pregnant during covid
Yet my husband and I have this wonder coming to us: a birth. And, for me, a few weeks of respite, a clean turn away from the code calls ringing out overhead and the spectre of refrigerated trucks. A chance to stop thinking about all the children, and focus on one—this kicking creature, this small leviathan within, who stubbornly insists on life amid so much death. Of course, nobody knows what pregnancy will bring until the end (or perhaps ever) and—fortuna, fortuna—I have seen it go all wrong at the very last minute, women ashen and still bleeding outside a resuscitation room while we push another round of epi into a child whose heart won’t start, young widowers weeping beside an incubator. It should have been me, not her, a new father once said to me in a room like that, grappling at that old wish to take the beloved’s suffering into one’s own body, to transmute death for death. I know death comes to the nursery, too, if rarely from the coronavirus.