A Poet Saved My Life
By: Maria Gregoriou
Tags: Birth, Poetry, Slam Poetry, Ultrasound, Pregnancy

I lay in the doctor’s office. My husband’s two hands grasp my right as my other hand is limp, next to my dictated, resting body. The doctor is to my left. My belly exposed, its content reflecting slight movement on a screen. The doctor introduces an injection first. I look away. Then he inserts a long needle into the same hole he had just made — I am told later — just next to my bellybutton. He extracts liquid, pinkie liquid with what looks like to be swimming bits of me inside. I feel nothing, physically that is. I see nothing. My eyes set on the air condition unit. I anlayse it. It must be old. It is white, big, how does it manage to hang there like that over the years? I count the holes in the grid, one, two, three… twenty, fifty… I lose count, I am counting on autopilot. I imagine the person who installed it, I think about the person who will switch it on for the first time when the summer sets in.

My eyes fall on my husband’s eyes for a second. He smiles at me, he does not take his eyes away from what the doctor is doing. His eyes, filled with tears. I tell him to look away, to look at me, to keep his eyes on mine, to concentrate on me. Again he was the one who had to carry our pain as I had to go through the physical procedure. It was not fair. I could not look. If I had and things turned out for the worst, I would play the same scene again and again in my head. It was not fair. The last two times scared him. The last two times when things did not progress so far and hearts stopped beating. The first scared him away, I broke down. The second, he was a trembling rock with a support system I had built around him. I was seemingly cool. Taking it in my stride — at night I did not sleep, I blamed whoever and whatever I could think of — it was not fair.

This time things had not stopped. I had made it to blood tests, I had made it to the size of a pear, I had made it to clear showing limbs, counting fingers and toes. We deserved to have one normal, simple run up to our joint her. We deserved a good run, a good result, and a glowing finish line.

I lay there. My hand in my husband’s two. A doctor drawing liquid from my belly and my mind on analysing the air-conditioning unit and all along the way the words ‘calm down, breathe, breathe’ were playing in my mind and were on the tip of my tongue. The words a poet had performed a few nights before. At a slam poetry competition — he won of course — which I also tried to read at, but with not very much success. I took part to get out of my own head. To progress back to when I used to read in public. To a time when I found myself. To a time when it was just me alone in the world.

He never knew it, he didn’t know it, even when I told him I really enjoyed what he had written and performed, that in that moment, a few days later, he would save my life with his words, save my sanity and keep me calm during — what I had hoped — the last time my trip to becoming a mother again would be in question.

I breathed, I breathed. Poetry has always helped me understand the world, people and find reasons. This was the first time poetry — spoken and acted — stopped me from falling apart. This was the first time that the force of words calmed me down enough to get through what we had to go through to find the answers and come to the conclusion that we had a normal situation to live through.

A poet saved my life. A poet’s words still echo in my mind as we continue on our journey to giving our son a sister.