If knowledge is power and we can get and obtain the same, then woe to us, because even when our bodies are heroic, they are still only a reflected, referred kind of glory. If I pretend I am a goddess, I lie to myself, absurdly. I pretend I am the one fleshly face in a room full of dancing skeletons. No. Instead, Hallelujah! Our bodies are poised for wrack and ruin on the precipice of the Fall. Indeed, we teeter on the edge, and, as it says in the book that is supposed to be about marriage, “life is more here . . . for being perched on the edge of an abyss.”
On that day in the operating room, the doctor cut as best he could, and, reaching his hand into the mess of my mangled insides, he pulled free the flesh-bound soul that my body wouldn’t let me push out. And I was gone. I was out of the realm of capacity and into the realm of damaged things, the place where the urologist’s notes say, “Partial left ureteral injury. I have every expectation that will heal.” The place where all that stands between me and death is, on this visible side of being, the doctor’s capable hands, and on the invisible side, the mighty hand of God, powerful to heal and to save – or to carry me across the threshold I stand at every moment, the one on the verge of here and eternity. I could whisper sweet lies in my own ear that knowledge and the strength of my own body will save me, but I’d rather remember that this life is always carrying me toward death, which will be a beginning, my final gasp a threshold.
[A version of this story originally appeared in the print version of Relief Journal.]
