Mary and Goldfish
The Thai surgeon was stuck in traffic, so I was lying in the surgical room in Bangkok wrapped in a strait-jacket-like device designed to keep my arms from flopping over the side of the surgical gurney. The sterile room and what it stood for was horrifying.
I was having an ectopic pregnancy, and the surgery would remove the baby-three months old-from my left fallopian tube. I researched, cried, and begged the doctors to do something to save this baby. I knew better, though. I’d researched my first tubal pregnancy after nearly dying from it. Ectopic pregnancy is a cause of first trimester deaths. A tubal pregnancy is nonviable. Nothing could keep the tube from rupturing and hemorrhaging, killing the baby and me.
The first ectopic pregnancy, just three years earlier, rendered me chalky white and caused me to bleed and cramp. I couldn’t stand. I couldn’t sit. I ended up lying on a cold apartment floor using an old flip phone on a low battery to call a British doctor. Thank God I did. How easily I could have taken two Advil and died on that floor, bled out. My husband would have found me in a mess on the black and white tiles- black and white and red all over! I imagined him arising from his all-night session writing our tourist guides, him stumbling into the living room finding me, stopping suddenly, and checking my pulse; finding none.
