De Los Angeles

[[ This is the rough draft to an essay I'm working on for my english class. It's a creative non-fiction essay. Let me know what you guys think about it so far ^_^ ]]

De Los Angeles

The room was cold, ice cold. It felt empty. It felt more like a morgue, than a hospital. As I sat up on the hospital bed, I couldn’t help but to think something terrible was about to happen. The goose bumps tingled through every inch of my body. I could hear the confusion in the nurse’s voices, and the fear in my doctor’s. No one was able to give me a straight answer. My mind was literally eating me alive, thinking of all the possibilities. “Would I leave this hospital today? Should I be as worried as I am? Will my daughter be alright?” One thing I was certain about, something wasn’t right.

     My doctor was an old, Cuban man with a heavy Spanish accent. He walked into the room with his khaki slacks and button down shirt, without his typical white lab coat. His facial expression gave it all away. He was the type of person to always make a sarcastic joke about something, but as he walked into the room, he had a serious face. He seemed puzzled. He himself didn’t know what was about to happen. In all his years of being a doctor, he never encountered a situation quite like this one.

He stood at the foot of my bed, hesitated and then said, “The odds of her not making it, are higher than the chances of her actually making it.” I literally felt my heart stop. Everything else in the room became a distant echo. Everything felt frozen in time. For a second, I was completely numb to what he said. I had no emotion. I didn’t know what to say or what to feel. Was this all a horrible dream? Was this really happening to me? He walked out of the room to speak to one of the nurses. Everyone else in the room just stared at me, waiting for a reaction, a reaction that would never come to light.

     Dr. Blanco came back in and explained to me, “We will try our best to stop the labor, and to keep her in as long as possible. If we can stop the labor, I’ll keep you here on bed rest for the rest of your pregnancy, or until I feel that you are not considered high risk.” I thought to myself, “the rest of my pregnancy, on bed rest?! In this hospital? Is he crazy?!” He continued to explain that I was going to be injected with magnesium sulfate, a drug used to stop labor. As he explained the possibilities of the drug not working, the not-so-educated nurse came into my room to inject the magnesium sulfate. Honestly, I was a bit nervous about her doing anything. When I was first admitted into the labor and delivery department, she was the one that was supposed to set up my IV. She pricked and poked me with that damn needle, four times. And if you’ve never had an IV put in, once is painful enough, let alone four times. As the nurse injected the medicine into my IV, it felt like hot lava was running slowly through my veins. It reminded me of the movie Twilight, and how being infected with their venom was supposed to burn through your veins. But I wasn’t turning into a vampire; I was going through pre-term labor.

Maybe turning into a vampire would have been easier.

     That night felt like the longest night of my life. I tossed and turned, and didn’t get one moment of rest. Being sick and in labor was no easy ride. The contractions were unbearable and unstoppable, like a runaway freight train. Every few minutes, another contraction would strike down like a lighting bolt through my body. I cringed and held on tightly to the bed rails, as if that was going to help. Nothing helped! Being thirsty and hungry didn’t help either. The last thing I ate was a warm, delicious Cuban sandwich with a café con leche made just the way I like it, light and sweet. I was lucky to have eaten that, because my doctor instructed me not to eat anything before going to the hospital. That was over twelve hours ago! Now, I was only allowed to have ice chips. Who the hell wants to eat ice chips?! I wanted a real meal with a tall, cold glass of anything, but no, I got damn ice chips. The thought of throwing the ice bucket at the nurses ran through my mind over and over again. Asking them if that’s what they wanted to eat after starving for 12 hours. Through out my frustrations, the sound of my daughter’s heartbeat on the monitor calmed me down, and kept me sane. As long as her little heart was beating, she was okay, so I was okay.