A Letter Of Thanks

Dear Doctor P.,

Hootie And The Blowfish were playing on the radio when the baby growing in my belly died. I could tell from the cramp that tore through my body, from the sudden spike in my body temperature that left me reeling, and from the change in energy that comes from a soul winging its way to another world.

My baby girl, gone before she could be born.

For ten weeks you had brushed me off and dismissed my concerns.

“Women bleed during pregnancy all the time,”  you told me.

In the beginning I listened to you. You seemed so composed and your explanations made sense. You were immaculately put together, with your tailored suits and your perfect hair and your flawlessly applied crimson lipstick. You looked every inch the professional. Anyone looking at you would have had no doubt that you were competent in a cold, calculated kind of way.

I may have felt intimidated by you, but I had no reason to doubt you.

I didn’t even doubt you when, ten days after the bleeding had started, you continued to tell me that nothing was wrong.

Although I believed you, I hated you. I want to make that absolutely clear. I hated your air of superiority and your utter lack of compassion. I hated the way you told my husband – even though I was sitting right beside him – that I was “acting in a paranoid and unstable manner.”  I hated the way you ordered me not to do research on the Internet, as if I somehow didn’t have the right to the knowledge. I hated it when you insisted that an ultrasound would not be helpful, that it could in fact harm my baby.

I despised you and everything you said with an intensity that was almost poisonous.

And yet, I respected you. Somehow, despite everything, you were credible. You made me believe, with medical jargon that was beyond my realm and yet somehow logical, that it was OK for me to be bleeding from Week 8 until Week 18 of my pregnancy. When you finally deigned, in your God-like way, to allow me to have an ultrasound, you effortlessly explained away the too-slow growth and the irregular fetal heartbeat. You even succeeded in convincing me that I was crazy to think my baby was dying.

As I lay there on my kitchen floor that day, doubled over with pain and the beginnings of grief, with Hootie and his gang mockingly blaring out, “It’s gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day,” I couldn’t help wondering what the doctor would say now.

When I walked into your office and told you about my dead baby, were you still going to somehow convince me that everything was OK? Were you going to say, “Oh, don’t worry, it’s perfectly normal for women to lose their babies after ten weeks of untreated complications?”

I want to thank you, Doctor P. Whether or not you contributed to the loss of my baby, and to the unbearable heartbreak that my husband and I endured, I am truly grateful to you. You opened my eyes, you see. You taught me not to trust the professionals I turn to for help, to question everything I hear, and to view life through shades of scepticism.

Thank you, Doctor P., for making me grow up.

This week’s Indie Ink Challenge came from Kelly Garriott Waite, who gave me this prompt: Take a person – in your fiction or your life–whom you despise. Now write a piece–a letter, a scene, whatever – showing love, admiration, or respect for that person.
I challenged Diane with the prompt: Tell the story of a telemarketing call that takes a very surprising turn.