Guest post written by author Nicole Bokat
Nicole Bokat is the author of the novels Redeeming Eve, What Matters Most, and The Happiness Thief. Redeeming Eve was nominated for both the Hemingway Foundation/PEN award and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction. She’s also published The Novels of Margaret Drabble: “this Freudian family nexus,” She received her PhD from New York University and has taught at NYU, Hunter College, and The New School. Her essays and articles have appeared in the New York Times, Parents magazine, The Forward, and More.com. She lives with her husband in NJ and has two grown sons. Find her online at Nicole Bokat.
“You’re ok,” my husband repeated as he held me steady.
Wailing on the DC sidewalk, I was aware of Jay’s embarrassment. He wasn’t a fan of public drama other than on Netflix police procedurals. Ha! Neither was I.
As much as I wanted to keep quiet, stand up, and slink away, my body wasn’t complying. My nose bled profusely, and the sting was a shock. My older son, who we drove from NJ to visit, ran into the pharmacy nearby to buy antibiotic cream and bandages.
A man pulled up in his car. “Do you want me to call an ambulance?” he asked.
I shook my head. Jay thanked him.
A woman approached us with a washcloth filled with ice. She worked in the restaurant across the street and had witnessed a similar accident the previous night.
I’d tripped, in the dark, over a motorized scooter, that’s all. But I’d landed smack on my face, using my left arm to brace the fall. Both my hand and neck ached, and red patches bloomed under my eyes. My nose swelled. Since I was able to walk back to the nearby hotel, we figured I didn’t need medical attention. By the time, we’d returned to our room, I’d decided on an ER visit (Natasha Richardson’s freak skiing accident, and subsequent death, had popped into my mind.)
Waiting for the results of my c-scan—which would come back normal—I thought about Natalie Greene, the heroine of my new novel, The Happiness Thief. Her life was changed irrevocably by a tragic car crash in which her mother died and she suffered a temporary brain injury. When writing it, I used reactions to various traumatic events in my own life—a spike in blood pressure, a jittering pulse, disorientation—in order to inhabit my character’s worst moments.
Thinking about this mishap led me to recall others, ones I’d drawn from when imagining Natalie’s ordeals: first and foremost was my second son’s birth. Having grueling back labor with my first boy—the worst pain I’d ever felt—I was dreading labor four years later. This time around, my water broke. Off my husband and I went to the hospital, where we were instructed to wait out the night at home.
I was unable to sleep for the remainder of the night. In the morning, when I returned to the hospital, my cervix wasn’t cooperating. My obstetrician applied a gel to it in order to induce dilation and, his hand to my knee, reassured that the process would be a while. He dashed out across the street to get a sandwich. Within minutes, I was in agony from continuous contractions. Years later, I looked up this unfortunate complication of induction; it’s called uterine hyperstimulation.
Everyone says that women are blessed with the ability to forget childbirth—in order to get pregnant again. While, like Natalie, my memories of what happened next are scattershot, my body kept the score. What I can recall is my eyes were squeezed to a slit, my breath was a moan, the nurse scurried to check my vitals, to duck in and out of my room, to explain that the baby was in distress and my doctor was required in order to take the next step. Then, the frantic transport to the ER, the quick explanation that there was no time to waste, the mask over my mouth despite my cries of fear. I craved a pause to comprehend my fate, to gather myself in preparation; but that’s exactly what an emergency excludes. It swooped me up in its arms, threatening to drop me to my death.
My next moment of clarity: a semi-conscious state, as if in a coma or underwater. Panicked, I tried to paddle to the surface, to break free to the air. I heard my father’s voice. The struggle to wake up was more frightening than the contractions.
Afterwards came the painkillers for the searing ache in my abdomen— sliced open horizontally and stapled shut as one would a cardboard package. Unable to see my child in the ICU, I was certain he hadn’t survived, that I was being duped.
But, within 48 hours, I was discharged with my son. On the car ride to our house, I wept from a brew of hormones, narcotic withdrawal, and exhaustion.
I put it behind me, stored away a near-tragedy that ended in a hard-won triumph: a healthy, beautiful son. I never thought that trauma might piggyback onto a new one and certainly not with such specificity. But five years later, my father died in the same hospital. He’d been battling an aggressive cancer for eight months, but his decline came so quickly—in a matter of weeks—that my last glimpses of him were a shock. From winter to spring, he shrank from a young-looking, fit 67-year-old, to one of our relatives who’d starved in Königsberg or Vilna during the Holocaust.
The terror I’d managed to suppress after my emergency C-section and the long recovery was now reawakened. My final sight of my dad was of his brittle arm, raised to hold onto a metal pole from which his IV hung, to life itself, as he was being wheeled into the room where he’d spend his last hours.
I’d never heard the term Medical PTSD. No one, not the social worker or the various specialists, or even the psychiatrist I visited to cope with my grief, mentioned this disorder. No one suspected that my dad’s swift decline and my visitation to that same ER had triggered my panic when it came to diagnostic procedures of all kinds—from skin biopsies to mammograms to EKGs. Not one person took inventory of my childbirth history. Why would they? I had two healthy sons. How they’d entered the world, the toll each delivery had on me, the imprint they made, was never discussed.
It took longer than it should have to calm down my system. But, eventually, writing about the happiness industry caused a reckoning in me. Digging into the perilous moments, figuring out what they meant, could be a way out of the heartbreak and fear that the pressure to be positive could never achieve. These experiences could be put to use as I created my character, Natalie, who’d lived through her own devastation. Few people can escape great suffering, but it’s how we process it, what we do with it, that matters. And for me, that meant turning my anguish into another woman’s narrative, imbuing her with the emotional truth of my memories. Helping Natalie overcome her greatest obstacles was a way to mend myself.
The DC fall, the broken nose, and, more recently, vertigo that landed me on the bathroom floor and then in an ambulance for, yes, another brain scan, the results “normal”—all of these were fodder, were material. “It’s from an inner ear infection,” the ENT pronounced. “Here’s what it is. Write this down.”
So, I did. Just not exactly the way he meant.
