FREE
I was supposed to be found dead on a hospital bed.
Pregnant with my fourth child, I was ecstatic. I’ve always loved children. They’re so new, inspiring, and fresh with life. And while my child had been deemed perfectly healthy, months into my pregnancy things took an unexpected turn.
I’d started to feel sick that day, so sick that I had to be taken to the hospital for days on a stretch. Complications of my invisible baby seemed to be taking a toll on my health. I was forced to take days off from work, miss every final exam of my college degree, and worst of all: I had to spend days inside the hospital and then have even more saddening news handed to me … I was now in jeopardy of losing my unborn child.
My friends knew nothing of me as I’d been lying on that bed; I’d been trying to spare them the darkening troubles of my private life.
Death was ruthless. Swift. He claimed my child so quickly that it was questionable if I’d been blessed with the opportunity to be pregnant in the first place. I was then given drugs to calm my nerves, drugs to put me to sleep. But then it seemed that the combination of losing my baby and feeling sick had rendered my condition worst. Much worse.
Death wasn’t done toying with me. He needed another life to feel satisfied. When I’d opened my eyes the following day there were all these strange things attached to my feeble body: an oxygen mask, bags, pipes, needles, drips, and a whole bunch of other medical devices that alerted me that I’d been losing the fight. Death had been swirling around the room with his scythe.
Meanwhile, my husband had been outside, sitting in the waiting room being warded off by the nurses who kept telling him that I was in no condition to be seen by anyone. These were the very nurses I’d been calling—whispering their names and pushing emergency buttons—yet they’d refused to pay adequate attention to me. Perhaps if the doctor hadn’t prescribed me with the wrong dosage of drugs after I’d lost my baby, then I would have been able to go home and mourn the death of my child. I would have done so in peace without the likelihood I would have ended up unconscious in a hospital room.
I’d been feeling all life leaving my body. I’d even thought I felt the strange thing that some people claim they do, which is travelling to Heaven and back. It just felt so strange to be fading away like that. Couldn’t move my arms, couldn’t twitch my feet, and my eyes kept struggling to open hopelessly. And as I couldn’t move or speak, no nurse would ever hear me call for her again. This was it. That noisy emergency machine started beeping next to me. I only had about a minute left. Then…
“I want to see my wife!”
“Sir, you can’t go in there!”
“I want to see my wife!”
My eyes twitched.
“Open the door! I want to see my wife!”
The door opened.
I heard my husband’s voice, then a woman’s voice in shock. “Quick, don’t let her fall asleep or else she’ll—!”
I couldn’t fall asleep after all that commotion. In the presence of my husband, I was given some more drugs, taken care of, then I was allowed to asleep.
A week later, still drained from all that had happened, I ended up in the same hospital again. This time it was due to stomach cramps, though I no longer had a baby living inside me. It was then revealed that another doctor at that hospital had forgotten a piece of gauze inside my tummy. But I couldn’t remember how it had gotten there because for the minutes, hours or days I’d been unconscious—or even while I might have been dead—I have little memory of what had happened at that hospital. All I know is that I’d slept with death the first time around and had somehow made it out alive the second.
People tell me I’m supposed to be a multimillionaire now. Yes, I know. At one point, especially after not being totally certain how I’d lost my child, I was seriously thinking about it. The looks on those doctors’ and nurses’ faces—the fear—I was 100% in the right and they knew it. All I needed was a lawyer (even one who didn’t know what he or she was doing) and we’d both become rich overnight … but really, at whose expense? The hospital’s? Mine? My daughter’s?
Just as many people have questioned for ages whether hanging a criminal is right, I have similarly questioned just how merciless and revengeful the human race can be.
“Fire all the doctors! Get rid of the nurses! And get me the best lawyer in the country so I can make examples out of them! Then we’ll get new doctors and nurses to take their places—new doctors and nurses who are all perfect human beings and will never again in this lifetime make such a foolish mistake!”
Revenge for pride. Revenge for money. Revenge because incompetent workers must pay. I didn’t want any of those things. I just wanted the peace of mind and the sanctity that my daughter didn’t die in vain.
Even though sufficient time has passed, I still stare at my husband and my beautiful three children whenever I’m around them. I pray every day that neither of them will ever have to endure the experience of sleeping with death. Only after living through it could someone understand why it might actually be worse than dying itself.
I believed it was God who saved me that day, through the timely action of my husband. And if it wasn’t for HIM, right now I’d only be rich, famous, living the “good life”. And perhaps I’d have proven not just to an entire nation—but the entire world—that in everything I do, even when I might be really tired, over-stressed, underpaid and overworked (or might just be feeling out of sorts for just a day or two per year) I should always be severely penalized for being imperfect.
I may not be perfect. But every time I find myself in the midst of busy cities and I see all the moving cars and the scores of unaware people hustling about the streets, I keep thanking God and counting my blessings that I’m one of the few who still realizes that amidst all the constant busyness I’ll always be human.
Revenge doesn’t make you at peace. And if somehow it does, consider that everything you lose in this life may very well be lost in vain.
Based on a true story
For my friend, Jenny
