Full Stop: A Birth and Dying Story

The blood won’t stop. It’s beginning to pool on the bathroom floor beneath her, slowly seeping into the grout. Her husband, Marshall crouches close, a phone pressed against his ear, “She won’t wake up,” he clamors. “The blood isn’t stopping and she won’t wake up!”

Marshall’s wife, Loi, is hemorrhaging - bleeding out on their bathroom floor.

And it all started with Buffalo Wild Wings.

My favorite picture of Loi is one that I keep meaning to post on my bulletin board for my own inspiration. Loi, an interior decorator, singer/songwriter and blogger, posted it on Instagram to announce her new bi-monthly newsletter. In the photo she’s eight months pregnant; her dark curly hair is piled on top of her head, black-framed cat-eyed glasses rest on her face. She has one swollen foot perched on her white brick fireplace and she’s pretending to shred her acoustic guitar. Her face is scrunched up in a smirk, eyes staring straight into the lens. Huge block letters are written across the photo, “CAN’T STOP WON’T STOP.” It was a good plan. But then Loi nearly died on the floor of her bathroom. It turns out that sometimes stopping is your only choice.

The birth is important to Loi. And that’s where she starts. “My pregnancy was pretty much a breeze,” she tells me as we sit in the living room of her College Park, Florida home. Loi and I have known each other for years, friends through Marshall who I grew up with, and so we’re comfortable as we sip tea on the couch and she explains, “I didn’t go to the doctor that much. I really didn’t have anything going on.” Loi’s body began to change with her pregnancy of course, but it continued to be the same healthy body it had always been – the body that strums her guitar and produces her strong and beautiful voice; the body that lifts and moves furniture as she decorates homes; the body that travels the world; that gardens in the backyard, that embraces the people she loved. And so as she planned the birth of her child, she planned with this in mind. She could rely on her body. “People have been having vaginal births forever,” she says. “I’m healthy. I’m prepared for it.”

Loi’s quiet for a moment, sipping her tea, “It’s not that I was like, Oh, if you do a hospital birth you’re a bad person.” But a hospital just didn’t feel right for Loi. She explains, “I have a natural tendency to not trust medical institutions.” She describes going to the hospital for her sister’s births, “I just didn’t like the feel of it, all the rules. I wanted to be in an environment where I didn’t have to feel so tense, or distrusting, or...worried the whole time.” Loi heard so many terrible stories in the news about hospitals and things going wrong. And as a black woman, it was hard to escape the staggering statistics when it comes to maternal health and race in this country. Black women are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy related causes than white women. Loi doesn’t remember this particular statistic influencing her decision, but she assumes she must have heard it, along with the many other negative statistics and stories. Loi didn’t want that for herself. She decided to have her baby outside of this atmosphere. “My thought was, I’ll have a midwife, a Nurse Practitioner, I will have a relationship with them by that time so I’ll feel comfortable with them. And I won’t just be in the hospital with a million different doctors coming in. And so many different cooks in the kitchen. I don’t want that. I want people I trust, and people I love around me.” And so Lucy’s birth was very carefully planned. It was to be a home birth, in the very living room where we sit on the couch with our tea. Certified midwives, a peaceful environment, and a blow-up pool, for a water birth.

“It’s funny,” she says, “The whole time during pregnancy you say, things don’t go as planned, like be prepared…But, I never in my mind doubted that I was going to have the home birth. I never thought that I would be going to the hospital.” Loi’s body had always been something she could rely on. She could always trust herself. “And then... Buffalo Wild Wings. I got the call. Yeah, so that was kind of astonishing.”  

Loi was with Marshall at that loud, family-friendly restaurant, tucking into a pregnant woman’s size platter of wings when the phone rang. Loi had just endured a series of tests for her and the baby, and the results were in. The doctor didn’t like the test results, Loi was two weeks overdue.  The baby had to come out. At the hospital. Now.

No home birth.

No blow-up pool.

No familiar faces.

Inducing labor was her only option.

Her first response? “I’m going to finish my wings before I go to the hospital. Thank you VERY much!” When things begin to spin out of control, we do what we can to hold center.

And sometimes that involves Ranch dressing.

They went back home to gather their things. Loi’s voice cracks as she describes packing her bag and leaving home to have the baby, “Man.” she remembers thinking. “This is not how I wanted it to go.”

Loi begins to cry as we sit on the couch together and she explains these moments to me, “It’s crazy thinking about it again. The emotions...” Loi had everything under control, a plan for this phase of her and her baby’s health. As Loi shares her story two reflections become clear. She is very grateful for the care that she received at the hospital. And she wonders how things would have turned out if they had never gone to the hospital in the first place.

When Loi walked into the hospital, she held a very deep trust in her body and her health. Almost from the get-go that calm confidence was tested, “Allll these people came in, We can’t find the baby’s heartbeat! For one second they couldn’t find it and they’re freaking out.” Loi was sure that the baby was fine, “Babies move, just relax, wait a minute…try to figure it out…It was like they were waiting for any little thing to go wrong. But I mean…I guess that’s what hospitals are for.”

And indeed, things began to go wrong very quickly.

I emailed Marshall to ask him about the experience and he explains to me what he has learned to be a classic cycle of inducing labor, “You do one thing and it helps with an issue, but then it creates another issue.” Loi’s was given medication to start the labor process. Her blood pressure was high, and so she was given medication to lower it. Her blood pressure dropped to a normal level, but then it kept dropping, so low that her heart almost stopped.

Marshall describes what happened next, “They pull this little cord and like ten people come rushing in.” They gave Loi medication and managed to bring her back around. “It was wild,” Marshall remembers.

Loi started her labor and delivery by her heart almost stopping in a hospital room. She then came back around, took a deep breath and labored for almost 24 hours. “I was pushing and everyone was like, You’re doing a great job!” But the labor went on. And on. And on. Loi finally accepted an epidural. Her body was so tired she could barely keep still for the needle.

Eventually a hospital midwife came in and broke the news, “I know you want to do this but the odds are against you.”

The hospital was recommending a C-section.  Loi had been laboring for a very long time and the baby’s heart rate was dropping when she pushed.

In this moment Loi was given a choice. She could continue to labor and end up in what the hospital described as a likely inevitable emergency C-section. Or she could elect to have a C-section now, with Marshall in the room. I look at her, “That feels like not a choice.”

Loi disagrees. It was a choice. A small choice, not the options she wanted. But it was still a choice. Looking back she sometimes questions if they were over-monitoring her every move, over-analyzing every heartbeat. Maybe if she chose to labor longer it would have worked out. But Loi’s ability to rely on herself, trust her intuition and body, had in many ways been taken from her. The hospital was relying on its own forms of monitoring her and the baby, which were certainly more scientific. Loi was weakened by her blood pressure issues, by 24-hours of labor, by an epidural that confined her to her bed. Loi had to trust the hospital. “I’m thankful,” she tells me. “I feel like they did what they could…She had to come out.” Loi chose the C-section.

Loi’s body was now entirely in the hospital’s hands.

“I remember them taking her out,” she describes. She remembers thinking, “This is a miracle too. This would have never happened years ago. Praise the Lord! I can be alive to see my baby. Even though it wasn’t what I wanted, it was still a miracle.”

Loi put her trust in the hospital and they kept her and her baby safe.

But they had also done something terribly wrong.

~

“I started bleeding in the morning,” she describes. It was early, 5am, six weeks after Lucy’s birth. The world was still dark outside Loi’s window; Marshall was lying in bed next to her, Lucy sleeping soundly in the room next door. It was a lot of blood. Too much. Soaking through pads, filling the toilet. Loi walked back and forth to the bathroom, deliberating on what she should do.

But then the bleeding stopped. The best thing, she decided, would be to wait a few hours until her midwife’s office opened and give them a call. This could wait. She lay back on the bed and tried to get a few more hours of precious new-mom rest before it was time to feed the baby again.

Lucy’s cries rang out around 7am, waking Loi from a fitful sleep. Marshall fetched Lucy from her bassinet and brought her into the bedroom, swaddled in a blanket and ready to nurse. Loi sat up against the pillows in bed and held Lucy close to feed her. Almost immediately blood began to rush from Loi’s body. “Marshall, take her. I’m bleeding.” She raced to the bathroom.

Marshall describes the strange, frantic, in-between moment when he was trying to figure out how many towels to put down on the seat for the ride to the hospital. Every emergency has this moment. The small detail you feel like you need to get right, the decision you just can’t seem to make. He knew they needed to go to the hospital, he knew it was a lot of blood, but it wasn’t until Marshall was catching Loi as she passed out onto the bathroom floor that he realized it was too late. Marshall grabbed a laundry hamper filled with clothes from the hallway and nestled Lucy inside of it, praying she would be safe.

A frantic 911 call and a wife who won’t wake up. “How about now?” the operator kept asking.

“Still no!” he responded.

“Make sure she’s lying flat.” She wasn’t. Bathrooms are only so big, and Loi was propped up against the tub in a sitting position, head lolled to the side. “She needs to be lying flat,” the operator insisted. Lucy crying from the laundry hamper in the hall, the emergency operator in his ear, Marshall gently maneuvered Loi all the way to the ground.

“I woke up to him on the phone with 911 saying she’s awake. And just...the look in his eyes,” Loi tears up explaining the desperation and terror she could see there. “It was so sad.”

Loi was losing blood, fast. She could feel it draining from her body, feel herself coming in and out. The sound of an ambulance, paramedics navigating her out of the bathroom and narrow hallway, glimpsing her baby as she was carried out on the gurney she had one heartbreaking thought, “Man, I really wanted to see Lucy grow up.”

And then, bloody and passing in and out of awareness she spotted her neighbors, frozen by their cars on their way to work, watching her being loaded into the ambulance. All of a sudden an awkward and sarcastic inner voice spoke up, “Well, isn’t this embarrassing?” it said.“Didn’t expect this on a Tuesday Morning, didya?” Loi laughs, “These are the things you think about. Like regular normal thoughts - with sarcasm! And those could have been my last thoughts.”

She bumped along in the ambulance and she knew it for sure, “This is the last moment of my life. This is it.”

Back at the house Marshall rescued Lucy from her hamper, strapped her into the car seat and followed the ambulance. Lucy stayed safe in her car seat, by Marshall’s side, as they rushed into the emergency room in time to see doctors and nurses converge onto Loi. The medical team attempted to insert a central line into Loi’s neck, ran IVs through her arms and hands, transfused two liters of blood, and worked to stop the bleeding. Finally an emergency procedure stopped the hemorrhage and discovered its cause: the hospital that performed the C-section for Lucy’s birth left placenta behind in Loi’s uterus, eventually tearing away and causing the hemorrhage.

Loi’s mistrust in the healthcare system had proven justified.

But as I sit and listen to her story, I don’t hear anger.

“I’m alive. I came out of the C-section, out of the hemorrhaging…and I don’t know…I do feel grateful that I’m still here. I came out alive.”

I flew down and stayed with Loi and Lucy about a month after the hemorrhage. Marshall had to be away for a couple days on a business trip, and she wasn’t entirely comfortable being alone yet. We watched Broad City, ate Indian food, and I tried to help with the exhausting three-hour cycle that is motherhood: feed, change, sleep, feed, change, sleep. Loi was moving slowly towards healing. She had picked up her guitar again, was taking walks with Lucy around the park by their house. And I was in awe of her. In awe of what a body is capable of, of what it can go through and claw its way back from. In awe of what it could create.

Lucy was thoughtfully considering rolling over and Loi and I spent time with her on the floor of the living room, offering words of encouragement and a few bribes. I remember Loi gesturing towards inches thick piles of hospital bills on the dining room table and explaining that she and Marshall just couldn’t bring themselves to open them yet. It was still too much to handle. They would eventually open them of course. They would open them and experience new trauma, discovering that their insurance wouldn’t cover the hemorrhage hospital visit. Hours upon hours of phone calls changed nothing. Marshall and Loi were $40,000 in debt.

“All this stuff is stacking and stacking and stacking against you,” Loi says. “Just because your body did something that you didn’t ask it to do.”

“The hardest part was just being let down by my body,” Loi tells me. “The doctors let me down,” she admits. The insurance companies didn’t care, the hospital billing departments were mostly indifferent. But these stories were not new to her, she was disappointed, at moments surprised  – but not shocked. What brought her to tears as she told her story were not the moments when the medical system betrayed her trust, but when her body – the healthy body she had relied on for so long – didn’t hold up to the expectations she had set upon it. The ultimate betrayal for her, the ultimate heartbreak, came from within. Loi never expected much from the healthcare system. But she expected everything from herself, as we so often do.  

Loi tells me that every so often she wonders if she should be a totally different person now that she almost died. Loi clung to life, her very own blood fleeing as she pondered the life she might be losing. Should she have woken up and from then on lived every moment to its fullest? There certainly are countless stories with that narrative. “But you can’t live life to the fullest with a six-week-old baby,” she explains. “You have to just take care of your baby. You’re still just in survival mode.”

It turns out that when you almost die - when you almost bleed to death on your bathroom floor – a lot of different things happen, and most of them aren’t what you think they may be. Loi almost died two years ago. And it was heartbreaking, embarrassing, and fucking expensive. It was inconvenient, it was infuriating, it was terrifying – and she doesn’t remember an awful lot of it. What near-death/90-minutes in heaven book does that go into? Do any of those books discuss insurance costs?

Loi posted a picture on her Instagram not long after she was finally home for good. It’s taken from above; a beautiful succulent in a yellow pot, sage green leaves sprouting through tiny brown pebbles. A miniature black bull has been placed among the green, a Ferdinand resting beneath the tree, smelling the flowers. The caption is a Yoko Ono quote: “There’s a long life ahead of you, and it’s going to be beautiful, as long as you keep loving and hugging each other.” Her guitar-shredding picture is only a few pictures behind it on her Instagram feed, and the mood couldn’t be more different. “Can’t stop, won’t stop.” In the moments following that guitar picture - in the moments that started with Buffalo Wild Wings – there has been lots of stopping. Loi has had to take life very slow. “I think that is in and of itself a lesson maybe,” she says. “Through the whole thing, you have to live life slower. That’s an okay thing to do. You don’t have to make everything productive all the time. Just slowing down. I’m still struggling with that.

Lucy is two now. She has dark curly hair and long eyelashes and she’s a little bit shy. But if you’re lucky and sit a while, she’ll teach you an awful lot about dinosaurs, sing you a song, help you color. And Loi is so grateful for her and for everything that was done to keep both of them safe. “She’s here, she’s healthy, I’m still here… We’re living a slow life and that’s okay.”