The ‘other’ one. Part One
The other one
Nine years ago, my best friend’s world exploded.
Her name is Angel, too. I have a few women I consider my best girlfriends, and she is among them. All my people call her “the other one” and all her people call me “the other one.” For a while, we were dubbed Salt and Pepper, due to her one-step-shy-of-albino fair skin and hair and my obvious Latin looks. We have crazy stories about our antics together..people often don’t believe us when we tell them some of the things we did or saw together. When she got pregnant with twins, and her boyfriend failed to step up, I did in his place.
It was me she called at 2am, frantic, at 20 wks pregnant when she thought her water broke the first time. Yes, the *first* time. I told her to call 911, I’d be right there, and I’d wait with her kids until their dad came for them. I did, and then rushed to the hospital….only to find her sitting up on the gurney, legs swinging, waiting for discharge papers. They told her it may have been a small tear that healed itself.
It happened twice again. And twice the ER staff sent her home.
Once she picked up a laundry basket, and when the fluid leaked out again, she got her 2yo daughter, clinging to her leg, all wet. Her daughter cried, “Mommy you peed on me!” But Angel was so used to begin sent home, she didn’t even bother going the the ER again.
She told her doctor about it, and she even leaked on him while he was doing an internal exam. He insisted it was urine leaking out. She tried to tell him she knew the difference between what fluid in the urethra and fluid in the vagina feel like. But he wouldn’t listen.
When she was 23 weeks, we were getting our boys to school and she casually mentioned that it happened again. I insisted we go to the ER, and she tried to veto me on account of how they just kept sending her home-and we had gone to different ERs, even. But I told her we needed to go anyway, so we did. She drove, her 3yo daughter in tow.
We really expected to be sent home. But this time, it turned out she was having contractions, and they finally listened.
They took her on a Bayflight helicopter for Bayfront Medical Center, which has an underground tunnel to All Children’s Hospital in St Petersburg, Florida. All Children’s has the best NICU in the Tampa Bay. I sent her daughter off with her grandparents and headed down. By the time I got there, the reality of what to expect in preemies born at this stage was made very clear by the physicians. 22 weeks was the youngest preemie to survive, but the physical and mental problems the came with that survival were staggering.
They were able to stop her contractions that day. But since her water had broken, she was at a very high risk for infection. She was placed in a hospital bed, feet raised over her head. She would stay like that 24/7, eating, peeing, bathing…all in that bed, feet raised above her head.
The first night I became her advocate, when they placed her in a room with a window at the foot of the bed. Modesty while using a bedpan in an upside-down bed with a window at your feet is just not possible. I was able to convince the staff to move her to a more comfortable spot. When her bladder refused to cooperate with the bedpan situation, I coaxed it into submission by pouring water over her bits. When she cried and told me she was scared, I climbed in the bed with her and held her until we both fell asleep, upside down.
For three days I tended to her. And then the explosion happened.
