![]() One in five pregnant people experiences a significant complication. Though my experience was unusual, I did have something in common with countless other pregnant people: Despite recent medical advances, bearing a child remains startlingly dangerous, a fact that America’s lawmakers on the bench have chosen to ignore. Over the course of my two pregnancies, more than 40 physicians and midwives, by my count, failed to explain why my blood work kept coming back with so many anomalies, why so many debilitating complications kept piling up in an otherwise healthy woman. I sometimes wonder whether my son, sharing my body, might have been itchy too.įor me, pregnancy was “obscene,” in the phrasing of one of my doctors. The itching intensified after sundown, causing sleeplessness and exhaustion. The sensation ranged between the tight skin of a sunburn and the agony of poison ivy. I itched unceasingly and uncontrollably during both: For 136 days the first time and 167 days the second, I was itchy every single moment of every single day. I experienced debilitating nerve pain during the second pregnancy-like having a tattoo gun alight on my skin, over and over. The hallucinations that arrived post-delivery were far from my worst symptoms. I had given birth to my second child a week before, and nothing made sense. Back in the bedroom, a strange pair of eyes, slate-blue with yellow sclera, stared at me in the mirror. I broke open the scabs on my legs, watching my blood bead on my irritated skin. I itched, and so I scratched, clawing at the damp back of my knees, my soft belly, my ribs. The veins in the stone on the vanity writhed and breathed. I slept, I woke up, I “slept,” I “woke up.” I hobbled into the bathroom, feeling shooting pain each time I moved my left side. Had I misread the clock? Maybe I was dreaming about the time. I tossed and turned and writhed and looked again, and it read 1:17. I looked at the clock glowing on the nightstand in my bedroom and it read 1:23, one-two-three, a neat set of numbers. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday.
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