A Tale of Woe

The time has come, my children. My eye is open, vision has returned, and I can gaze unflinchingly upon my laptop screen. Come close, little ones, and I will tell you my tale. Listen, and I will tell you the story of the vacation from hell.

When Daniel and I booked our flight to California, we had big dreams. I imagined long, lazy afternoons stretched out on the warm sand, soaking up the California sunshine. There would be virgin pina coladas in abundance, and I would dig a little hole for my belly so I could sunbathe my back comfortably. (My tan had become comically uneven.) Daniel had his fantasies, too. He spoke of going for a dive near a (nonexistent) reef off the coast. We could rent a couple of bikes and ride along the beach at sunrise. Maybe we'd take a little sailboat out one day. And we were both excited about the prospect of getting in some quality shopping at local boutiques and stores we don't have here in Nashville. This vacation was going to be just what we needed. We would cherish the pictures and memories for years to come.

The only comfort I've had since the storms of disappointment first rolled into our sunny babymoon skies has been this little observation: nobody- no matter how much they love you- nobody enjoys reading about the vacation we were anticipating. Nobody cares to hear how relaxing and perfect and dreamy your trip was. It's not that your friends don't want you to have a nice time, it's just that a nice time does not make for very entertaining material. So every time something went wrong, I would just tell myself, "it's okay... this will probably be really funny after the Vicodin kicks in."
Daniel had been suffering from a pretty nasty cold all week before we left. Fortunately, he recovered just a couple of days before we flew out. Unfortunately, I caught it the day before. Our travels on Saturday went pretty smoothly until we were landing at LAX and my ears wouldn't clear. I tried everything. I was frantically chewing gum, plugging my nose and blowing, drinking water... all to no avail. As we touched down, I felt the bubble of pressure from my ears force itself into my sinus cavities. It felt less like a headache, and more like a little demon in my forehead prodding my brain with his trident while laughing maniacally. I knew then that it was too late, and that there was nothing left to do but wail and cry in pain. So that's what I did. We sat on the tarmac for about 20 minutes in the inexplicably hot plane while they dealt with some maintenance issue with the gate. It was a long time to weep in front of strangers. I think everybody was pretty uncomfortable.
That afternoon, while I laid down for a nap in hopes that my ears would clear in my sleep, Daniel went grocery shopping. When he returned, he told me that someone had hit our rental car in the parking lot and left a note. He called the girl and left a message, but she never did call back.
In spite of these things, we were still highly optimistic about the week ahead. The apartment we were staying in was even nicer than we'd expected, and the owner had thought through every detail to make our stay comfortable. She'd even set out a cheese plate, fresh cherries and wine for our arrival. While I couldn't enjoy the wine, I thoroughly enjoyed the snack and we both appreciated such a thoughtful touch. And then there was the climate. There was no air conditioning, but we soon discovered that all we had to do was open the doors and windows and a cool breeze would keep us perfectly comfortable. It was such a refreshing change after the sticky mid-July heat we'd left behind in Nashville. That evening we walked to the beach and Daniel brought his camera. Everything from the plant life to the graffiti was new and beautiful and exciting to us. When we reached the boardwalk on Venice Beach, there were plenty of colorful sights to see. (There was this one guy on stilts with what appeared to be moss covering his body and dreadlocks? Someone dressed as Spiderman? Also, a lot of open drug use. Indeed, "colorful" may have been a bit of an understatement.) We came back to the house for dinner, and we both proclaimed aloud that this week was going to be fantastic, starting the minute my ears cleared.

Sunday, my cold was a little worse, my headache was a little sharper, and my ears were still clogged. I started to worry I may have an ear infection, and decided to go to the doctor on Monday and get it checked out. Hopefully, that would leave enough time to heal before the flight home Thursday.

On Monday we were having lunch at my Aunt and Uncle's house, so I located an urgent care center near their home and decided we'd swing by after lunch, before heading into Hollywood to do some shopping and sight seeing. We had a delightful time with Aunt Merry Lynn and Uncle Steve, who Daniel still hadn't met and whose home I'd never been to. Afterwards, we went to the urgent care as planned only to find that it only became an urgent care clinic after hours? And before that it was... something else, I guess. Anyway, no big deal. We'd just go to Hollywood and have our fun, then come back between 6 and 10 pm to see a doctor.

The first thing we did in Hollywood was go to the Beverly Center, where we'd heard rumor of an H&M with maternity clothes. When we got inside the mall, we went in Bloomingdales to use the restrooms. On our way back out, we spotted an All Saints section in the women's department. We started browsing, and soon a sales person was following us around making suggestions. I went to the dressing room with a lot of flowy tops we thought might work with my bump. I tried on the first top, showed it to Daniel, then started changing into the next. When I went to toss the blouse on the bench in the dressing room, the sales tag, which was made of cardboard and unusually heavy, swung at my face and scratched my left eye.

"DAN-IELLLL!!! HOLY.... GET IN HERE!!! OPEN THE DOOR!"

"What is it? Is it your ear?"

"NOOOOOOHMYYYYGOD!!!!"

I was convinced something was stuck in my eye. I didn't know what- maybe a safety pin or a fighter jet. Whatever it was, it hurt like the dickens, and I needed Daniel to get it out. But when I held my eye open and rolled it around, he couldn't see anything. I wasn't satisfied with his answer until I looked in the mirror myself. I was surprised by what I saw... not only was it not hemorrhaging, there was nothing there. Daniel suggested we go sit at one of the tables around a coffee kiosk we'd seen outside Bloomingdales until my eye felt better. I had a pretty good feeling this wasn't going to blow over in ten minutes, but I agreed. He led me, one eye shut and streaming, through the mall, past a lot of people who I could feel staring at me.

Daniel sat me down at a table, and brought me some napkins for my eye, then went to the counter to order something. While I sat there, there was this one guy sitting alone at another table facing me. I wondered what he was thinking as I sat in front of him, some pregnant lady all red in the face and crying, clutching her eye. I wondered if he had a vague idea of what must have happened. He continued to stare at me, but looked pretty indifferent and unsympathetic.

While Daniel was waiting in line, I tried to open my eye a few times. One time, I held it open for several seconds at a time, and got really excited. I was cured! It was over! Let's go to H&M! I waved at Daniel to get his attention, then opened my eye and animatedly began pointing to it with one hand while waving with the other. Almost as soon as I did this, I blinked and was struck with the worst pain I'd had yet, like a piece of shrapnel from a nearby explosion had plunged into my eye. I screamed and clutched it again, dabbing it with a napkin as the river began flowing anew. The guy at the other table was unimpressed. He clearly thought I was some kind of idiot.

Soon after that, we gave up the ghost and decided to leave the mall and head toward the urgent care so we could be there when it opened. But when we arrived, they turned us away, saying that they were part of a medical group, and you had to be a patient of that medical group to receive treatment there. It all sounded like a bunch of nonsense to me, but I gave up long ago trying to understand the bizarre rules of the medical community. They sent us to an ER across the street.

At the ER I was rudely checked in, rudely questioned about why I’d come to the hospital and rudely asked for insurance information by various personnel. By the time I got to the waiting room, I could no longer disguise my tears as directly related to my injury. And even if I could have done that much, I was sobbing hysterically, so the gig was up.

I feel like I need to step back and make a little disclaimer here: I can handle mean people. I can even laugh when people are mean to me. It can be funny sometimes! But I was having a pretty bad night, and I was in a lot of pain, and I don’t know if y’all have noticed, but my body’s been rather flooded with hormones lately. So yeah, maybe I was a little on edge. The thing is, no one in the waiting room knew any of these things. I just looked like I’d escaped from the psych ward.

When they called me back, I was “helped” by a PA named Jesse. One of the first questions Jesse asked me was whether I was on any medication. I told him I was on my prenatal vitamin, and that I was taking Sudafed, Robitussin, and Tylenol Cold. He looked dumbfounded.

“Have you talked to your OB about taking all of that?”

“That’s what my midwives recommended last time I had a cold, so I just took that again this time. Are any of those bad?”

“That’s just… really a lot of medication to be taking at once when you’re pregnant. What if you had a reaction to one? How would you know which one? Here in the state of California, we just think the baby’s health is as important as the mother’s. But you know, that’s just how we do things…”

I asked what he would suggest I take instead, and he said plain Tylenol. But Jesse the PA wasn’t done upbraiding me yet.

“Do you see an OB? Or are you just seeing your midwife?”

“Well it’s not just one midwife, it’s a clinic with several nurse-midwives who do my regular prenatal checkups, so an OB isn’t really necessary.”

“So you don’t have an OB?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

(Pause)

“That’s just the route I wanted to take.”

(Longer pause)

Okay… (The clear undertone being, “Okay, I guess if you want to kill your baby, that’s your prerogative…”)

Finally, Jesse started addressing the things I actually needed his help with. He looked in my left ear.

“Oh yeah. Full blown ear infection. Looks like it’s gonna burst.”

He prescribed an antibiotic. I tried to get him to advise me about whether it was safe to fly, but he just wished me luck. “Good luck! Hope your eardrum doesn’t burst!” This was not very reassuring.

He then explained that he was going to put some numbing drops in my eye so he could swab it with a dye and look at it under a black light to see if it was scratched. He said he would send me to the waiting room while they prepared the dye.

By the time we got to the waiting room, I was in hysterics again. At first, I felt guilty and ashamed for taking so much cold medication. But soon, it started to dawn on me that this Jesse character was a giant A-hole. He had just treated me like I’d come in and announced, “In Tenn-uh-see, me and the other hill people like to sprinkle rat poison on our Corn Flakes in the mornins. My midwaff says that’s just fine. My baby loves it when I go cliff jumpin’ and do a good belly flop, ‘specially when I get him good ‘n drunk!” He’d suggested that he and the state of California cared more about my baby than I did because I was following the advice of inferior medical personnel who happen to be staffed by Vanderbilt Hospital, thank you very much. I have a lot of faith in my nurse midwives, and this PA was starting to seem like a real ignoramus. What a jackass. I hate him.

This is the frame of mind I was in when he called me back to the examination room. He put a numbing agent in my eye, which made it feel better. Then he stuck a stiff little strip of paper in my eye and started rubbing it around, which did not make it feel better. I have this unusual condition called reflexes, which caused me to flinch a little, and that sure was a problem for Jesse, who was very rude to me about it. I could have punched him in the face.

When he looked at it under the black light, he said, “Oh wow! That’s a deep corneal abrasion, right through your vision center! You may have vision loss!” He sounded super excited about it. Obviously, Daniel had a lot of questions about that, like, “what do you mean, ‘vision loss?’” but Jesse said he couldn’t say, and there was just no way to tell if I’d be blind in that eye until after it healed. I could tell Daniel was pretty concerned, but I wasn’t. I mean, what Doctor breaks that kind of news to someone that way? I had a gut feeling that him celebrating my potential half-blindness and telling me my eardrum was “about to burst” were just textbook examples of bad bedside manner and general douche-baggery.

Before we left the ER, I had to sit in the waiting room one more time. This time I’d been given the numbing agent and could temporarily open my eyes. I saw that there was a small child who had broken his leg, and was not sniveling and making a scene like I did. I also saw that all the other people in the waiting room seemed scared to look at me.

The next day my eye felt worse, and there was some gunk in it which we'd been warned to watch for, so I got scared it was getting infected and we went to an ER that was closer to our apartment. It wasn’t infected, but the doctor there was much nicer, patched my eye for comfort, (Jesse said they don’t do that anymore. Screw Jesse.) and prescribed me some Vicodin. I was wary when he first suggested such a strong painkiller, but as I’d recently been informed that California doctors care about my baby more than I ever could, I took his word for it. (Just kidding. I made him show me in a medical reference book where it says it’s okay for me to take that.)

He referred me to an ophthalmologist nearby and told me to get an appointment for the next day so he could check on it and make sure it was healing properly.

I felt significantly better for the next 12 hours, and we even ventured out for a walk on the beach that night. This was our first outing besides trips to the hospital since I'd maimed myself. My eye was too sensitive to light for me to go outside for long, and I had been walking around with both eyes shut since having my good eye open tugged too much on my other eyelid and caused more pain. The patch remedied both of these problems, and the painkiller made me feel up to enjoying an experience like a walk on the beach.

My eyepatch. I think I thought I was smiling.

The next day I went to the ophthalmologist as instructed, and he patched my eye again (I’d been told to take the first one off that morning) then we returned to the scene of the accident so we could get me some freaking maternity clothes. I started feeling kind of queasy on the way to the mall, and thought the Vicodin must be making me carsick. When we got there we found out that that H&M didn’t even have maternity clothes. But you know where they did have them? In Hawthorne, the town we’d just come from 45 minutes away. So we drove back to Hawthorne in the middle of rush hour. And I got some dang maternity clothes. When we were done shopping, I wasn’t feeling great, and my eye patch had come undone in the store. Daniel suggested we go out to dinner since it was our last night in town, so we drove to Santa Monica and to a restaurant Daniel had found with good reviews. When we got there, I felt nauseated, but after we parked the car and sat still for a while and I thought I was going to be okay.

Umm, long story short, I ordered a $30 dish, took two bites of it, and ran to the bathroom to vomit. So we went home.

Obviously, I stopped taking the Vicoden after that, so the little demon came back and started stabbing my brain again.

The next morning we (read "Daniel") packed our things, then we went back to the ophthalmologist before our flight home because for some reason the doctor really wanted to look at it one more time. I just want to point out that this makes four consecutive days out of the five days we spent in LA that we were in an ER or doctor’s office. I was still feeling sick, so I told the doctor when I got there that I thought I was having a reaction to the Vicoden and asked if there was anything else I could take for pain. He said that really any other narcotic was going to do the same thing, and my best bet at that point was to just take Tylenol and wait it out. I was in a lot of pain, and I was going to be flying with a double ear infection to top it off. I knew I had a hard day ahead of me. I just didn’t know how hard.

Daniel and I were on way to the airport having a conversation to the effect of, “Thank God we survived this trip! And we're still married!” when he realized we had the address to the wrong rental car location and decided to pull over and figure out where the heck we were going. When he attempted to pull into a nearby gas station, he sideswiped another vehicle.

In this moment of crisis, when we needed to bust out our problem solving skills and do our best to wrap it up and make our flight, my contribution was to burst into tears on impact. Literally. The very millisecond that I felt the car hit something, the floodgates opened, just like that. I was actually kind of surprised by how readymade and accessible this meltdown was. The whole time Daniel stood outside my window exchanging phone numbers and insurance information with the other driver, I just sat there and sobbed my way through a box of tissues like a ninny. The other driver seemed to be making a concerted effort not to look at me, and I felt the same way I’d felt in the waiting room and at that coffee kiosk. I knew this guy was wondering what the heck was wrong with me. I didn’t want to personally explain myself to him just then and tell him what my week had been like and how much pain I was in and how pregnant I was, but I did wish there was a sign over my head that would explain it for me. I just felt like he couldn’t possibly be giving me enough credit.

After Daniel finished handling all the wreck business, we went to the rental place to return the car. I was starting to feel a wave of nausea coming on. We had to file an incident report, and we were trying to do it before the next shuttle to the airport departed. I felt like we were on the Amazing Race. We turned in our form and keys just in time to board the bus. The doors shut and the bus started moving, and then… I puked. I held it in my mouth and ran to the front of the moving shuttle while Daniel yelled, “Let her out! Let her out!” The driver stopped and I ran out to the bushes and continued to barf for a couple of minutes, with this whole busload of people watching me. When I was finished the driver, much to my surprise, let me back on the bus and we headed to the airport.

When we got there, Daniel literally sprinted to check us in for our flight, and our tickets printed out with the words “seat request” on them. We went to check our bags, and there was a lady looking at people’s tickets before letting them in line. When we gave her ours, she looked at her watch and said…. “Ohhhhh. It looks like you’re not going to make it.” The impression we got was that had we been five minutes earlier, she would have let us go. Dang bus puke.

A hundred dollars later, we were assigned to a different flight departing not long after our original flight time. Soon we boarded a plane, where we sat in front of the two most ill-behaved boys in the United States. They sat directly behind Daniel and me, kicking our seats with vigor and screaming things like, “Why you put ice on my butt?” and “HE SPIT IN MY FACE!” Their mother was not much quieter than them, and spoke about fifty decibels louder than anyone else on the plane. Sometimes, she would raise her already booming voice to chide "I will NEVER travel with you again! Never! Did you enjoy this trip?! GOOD! NEVER AGAIN!!!” Needless to say, my ears and headache were in great shape after being jolted around in my seat for five hours in front of this charming family.

One good thing about a really bad vacation is that it makes your own home feel like paradise. I’m still recovering from the cold, but my eye has been feeling much better for the past few days, my vision is getting clearer, and I’m not throwing up anymore. Saturday after we got back, my friends threw me a shower where I saw a lot of people I love who were so kind to me, and none of whom looked at me like I was crazy, not even once. Daniel had a wedding this weekend so he left Nashville about eight hours after we landed here, but he’s back now, and everything can just go back to normal. Now we can put this vacation behind us, and pretend it never happened.