I was in labour for three months

Originally published by Take 5 Magazine in 2010

My pregnancy was a precious and hard-fought one. After four years of IVF and ten expensive, emotional and gruelling cycles my husband and I finally conceived our much longed-for second baby. Although my older son was fast approaching his fifth birthday, I remembered well the road ahead of me, the crippling impact of morning sickness, exhaustion and discomfort and I braced myself for the inevitable inconveniences of these. But nothing could have prepared me for what was to come.

Having spent years tracking every moment of my cycles, temperatures, blood and hormone levels I was well schooled in the habits of painstakingly ticking off the milestones of my pregnancy. So I know that it was at precisely twenty-three weeks and one day that I went into labour. It was also my father’s birthday, so the date of 21 November is forever etched in my heart. I woke up one morning prepared to go work, when I realised I was spotting blood. I rang the hospital, who agreed with my initial diagnosis that it was probably nothing, but that it was worth getting checked out nevertheless. I rang my boss to let her know I would be an hour or two late (how funny that seems to me now!), and hopped in my car. It was a gorgeous, sunny morning. The kind where dappled light filters through spring leaves and birdsong makes you feel good about the world. The midwives showed me to a wide, sunny room overlooking a playground, and I could hear the squeals of delight from children playing below. I remember thinking, as I allowed myself an indulgent stretch on the white sheets of my bed, that there were worse ways to spend a few working hours.

Little did I know.

The doctors arrived pretty promptly, asked me a few questions about my pregnancy and symptoms, and requested a quick internal exam. After years of IVF I was pretty accustomed to the indignities of these, but I had never before seen the look of alarm that flashed across my doctor’s features after only a moment’s glance. He muttered to the midwife in that impenetrable multisyllabic medical language that always seems so impressive on television but is frankly terrifying in real life. She raced from the room and came back with a wheelchair, suggesting with a friendliness bordering on mania that I come with her for an ultrasound. I was bewildered at the speed at which I was jumping queues and getting attention, and struggled to make sense of the proceedings. The radiographer and midwife continued the stream of unintelligible medi-lingo but I did catch the word ‘funnelling’ several times. Knowing by now that things were not looking good, I could feel the lump in my throat expanding rapidly and I really struggled to find the courage to ask them what they were looking at. As sweetly as she could, the radiographer explained that my cervix was shortened and dilated, and that it seemed as if I was in labour.

Back to the sanctity of my hospital room, its earlier cathedral quiet now shattered by dozens of nurses and doctors, preparing injections and exchanging instructions and repeatedly assuring me that things were okay but I was not under any circumstances to stand up. Summonsed from work, my husband arrived and held my hand, a life-line in the chaos. A senior doctor explained to me that I was in labour, that my cervix was shortened and dilated and that the membranes surrounding the baby were clearly visible. Their suburban hospital was not set up to cater for premature births and they had made arrangements to transfer me to another hospital, half an hour away, who were preparing for me even as we spoke. At 23 weeks, he chimed, as lovingly as it was possible for a stranger to be, my pregnancy was not viable. But they had given me steroids to boost the baby’s lungs, drugs to slow the contractions and had every hope that they could delay the birth for a while. Every hour, every day, he intoned with a smile, counted in my favour.

Strange as it may seem, I didn’t cry. It was all too surreal, like it was happening in a movie. I lay in the back of the ambulance, sirens wailing and lights flashing, trying to make sense of the trees and light poles and sky as they scrolled past. The intimately familiar Pacific Highway looks entirely different when viewed backwards and upside down. In no time at all the new, bigger hospital admitted me to the delivery ward, another set of doctors examined me and ordered yet another set of scans. The verdict was repeated, and I was ordered to rest.

Things began to blur and I struggle to remember the sequence of events after that. But one particular conversation with the doctor in charge of the Neo-Natal Intensive Care Unit stands out. He explained the risks associated with premature birth, how lungs and blood vessels and the minutiae of miracles needed to support life in a baby were just not ready, in my case. If I gave birth, he said, my baby would probably not survive. And if he did, he would face a gargantuan series of hurdles most of which ended with severe disability or blindness. His bleak message, though, was delivered in mellifluous tones that seeped in like a warm quilt on a freezing night. Absolutely numb with confusion, grief and drugs I remember making out the words ‘quality of life death’ and a carefully explained message of how our baby would be comfortable no matter what happened to him. After that, I chose not to listen any more.

Once the doctor left I put my head on my husband’s shoulder and for the first time in hours, I gave way to emotion. The years of effort spent achieving this precious pregnancy, the love and longing for a baby conceived but not yet born, the magnificent volume of drugs in my blood, the heartache of the news just heard, the terror of what we were facing and an overwhelming sense of fear crashed simultaneously into my head and chest and I gave in to it. A nameless, fearful noise came out of me and I cried like I have never cried before, keening and wailing and hauling at feelings too big to contain for a minute. It was as if I had ceased to exist, and I consisted of nothing but darkness and grief and pain and the one solitary lifeline of the warmth from my husband’s shoulder. It might have been moments or hours that passed, I don’t know, but that bilious wailing was terrifying and overwhelming and ultimately, cathartic.

Hours later, once we were both too exhausted to cry, we tried to sleep. And at some hour in the pre-dawn gloom I found a peaceful place in my head, at last, where the final shreds of my strength seemed to linger. Like a pilgrim kneeling at last before a lighted candle, I asked my body, plainly and simply, not to give birth. I talked to the baby and asked him to stay. I promised myself to devote every single scrap of energy to the quest and as the dawn snuck around the blinds I surrendered to the unknown, I closed my eyes and I finally went to sleep.

A long story follows, of hours and days and weeks staring at the ceiling of my hospital room and counting off the milestones. Twenty-four weeks to viability, twenty-seven weeks to significantly brighter outcomes, thirty weeks to being 'almost out of the woods'. Every day a tedious repetition of ‘obs’ (observations), awful food, doctor’s rounds, bleeping machines, friendly nurses, ultrasounds, medicine, wash, rinse, repeat. As the immediate terror of early labour subsided, a new set of anxieties swelled up in its place, like how to care for my pre-schooler at home with no extended family in Australia, how to support my husband who was cracking under the strain of a full-time job, an unsympathetic employer, a needy child at home and all the usual meals to cook, bills to pay and jobs to be done. Every day was a marathon for him, juggling a patchwork of child-care arrangements, commuting, the logistics of snacks and toys and nap times, the hour-long return trip to the hospital, answering the ‘when’s mummy coming home questions’ and putting on a brave face for me. With hindsight it was the most brutal thing we had ever endured, and that’s saying something since we have previously survived immigration, a cancer diagnosis, retrenchment and unemployment, moving house, a child who didn't sleep and infertility.  As we now like to joke with one another, we have done the ‘in sickness’ and ‘for poorness’ part. Bring on the ‘for richer’ and ‘in health!’

In all, I spent three months in hospital. But you don’t know, going in, how long the road will be. I longed for home, I pined for privacy, I was bored senseless and I was literally sick to death of the twice-cooked swill they call food. My friends however performed miracles by organising themselves into a roster of child-carers and chefs, my mum-in-law and mother ran an inter-continental relay to come to our aid and the midwives, stenographers and doctors sang a blissfully well-rehearsed chorus of reassurance and praise. No one at the hospital had ever seen such a dynamic cervix as mine before (not something I ever thought I would be famous for!), they extolled, and no one had ever lasted more than eight weeks at seven centimetres dilated. Except me!  The doctors warned me daily that a premature birth was imminent. I missed Christmas at home, I missed my son’s fifth birthday and was only able to attend his first ever day of school by begging and pleading for so-called ‘gate leave’ so that I could kiss him goodbye at his classroom door. I watched the new year’s eve fireworks from a waiting room window. But it was a price worth paying, I told myself daily, for the sake of both the lives at stake.

One night I met a girl named Claire in the ward’s dining room who began to cry when she saw my still-pregnant belly. It transpired she had gone into early labour the night before, and had lost her baby girl at twenty four weeks. Her story mollified me, having allowed a certain confidence and familiarity of things to take over, and I realised how lucky I truly was. As I watched that girl cry the way I had cried on my arrival, and I saw the stony grief of her husband as he put a rigid arm around her, I realised how truly lucky I was. There, I thought, but for the grace of God go I.

I went into labour regularly during my stay, more times than I care to remember. But miraculously the cocktail of nifedipine, steroids, antibiotics and rest seemed to work in my case. My waters broke at thirty weeks, and I once again braced myself for the labour that was surely to follow. But the contractions obeyed the orders of the medicine, and subsided. I waddled around like a leaking, undignified duck for another four weeks, before the contractions resumed, this time for good.

Our precious son was born at thirty-four weeks and fifteen minutes exactly. The paediatric specialist stood waiting at the door with his scrubbed hands outstretched, ready to rush the baby to the NICU at a moment’s notice, but Little Man's outraged bellowing at being expelled from his comfortable bed sent the doctor slouching back down the corridor like a cricketer out for a duck. I watched him walk away, and to this day remember the sight of his back being one of the most reassuring visions of my life. If he didn’t need to rush the baby away from me, then things were surely going to be okay.

With our preliminary cuddles over, Connor spent a few days in the NICU and high care, but was released home to us at a mere thirty-five weeks and one day’s gestation. Having shattered all hospital records, he continues to go from strength to strength and I still can’t look at him without feeling sheer undiluted elation. He is literally every dream come true. He is also a reminder of how senselessly lucky I am, with no rhyme or reason to explain why my pregnancy continued while the likes of Claire’s didn’t.  

When I think back on that whole dark episode, which has become such a stark and defining episode in my life, it is often that first night that I recall, and the peculiar and disembodied noises I made when we thought that we would lose our precious boy. And although you will think it a very strange thing to do, I often think of that as one of the best things that has ever happened to me. To have travelled so far down the mortal coil, like a bungee jumper viewing death in the looming reflection of the river, to have brushed the inky waters with my finger tips and travelled back to tell the tale, is a testament to a resilience that I never knew I had. To have a happy tale to tell when it might so easily have ended differently is nothing short of a miracle and one that still gives my step bounce. I know how lucky I am. I have an adoring husband, two healthy children and a whole new perspective on things. 

And I have a badge of honour I wear proudly. I hold the hospital record for the longest labour. Yes, I was in labour for three months. 

The day I got the willies.

Originally written in August 2005

Also published in Irena Madjar's book What Women (and their Men) Need to Know About Prostate Cancer

I was so sure that there wasn’t going to be a problem that I didn’t even go with my husband to the specialists’ office on the day he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Instead, I was sitting in a local park sipping a latte and playing with my then eighteen month old son. After all, Hubby had only just turned 40 and the day was clear, crisp and sunny. It was only later, when I heard the crunch of his car on the driveway at a time when he was supposed to be at work hat my heart thudded up into my throat and my feet started running towards his car. His face was stricken and his eyes were brimming with tears. He put his arms around me and whispered “cancer” and swallowed. I don’t really remember much else for hours after that.

Hubby turned forty in May and took himself off the GP for a general check-up in the interests of good citizenship. We were slightly worried about his cholesterol, which is stubbornly high despite his slim frame and active lifestyle. The doctor took blood to monitor this, and at the same time requested a Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) check just by way of routine. PSA is part of the “juice” that the prostate makes that the sperm ultimately swims in. PSA is all good and well when it’s in the prostate but the fact that it’s in the blood indicates that for some reason, the prostate is leaking. The PSA results came back as being 4.6 which is more than twice the level it should be for a man of Wayne’s age. Still, the statistics were firmly in our favour and we prepared for news of a hyperactive prostate or perhaps an infection, and Wayne was sent to see a urologist to have further tests.

Hubby's urologist recommended a biopsy just in case, to which we conceded especially after a second PSA test showed his levels had crept up slightly to 4.8. The biopsy was done under general anaesthetic and two days later Wayne fronted up to receive the results. As I said, we were both confident of a good outcome and the resulting diagnosis just knocked us sideways. To my uninformed head, prostate cancer was an old man’s illness and Wayne, with his beautiful, athletic body and healthy lifestyle was not even vaguely a candidate for this awful thing. We have always eaten well, lived well and exercised. We wear hats and sunscreen. We fasten our seatbelts. We don’t smoke. Wayne is as slender and beautiful as an Olympian and has run more marathons (including three Comrades’) than I care to recount. According to the literature, we’ve done everything right. So how do we get our heads around why this is happening to us? 

As I write, its only around a month since we found out the diagnosis and I know that we’re still at the very beginning of this horrible journey. But already I’m exhausted. Hubby seems to be handling it stoically, ploughing through the recommended reading and asking informed questions, meeting with doctors and prodding insurance brokers for answers, ticking all the boxes on his to-do list. I’m just trotting along beside him, trying to look useful but unable to hear anything or do anything except be confounded by the deafening white noise in my head. I feel like a deer in the headlights, stupefied and useless and about to be hit head-on by something colossal and unforgiving.

Hubby, and I’m sure all men with Prostate Cancer, faces a brutal series of choices about how best to treat this. Some men choose to do nothing, an option termed “watchful waiting” in the hope that diet, lifestyle and homeopathic treatments might be able to contain or reverse the cancer until a more preferable treatment option becomes available or the cancer remits. But this seems unsuitable for us, since Wayne’s tumour seemed to be relatively aggressive and any time we spend waiting would only give the cancer time to do more damage. There are several radiation treatments, some more appealing than others. But the option that seems most suitable in our case is a radical prostatectomy, or the surgical removal of the prostate. On paper, it looks beautiful. If the cancer is contained in the prostate, and you remove the prostate then you have no more cancer. QED. In reality though, we face some small but nevertheless frightening potential risks including incontinence and impotence, which must be devastating for Wayne to contemplate given his youth and health, and not that great for me either I might add.

We have also learned that Hubby's case is quite exceptional, in that he is so young. It is not unheard of, of course, but it is unusual for a man in his forties to have it. In fourteen years’ experience, our specialist’s youngest patient ever was 49, until Wayne came along and, at the age of 40, shattered all the record books.

As far as I can tell, experience so far has been a fruit salad of uncertainties including being confronted by a new knowledge of mortality, the prospect of surgery and its many awful implications. And these are mine too, but woven through them are other peculiarities, like the guilty memory of a sunny park when I shouldn’t have been there, the antiseptic smells of waiting rooms and crying behind the steering wheel of my car. Waiting is a curse, second only I guess to actually enduring the treatments. And yes, I am keenly aware of how I am making this about me, when it is Wayne’s disease. Of how I am feeling sorry for me when he is the one who needs to go through it. But the way I see it, I might not be the one with the prostate, but I do have a ring on my finger, a beautiful blue-eyed baby boy to take care of and a very large lump in my throat. Prostate cancer is not just a man’s disease, that’s for sure.

So where to next? For the time being, we have booked the radical prostatectomy surgery and have been told by many medical practitioners that we have every reason to expect the best possible outcome. But Wayne will require a lot of time off work, and it doesn’t really take away our anxiety as we consider the potential risks. Then there’s also the tough logistics to be negotiated, like time off work and babysitters while we bank blood and sperm, or while we consult with any number of doctors, nutritionists and support groups. It is financial year end and we both have our own companies and must churn out all the reports that the systems demand. Our personal tax returns are also due, while at the same time we wade through the requirements of our health funds and insurance companies. Then there’s work, which is busy for both of us, and the demands of a hopelessly active toddler. Yes, I am desperately stressed, I admit, and not always dealing with this in a way that I am proud of.

Part of me feels like that, if things were fair, the clocks would stop and the blinds would shroud the windows and the whole world would converge on our house offering shoulders to cry on and whispering wise words of support. They would nod understandingly as I howl and fling furniture at the walls, and pat me on the back and make me endless cups of tea. In an ideal world Wayne and I would have nothing else to do but focus on each other and beating this thing for once and for all. But the reality is cruelly different, and life goes on, and we must fill out the forms, meet client’s deadlines, remember where we parked the car and find something to cook for dinner. I would like to do nothing except lie with my head in Wayne’s lap and listen to his breathing and the rain pelting against the glass as we while away another precious afternoon together. Instead, I sit in traffic and thump my steering wheel, I wait in line at health insurance office and cry into the onions. This is the most brutal thing I’ve ever had to do.

One of the small ways we’ve managed to feel proactive during this whole messy business is to inform ourselves as much as possible. As I type Wayne is reading one of eight text books on the subject that we have borrowed or bought. We have scoured the internet and the local library and we’ve started attending a prostate cancer support group that is offered by our hospital and has been absolutely invaluable. I have learned so many valuable things that I wish I had known five years ago, which would have given us some defense against this dreadful disease. But then again, I must concede that had somebody told me this, I would have dismissed them as a new age hippy freaks and not given it any more thought. Ah yes, hindsight is 20/20.

Something I am grateful for every day is that when detected early, prostate problems are almost never a death sentence. In fact, in healthy people where the disease is caught in time the success rate of treatment is almost 100%! On the other hand, if we had waited a few years before becoming aware of this problem who knows what kind of outcome we might be facing. We will now be forever committed to annual check-ups and hugely grateful to the medical professionals who picked this up before it became an even more serious problem.

While it’s impossible to know absolutely why cancer happens to good people, we have learned that there have been a lot of contributing factors such as previous illnesses, stress levels, deficient diets and so on. I read an excellent metaphor that likens developing cancer to playing a poker machine at the casino. You get one strawberry, and nothing happens. You pull the lever again and get two strawberries. Nothing. But sometimes the odds stack up exactly and you get five strawberries in a perfect line and bingo, the lights begin to flash and your life is changed forever. So while I ramble on about the things that might have contributed to Wayne developing prostate cancer, bear in mind that its never just one thing, but a domino effect of systems out of whack that put pressure on other systems, and there is still an awful lot of random, brutal luck involved.

Stress is potentially one of the many “strawberries” that can contribute to the onset of disease. In our case, as our nutritionist pointed out, we have been subject to a lot of stress in recent years, even if we weren’t able to articulate it at the time. Wayne has been divorced, we have immigrated and are raising a baby who has been ill and doesn’t sleep much. We are remote from our families and Wayne in particular is easily stressed by his environment and circumstances. Intense and prolonged stress has been shown clearly and specifically to be associated with the onset of cancer. This is because oxygen available to the tissue cells is decreased because of elevated blood fats and increased blood thickness which follow stress. Similarly, stress decreases oxygen available to the protective white cells of the body's immune system, thus debilitating them. In turn, the immune system, having been constantly stimulated by stress, becomes exhausted and impotent, allowing other potential hormonal upsets to occur. In this condition, the body's defensive white cells, although capable of destroying the cancer cells, make no effort to do so.

Lifestyle is in fact the most powerful drug you will ever employ as part of a cancer prevention strategy. Please don’t smoke. If you do, consider quitting for the sake of the people who love you. Make sure you exercise in order to maintain healthy bones and organs, even ten minutes a day makes a huge difference. And with all the fervour of the newly reformed, I believe that meditation too promotes a positive mind-set, a calmer mind and a healthier body. 

Do I sound like a doomsayer? I don’t mean to. It’s just that it has finally hit home to me how fallible my body is after all, despite the decade or so of parties, alcohol and reckless driving during which I was convinced I was immortal. And even more fragile than my body is my heart, which is bruised and straining under the weight of this appalling cargo. Good health is such a blessing, and my responsibility is more than just to myself, but to everyone who has ever told me that they love me.

For me, a shock of this magnitude teaches several things; about how I have taken my body and my health for granted for so long and why I shouldn’t, about who my friends really are, and about what’s really important to aim for every day like a kiss from my child, a letter to a friend or a glass of wine with my husband after the achievement of another day together.

I have heard the clichés many times before, like how I will never lie on my deathbed and wish I had bought a flat screen TV, but this rings truer now more than ever. I have had to completely re-think what is important in my life; and possessions, crippling workloads and bad traffic are not part of this. Cancer has been a terrifying, humbling and strangely life-affirming experience. While I don’t want to take anything away from what Hubby is going through, and has yet to face, I must concede that this has been very harrowing for me too, and I know the same is true for his family, especially his mum. Illness is insidious because of the way it attacks not only the patient, but the hearts and minds of everyone in their circle.

I may not have a penis or a prostate, but I can still get the willies.

Copyright Andrea Moller Doney