Trauma and the odds

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It sounds like a good band name, doesn’t it? Trauma and The Odds and their new hit single ‘Will It Be Me?’ It’s a catchy tune. Gets in your head. Bit of a menacing bass line. A real ear worm.

In November, I found a lump in my breast.

I called the walk-in clinic right away and even though they have a ridiculous system of phone consults and a huge waitlist, they saw me pretty quickly. The doctor asked lots of questions and I answered cheerfully. No pain! No other changes! No weight loss! He gave me a requisition for a mammogram and ultrasound, which I tucked into my wallet and mostly forgot about. Sometimes a little sliver of worry struck out at me - February 16 seemed a long time to wait, didn't it? Must be confirmation I had nothing to worry about, I would think, and go on with my days, busy, occupied, not thinking of the lump and what it could be, refusing to consider what it might mean.

The day of the mammogram and ultrasound arrives and I drive down to one of two huge medical buildings on Broadway. My appointment is in the building across the street from the one with all the obstetricians, where I spent much of 2011 to 2013, traipsing in and out of different doctors’ offices, waiting for different tests, at different stages of pregnancy and loss. This building is the one I spent my mid-20s in, seeing gynaecologists for a problem that seemed serious and scary until I started losing pregnancies left, right and centre and abnormal paps felt like a walk in the park.

I’ve played the odds before. The irregular paps were a series of comical affairs until I ended up in the hospital, hemorrhaging. A number of visits to the doctor’s office for minor procedures, each time the doctor saying, ‘99% of patients are done after this and don’t need another treatment.’ My partner and I thought it was funny, how I kept being the 1%. Even when I ended up in hospital for side effects that are ‘exceedingly rare’, we brushed ourselves off, a little shaken but still chipper, still laughing. Still believing, miraculously it seems to me now, in my unquestionable good health and luck. Despite the odds.

The odds struck again in pregnancy. Those of you reading here will know: how it feels to hear the odds they give you of another loss. After that first miscarriage, they told me, ‘Well, you know, at your age, the odds of miscarrying are pretty high.’ A bit of a ‘tsk! tsk!’ present in their voices that I hadn’t heard til then. But then it was all, ‘most people go on to have a healthy pregnancy after miscarriage. There’s nothing to worry about.’ They were so brisk and clinical, I felt silly for worrying. Another miscarriage. Pregnancy after two miscarriages, and the odds are definitely in your favour….aren’t they? ‘You’ve made it past the first trimester. The odds are firmly in your favour now. You should relax.’ I held my breath.

On February 16, I ride the elevator to the fifth floor, read calmly in a busy waiting room, change into a gown and carry my things around in a shopping bag. I am doing just fine. Until the ultrasound room. I lie down on my back and the technician begins the slow, cold glide of the wand over my skin. I look at the screen and remember seeing babies there. Alive. Dead. Not dead yet. I see the lump on the screen. A black spot, clearly visible. Of course, I don't know how to read an ultrasound. I know that. But I feel the room change. There's a kind of quiet that happens when the news in these rooms is not great. The technician asks me to roll on my side. Serious. They always are, right? But I've been in enough of these rooms to recognize it. The dark anticipatory silence; the subtle shift of anticipation, good news or bad.

The technician asks me to wait when she’s done. Her supervisor might want more images, she says. My stomach clenches. Her supervisor arrives and asks me to follow her into another room. She opens the door to The Small Room. For a moment, I feel lightheaded. I nearly swoon. Those of you reading here will know: The Small Room is never for good news.

There is a lump, she says. (I know. I know.) We don’t know what it is yet. (I know. I know.) We will need to do a biopsy - and then, rushing to get this part out a little - the odds are good. (The odds. The odds!) So many of these come back benign. (Right. The odds.) We just need to check. (The fucking odds.)

I remember riding in the back of a cab on that bitter cold night, one hand clenching the door to steady myself as the driver raced through downtown, not because he was worried about me but so he could get rid of me, and one hand clenched to my stomach, willing her to move. The odds of losing a baby at this stage are so low. So low, I repeated. She’ll be ok. The odds are in our favour. Despite the evidence of stillness against my hand. Despite the hours of no movement. The odds, the odds: hang on to the odds.

I remember being rushed back to a bed in admitting when I said I hadn’t felt the baby move since before lunch. (What an idiot I am. I still can’t write that sentence without wondering how I could have left it so long. It was the odds. The fucking odds.) I remember the silence. The slow, cold glide of the wand over my skin, and the silence. (The odds! The odds! I silently screamed.) I remember the truly guttural moan, an animal sound I realized was coming from me when the obstetrician who was finally called in confirmed it herself. Your baby is gone.

The odds.

They got you again.

February 16. Grey, cold, a bitter day. Eleven years, 1 month and 4 days since she died. I stand blinking in the flat white light on the street, wondering if it will rain. My eyes flicker to the building across the street again. So many memories. My hands are shaking a little, but I retrieve the keys from my bag, find my car. As I’m driving out of the parking lot, Fun’s ‘We Are Young,’ comes on the radio and I laugh. I remember this song from the year she died. Some grim sense of joyless irony in belting it out by myself in the car. ‘Let’s set the night on fire. We can burn brighter. Than the suu-uuun.’

The fucking odds. ‘Only 20% of biopsies come back cancerous,’ I read on my phone in the elevator down to the car. That’s a lot higher than the 1 in 175 babies that are stillborn each year. And anyway, those of you reading here will know: it’s not the numbers that matter anymore. Now that it’s been you, you know it’s always someone, that there’s a person behind those numbers, and hey, why shouldn’t it be you? I feel like I was trained, somehow, to imagine that it would always be someone else, that there was no reason it would be me. I think in 2023 we call that toxic positivity. Now I know: why wouldn’t it be me?

Ah, the odds.

Once, like in the song on my radio singing me home, I was young. Now, I steel myself, wrap this old trauma around me like a shield. Like a warm blanket, too. Thinking about the odds, driving away from the cursed hush of the ultrasound room, flashing in and out of time, I think about that little baby girl the odds took from me. I imagine her in another universe, laughing in a bar with her friends, beautiful young people having fun. ‘Tonight, we are young’ they sing out together, arms around each other, in a timeline where the odds were in her favour. She smiles up at the ceiling, eyes closed, arms around her friends, and I steady myself for the next round of waiting.

How do you feel about the odds now?