Three generations of surviving

Don’t be haunted by your vote

(Warning: There are a few graphic medical details in this story.)

On November 13, 1962, my mother wrote a letter to her mother from a hospital room. She was recovering from emergency surgery that saved her life after she was rushed to the ER.

That surgery was necessary because my mother had an ectopic pregnancy. In case that term isn’t familiar, I’ll include a definition from the Mayo Clinic’s website:

“An ectopic pregnancy occurs when a fertilized egg implants and grows outside the main cavity of the uterus. … An ectopic pregnancy can't proceed normally. The fertilized egg can't survive, and the growing tissue may cause life-threatening bleeding, if left untreated.”

That’s exactly what was happening with my mother in November 1962: life-threatening bleeding. We’d talked about the surgery a few times, but I had never seen this letter until a few months ago, when I was sorting through the correspondence she left behind when she died.

“I guess I’m better,” she wrote to my grandmother. “I’m still having the pains in my chest from my diaphragm up, but they say that is caused by some of that dried blood being absorbed into the tissues. (They removed 1-1/2 pints of blood from my abdominal cavity.) The incision is healing fine. They removed the clamps yesterday. I can move around fine except that I feel so bad with those chest pains that I’m doing nothing but lying here. I still don’t know when I’ll go home – I’ve got to feel a lot better before I do.”

She needed to feel a lot better in part because she had three children waiting for her at home: my two brothers (8 and 9 years old) and my sister (6 years old). My father was handling things with help from his mother, friends and neighbors so he could work and spend time at the hospital, where she stayed for at least a week.

Before closing her letter to my grandmother, my mother reassured her.

“Don’t worry about me,” she wrote. “I couldn’t be in better hands. Dr. G____ did the operation, and he and Dr. M_____ and Dr. D____ have looked out for me since.”

In more normal, sane times, I would not be so struck by this part of my mother’s letter. But now we are living in a time when women who show up at a hospital with pregnancy complications cannot count on their doctors’ response to be immediate and based entirely on their education and experience. In some states, doctors are now forced to stop and consider restrictive abortion laws written by politicians.

History repeats

Americans need to understand the price being paid for these laws, and firsthand stories are a powerful way to communicate that, so I’m sharing my family’s story.

The availability of abortion care — that is what it’s called, no matter how the pregnancy ends – had the most profound of impacts on my life.

I am here because my mother was in the “good hands” of those skilled doctors who were free to treat her without hesitation. A little over two years after her painful recovery, she gave birth to me.

A little over 40 years later, in December 2004, I found out I was pregnant for the fifth time. My then-husband and I had had a healthy, wonderful daughter in 2001, and I then had two miscarriages. I was apparently up against two challenges – “advanced maternal age” (anything after 35, I believe) and the overactive thyroid disease that began while I was pregnant with my daughter.

I went to a specialist OB after the second miscarriage, and she said there was no reason not to keep trying. Getting pregnant was not an issue for me; after our conversation, I got pregnant again, miscarried again (#3), and then got pregnant again. Two of these three pregnancies did not require any procedural intervention; one required a D&E (dilation and extraction), a procedure that has been denied or delayed in some states due to abortion laws.

The December 2004 pregnancy took a much more serious turn. I summed it up in an email to a friend:

“Early last week, I found out I was pregnant, and within a day, I was doubled over in pain. They suspected an ectopic pregnancy and did various tests over a couple of days' time. By Wednesday night, they were speeding me into laparoscopic surgery – they found that I had been bleeding and were a little taken aback to find out that scar tissue from my C-section had fused my uterus to my abdominal wall. Once they figured out how to deal with that problem, they were able to confirm that it was an ectopic pregnancy and take care of things, so I feel very, very lucky.”

Taking care of things meant losing a Fallopian tube; they tried to save it as they dealt with removing the tissue that had implanted in the wrong place, but the tube was too compromised, and I was bleeding too much.

As with my mother’s ectopic pregnancy decades before, the doctor used a dramatic visual description to convey how much blood there had been, much like my mother’s doctors had told her about the pint and a half in 1962.
I have forgotten what the description was in my case, but I get why they were so descriptive:  They wanted me to understand how serious the situation had been.

It worked. I came away feeling lucky despite a fourth miscarriage and a now-compromised reproductive system.

I did not have another child. My marriage ended the following year for unrelated reasons, and I have always chosen to focus on our daughter and the joy she has brought rather than those miscarriages.

Votes = real-world, sometimes personal consequences

In thinking about how to write about how this history plays into my current outrage, a weird image came to mind: The scenes in the movie “Back to the Future” where Michael J. Fox’s character looks at his family photo and sees himself and his sister begin to fade away.

Had my mother not gotten the care she needed, both of us could have faded from our family photos; my three siblings would have been left without a mother — and since my father, following in the footsteps of his brother and father, began having heart attacks in the late 60s and died in 1972, they would have been left without parents as teenagers.

My ectopic pregnancy had not reached as “emergent” a situation as my mother’s, but I, too, was in a situation that could have gone terribly wrong if doctors had to stand around and debate what care they could offer me. If today’s laws were in place back then and I was living in the wrong state, I may have faded from my daughter’s family photos.

She was three back then, and she is 23 now. Should she decide to have children in the future, the reality is that she will be risking her life; as I know all too well, miscarriages are common, and if you can’t be sure you will get the care you need if you have one, you are rolling the dice.

If the politicians who put us in this Handmaid’s Tale situation are not held to account by voters, I will tell my daughter to look into moving to a country where women have full rights before having a child (easier said than done).

I believe we are where we are because people who voted for Donald Trump and other politicians with these views have not stopped to think about what their vote may mean for the people in their lives. Do you have family members or friends who may be having children in the coming years?

If so, you need to come to terms with the fact that a vote for the politicians who are taking women’s rights away may end up hitting very close to home in the years to come.

Don’t risk being haunted by the life or death or serious medical fallout that may result from your vote.

Support women. Respect women. Value women’s lives.

And vote for candidates who do the same.