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| Get Into It! Spring - Summer 2008 |
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My particular journey through the Valley of the Shadow, began at six o’clock one Saturday morning. I vaguely remember waking up to that persistent feeling of nausea and fatigue to a loud banging on my bedroom door. Before I could get up, the door flew open to reveal my cousin’s anxious face, “You have to go to Joan’s now! Tony has chicken pox.”
I admit I was a still a little slow to move, Tony had been feeling feverish for sometime now but we’d all out it down to some virus he had picked up on vacation. None of us knew that chicken pox had an incubation period as long as a week. Just the night before he and I had sat on the couch talking and watching TV.
As I haphazardly packed a bag, the
implications of what was happening began to dawn on me. I touched my
still flat stomach, just ending my third month of pregnancy. That
troublesome first trimester was almost over. I was looking forward
to the end of the constant tiredness and desire to vomit. Other than
those symptoms, though, I felt perfectly fine. I was pretty sure I
had escaped the bug in time.
The next week I relaxed at Joan’s place, we spent a lot of time
chatting about babies, breastfeeding and just enjoying some girl
time. The news from Tony’s wasn’t so good, both his wife and son had
contacted the pox too. I began to be concerned but other than a
dizzy spell I was fine.
On my fifth day at Joan’s I stepped out of the bath and glanced at my acne-riddled face in the mirror. Amongst the pimples and scars, were two or three tiny bumps. I touched them and realized they held water like little bladders. What the heck is this? I asked myself and ran to ask Joan her opinion.
She confirmed my worst suspicions, “I’m taking you to the doctor right now. This is chicken pox.”
I dressed in a daze, fighting rising panic. I had no real idea what chicken pox would do to the baby, but I remembered the dire warnings I had heard as a child: Chicken pox and pregnancy do not mix. I began to pray.
The doctor sighed heavily. “Yes, you have chicken pox. Your pregnancy is now considered high-risk. Unfortunately there is nothing I can give you at this point. There is a vaccine on the market but it’s for small children. It would be harmful to the fetus.”
“You mean there’s no medication I can take for this? Or something that could protect the baby?” I asked in disbelief. He shook his head, “I’m going to give you a number to call. It’s a hotline at Sick Kids hospital, you can find out all the details of the effects of the pox. It may help you to decide what steps you should take.”
I thought to myself, what steps? He can only mean abortion.
I moved back to Tony’s so that Joan’s children would not be infected, although we felt it might be too late. I collapsed at their front door in tears while his wife held me. Over the next few days, I called the hotline everyday. The first person on the line suggested that a hospital might be able to give me a shot to lessen the effects of the pox on the baby. Six hours of waiting in the emergency room, and another hour while the obstetrics department conferred with emergency staff, “I’m so sorry but our specialist says that we can’t give you anything. It would be detrimental to the baby.”
“Isn’t chicken pox already detrimental?” I shot back in frustration. The nurse pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows, “I’m sorry but here’s a number you can call for more information.” She wrote it down and handed it to me. I recognized it immediately, Sick Kids hospital hotline.
I was sick for about two weeks, during that time I called the hotline again and again hoping that another voice would mean another opinion. It was always the same: chicken pox can cause severe defects in a fetus, including limb abnormalities, scarring of the skin and internal organs and neurological damage. Tony had been contagious for at least five days before the pustules began to show up on his skin.
I refused to let the horror pictures of a deformed baby invade my thoughts. Up to that point I had been strengthening my relationship with God, reading the positive messages of Essence magazine and Iyanla Vanzant. Now I drew on what I had been reading and began a spiritual and mental campaign to fight the negative predictions I was hearing.
I began to pray in earnest, asking God to protect the baby. Then I realized that faith is belief in things not yet seen, so instead I began to thank God for protecting my baby. That positive affirmation did a lot to fight the voice of fear in my head.
As I smothered my own skin with chamomile lotion, I imagined the smooth dark skin of my baby. I looked at my marked body and I thought of his clear baby skin. I looked at pictures by Anne Geddes, those impossibly cute images of babies dressed like flowers, bugs and puppies. But most of all I prayed. I read psalms to my belly, I read for myself.
When I was better and the long length of months lay ahead, I began to occupy myself with work and preparation. From time to time I would have a moment of doubt, a flash of fear. I reasoned that I would not have aborted even if I had believed he would be deformed. I crushed the fear with a little prayer “Thank you Lord for healing baby, thank you that he will be beautiful and have better skin than me.”
Eventually the concept of labour loomed largest in my mind. I even managed to forget I had had the pox. On December 23, 2000 I gave birth to a little boy all of 5 lbs 13 ozs. He was the tiniest most complete person I have ever seen. From head to toe he had the softest beautiful brown skin, perfect in every way.
Nicole Georges is a freelance writer.
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