Excuse Me?

On October 15th, just 10 days after giving birth to Olivia, my doctor’s nurse called.

“How are you doing?” she asked in a too-chipper voice.  I was annoyed right away. How could she speak so normally to me after what I’d just been through?

“Uh, ok,” I managed in a voice that definitely didn’t match my answer. The nurse seemed a bit taken aback by my less-than-peppy response.

“Well, I was just calling to check on you. How is the bleeding? How is breastfeeding?” Hold up, WHAT!?! Now her sense of surprise became clear.  She thought she was calling a blissful mother of a newborn.  I was anything but that.

“My baby died,” I snarled through the phone.  Immediately, her tone changed and she became very somber.

“How are you doing?” she asked again in her new pittying voice reserved for mothers like me.

“I can’t talk to you right now!” I responded right before chucking my phone to the floor.

This phone call came while I was still hiding from everyone I knew.  I had stopped going to the bus stop (I still don’t go there). I hadn’t been to Lily and Ella’s dance.  I had been nowhere I thought I might see someone I knew because I was avoiding the terrible moment when someone would ask about my baby without knowing that she was dead.  Of all places, the office of the doctor who delivered Olivia should have been safe from that!

I still remember this conversation word for word nearly two months later.