Read Online Tsunami Across My Heart by Marissa Elizabeth Stone - Free Book Online Page B

I’m losing my baby. There’s blood everywhere.”
    She looked at my quizzically because the children were fine.
    “No. I’m pregnant. I’m bleeding. It’s everywhere.”
    They pulled me into a room and laid me down, cutting off my jeans. The blood was profuse and bright red. It covered my clothing and was quickly getting onto the gurney bedding. The nurse seemed to slow a bit and was tending to me but no longer really rushing as I thought she should.
    “Have I lost the baby?” I said trembling
    “Ms. Stone, you’ve probably lost a pint of blood. Yes, I’m so sorry, but you’ve lost the baby.” She said, and I just collapsed into her arms and cried my heart out.
    Soon David was there and he came into the room and he was worried and frightened but I didn’t’ feel that he was as sad as I was about the loss of the baby. “It’s just like everything that I was afraid of going wrong with this pregnancy has gone wrong, and the timing is just terrible.”
    I sensed he was relieved on some level and I was angry with him for feeling that way about our child, and hurt that he was relieved. The nurse came and went and finally she told us, “I need to give you an ultrasound just to make sure all the tissue has been expelled from your uterus so you won’t be vulnerable to an infection.”
    I sobbed all over again and felt numb and miserable and wanted to curl up and cry forever.
    The machine arrives without a technician and sits there by the bedside for quite some time. I don’t care really, because I’m stricken with grief and exhausted besides.
    Finally the technician comes and she apologizes for the violation when I’m suffering a loss. David is gone with Brittany and Joshua, and I’m alone in my sorrow. She gently moves the blanket aside and puts the gel on my abdomen. It’s cold because we’re in the emergency room.
    She places the receiver upon the slippery surface of my skin and suddenly gasps “Oh my gosh! There were three!”
    There on the screen I see the strangest sight.
    There are three separate orbs on the screen. The first is mostly collapsed and empty, folded in upon itself and I thought to myself it explained why I had bled that first month. The last is empty but appears damaged at the base, and she points at it showing me where the bleeding is coming from now. But, amazingly, miraculously, in the center to my complete amazement there is a baby, much larger than the four weeks my doctor insisted that I must be at that point and there is clearly movement from this little gem. There’s a baby, and it’s alive!
    “There’s still a baby!!” I shouted and I started crying all over again, but this time for joy. “How far along am I? It looks so big!”
    “I’d say you are ten weeks pregnant” she said.
    “Ten weeks?!? I KNEW I got pregnant in Cape Cod . I knew it.”
    The technician is suddenly my best friend and we are both so happy to see the baby well, and alive. Even so I am mystified to see not just one other placenta but two. They are completely distinct, completely different from one another, definitely three, two empty ones and the third completely secure.
    Later the doctor appears to say that I had “a” vanishing twin and wondered if we weren’t mistaken about the third sac. Yet, it was there, the nurse and the technician saw it, heard him and gave me a knowing glance…as if to say “You know, and we know, that we really saw that…” and I realized too that each of the sacs was a different shape, and none mirrored the shape of another.
    I was instructed to stay in bed as much as possible, and to lift as little as possible in order to get Nathan here   alive and well. I spent five months flipping between news channels while Bush and Gore seemingly made a mockery of our election process. Nathan had two siblings we’d lost in that pregnancy and I laid in bed still bleeding for five more months hardly allowed to get out of my room, not allowed to carry Joshua or Brittany and