The lowest of the lows

“It’s best if you leave now.  Please take a seat out there in the empty cubicle. Just down the hall.”  

Although she's frantically detaching tubes and disconnecting surgical equipment a harassed nurse spares me a tender look and gestures to the exit. Things have gone badly and a pitiful husband, however supportive, is simply an obstacle in a manic operating theatre.  As small and invisible as I have made myself it's no good, the nurse has put it a nicely as she can. It’s best I leave and I know it.   

The consultant who performed the procedure has fled out the side door already.   

“Kelly will be with you soon.” 

She turns her attention to my wife and with that I’m dismissed. I squeeze Kelly's hand one last time and whisper in her ear that I love her. I don’t know whether she hears me because she is sobbing savagely and was recently administered quite powerful sedatives. I turn my back and go.  I only hope the anaesthetics will drag her from this appalling pain.  

As I leave the operating theatre I pray to a god in whom I have no belief “Please look after her.”    

It’s funny because all of a sudden faith in a higher being is not so absurd when you finally realise you’re little more than a worthless mammal, stuck on a massive rock, in an infinite space. I’ve done this before and so far all my requests have been ignored. But there’s some comfort in the act.   Sometimes, in the toughest, darkest and most hellish times prayer is the only alternative we have.  The final act, the point at which the ego admits it’s got nothing left to offer and it’s time to look elsewhere.  

I know God doesn’t care about my wife and I and with my pathetic self-esteem lost, ruined on the floor of an operating theatre I slink down the hall,  defiantly ripping the scrub hat from my head I fight the desire to destroy the rest of the blue paper garments I was supplied with. Clothes I had been so proud of only an hour earlier.   

If there is such a thing as Karma then surely I’m living the punishment that comes from immeasurable lifetimes of misdeeds.   I’ve not been sedated, my brain and body have been given no synthetic assistance and alone, under the fluorescent glare of the recovery room I’m left to deal with the full consequences of our tragic desire to have a baby.

Our last attempt at IVF has failed. My wife’s ovaries did not produce any eggs.   They have been stretched and twisted around a couple of cysts, one the size of a fist and the other a golf ball.   Under such duress they no longer function, despite the prolonged exposure to fertility drugs.    The blurry patches we’d seen on an ultrasound screen only yesterday were not egg producing follicles, more likely air bubbles.  No eggs were collected, not today, not tomorrow or ever.  She has just learnt she will never conceive a child of her own. 

Fertility treatment can’t give us the baby we couldn’t make ourselves. Two years of violating procedures, daily injections and invasive operations have produced largely misery.  I sit here separated from the world behind this absurdly patterned curtain, in a tiny cubicle, next to the empty space where my wife’s bed will be wheeled I feel a heart-breaking and overwhelming love for her.   

If only I could be stronger and shake this miserable pity I have for myself.    

Twenty feet separate me from my wife of ten years, my best friend.  Close enough so that I can hear the commotion as she is disconnected from drips, the clatter as surgical stirrups are stripped down and rapid footfalls from the soft slippers of nurses as she is prepped for recovery.   Amongst all the hustle I hear her choked sobs and mournful cries.   As I listen a kind nurse tries to sooth her but a stranger can't offer the comfort she needs. That should be me but I can’t see her and I can’t touch her.  I’m waiting to offer something and hopefully make this horrible inadequacy that is threatening to overwhelm me disappear.   

I’ve known lows before but nothing like this.  Most of us never want to see another human suffer and all of us have a core group of people in our lives, people so dear and essential that merely seeing them in pain generates in us an overwhelming grief to match that of our loved one.  My wife is one of those people and the pain on her face will never fade in my memory. 

Ten minutes ago a simple procedure went horribly wrong, Kelly’s chemically stimulated serenity was broken by a dawning realisation and in a moment of the purest sorrow she wrapped her arms around her tummy and let out a silent wail.  I will live with that forever.    She was suffering and I could do nothing except leave.  She needs me and I’m not there. I’m alone behind these nasty curtains that are so busy and muddled that only the conflicting minds of a focus group could have picked them and she is in a room filled with strangers.  

I’m not a crier, never really have been. Sure there have been drunken incidents but mostly I stay dry like some arid and impassive macho beast. Whether it comes from being the eldest of four brothers or growing up in the masculine culture of 1980’s Australia is of little relevance to me because inside I’m in pieces and I wish for some other physical emotion to overwhelm me. For the tears to flow and drag all that pain bubbling and blubbering to the surface purging me of the poison that threatens to consume from inside.  

I don’t.  I want to.  But I can’t.    

All I do is hold my head in my hands and sit there as part of my heart turns eternally to stone.  Mercifully the wait is short and she is wheeled in.  She’s given in to the sedatives. Gratefully I grasp at her limp hand as her bed is locked into place by my concerned nurse. I feel it tighten as she responds to my touch, her other hand reaches out for me and I eagerly grab it. 

And there we are, Kelly lying on her cot and me, kind of hovering over her with my head buried into the side of her bed.  It’s uncomfortable but I’m very aware that she has a real physical pain also and I’d love to squeeze her, holding her tightly but the force of my emotions, transferred through my touch, will only cause more pain. 

Neither of us notice the nurse as she sorrowfully watches over us, pulls the curtains tight and creeps from the room. 

Over the course of the next hour as I sit holding her hands she will stir and ask me how things went three times.   This is not one of those tasks that gets easier the more you do it.   Years ago I was in a similar position when my grandmother, utterly submerged under the dreadful influence of dementia kept asking for her son who had died many years earlier.

 Back then I lied “It’s okay he’ll be here tomorrow Granny.” 

Lying, I figured, was protecting her. Why give her the painful truth to a question she was bound to forget asking? I couldn’t do that to my wife though, soon the sedatives would wear off. The truth was poised to consume her. Each time she asked I responded with honesty and every time I replied she would sink back into the bed sobbing as a part of her died all over again.  

Finally the sedatives ease, the realisation fully sinks in and she wants to be somewhere else. Anywhere but here.