This post is for Echo, who misses my creative lobbing of F-bombs.
I’ve heard the argument that swearing is dumb language and that it is better to use more complex vocabulary to describe what you mean. I know there are people over the years who have refused to read my blog because of my enthusiastic passion for this word. I forgive them, and I bid them godspeed.
Because there is nothing in the world quite so satisfying, theraputic, redemptive, as a well-placed F-bomb.
Layered vocabulary, prose poetic in its complexity is all well and fine in its place. But the F-bomb has its own lyricism, it’s own very important place in the world, and Echo is right that I have not made adequate use of it lately.
Hence this story:
I did not quite leave the hospital AMA (Against Medical Advice) after Eden’s birth, but it was awfully close. Eden was losing weight rapidly and the hospital wanted her to start taking lots of formula. The pressure was no longer polite, and the hospital pediatrician staged an intervention with me, even calling Dr. Button without informing me.
At that point, Eden was not yet sick. She was losing weight as my other babies had — but like them, she had started out large. She was 48 hours old and weighed seven pounds. To me, it did not seem like an emergency that warranted taking away breastfeeding.
The intervention put me in an adversarial relationship with the hospital, so it was time to bail.
I actually cleared pretty easily — the on-call OB checked my incision, did a quick check of my vitals, shook her head that I was nuts but agreed that I could go.
Eden was harder — I agreed instantaneously to a long list of conditions and executed them, rapid-fire. I gave an ounce of formula. I scheduled daily visits with the on-call pediatrician from Dr. Button’s practice. I met with a lactation consultant, bought a high-end pump.
I scheduled a meeting with a visiting nurse of the hospital’s choosing. She would remove my staples and examine Eden. (I had had staples because the delivery was complicated and they wanted to be able to get back in quickly if they had to.)
Three hours after the intervention, we left. The staff was so mad at me they didn’t even give me my goody bag. (Ironic, really, when you consider those things are packed with free formula.)
I was happy to be in my own bed, naked baby beside me, ordering takeout and watching Spring bloom outside my window.
But that “basically-AMA” followed me. Eden’s file was full of notes about my refusing to follow medical advice. The pediatricians I faithfully saw were mad at me before they opened the exam-room door: I was the Difficult One.
By the third day, the third hostile pediatrician, they broke me.
“She’s gaining, right?” I asked.
“She’s not gaining enough,” Dr. Nasty answered.
“But she’s ganing,” I said. “She’s just five days old. She weighs 7 pounds and change.”
“She weighs almost a pound less than she did at birth.”
“What are the health implications of that? What is it that we’re afraid is going to happen?”
“The fear is that you don’t have enough milk and you are starving her.”
Oh. Is that all.
I went home miserable. I hurt all over and I felt guilty, misunderstood, anxious. I wrapped myself around my baby and went to sleep.
“Liz, she’s here,” Cute Husband said.
“Who?” I asked.
“Visiting nurse.”
Ohmahgawd I forgot about her.
The Enemy was inbound, the minion of Dr. Nasty, come to scold me in my own sanctum. I looked around the room for, like, wildly flung panties or mislaid diapers or other evidence of my delinquency.
Too late.
“Hi,” said a woman in the doorway.
She was gray and short, round, wrinkled. She smelled of cigarettes and wore old Nikes under her scrubs.
“All right, let’s have you lay out heya,” she said, in a thick Boston accent. She was a grandmother, she said. From Brockton. She did the visiting nurse gig a few days a week, took care of the grandkids the others.
I lifted my shirt and she stood over me, brandishing pliers.
“It’s been a while since I did this,” she said. I tried not to think that I could be on the maternity ward with nurses who do ten of these a day. I tried not to imagine what it would be like if the wound were not closed all the way.
One by one Grandma Brockton picked the staples, a pinch, a pull, a wince, and out. I, who had not cried once during the C-section or the days that followed, was fighting tears.
And then it was over.
“Now let’s have a look at that baby,” she said as I sat up. With dread, I handed her over.
She suspended Eden from a hand scale — a storklike sling, with a dial on the top pointing squarely at seven pounds and some ounces.
“How’s she eating?” she asked.
I rattled off the statistics, diapers, feedings, pumping. She noted it. I kept going, more statistics — recent weight numbers, night wakings, how much tea I was drinking.
“This is your third? Don’t you know by now to relax a little?”
“Dr. Nasty told me I might be starving her,” I said.
“No suh!”
“Yeah,” and then I was pouring the story out. What I did, why I did it. I was babbling. I was post-op, post-partum, post-traumatic, post-hoc-ergo-nuts.
She nodded, listening as she filled out paperwork, packed up her stuff. I kept babbling, felt like an idiot and decided to gather my manners and my dignity and escort her to the door.
“You should get back into bed,” she said. “I can see myself out. You’re fine, your baby is fine. Park in that bed and nurse her and it will all be all right.”
“Okay,” I said.
“And honey?” she added. “Don’t tell anyone I told you this, but Dr. Nasty is a pain in the ass, he always has been. He can go fuck himself. ” With a chipper wave she was gone.
Yes, my friends, that F-bomb is a rare and beautiful thing, with restorative powers beyond any other word in the English language.
There is a shrine to Grandma Brockton in my heart. What a difference she made to me. I never breathed a hint to Dr. Nasty about what she had said, but I was never quite so meek in his office again.
