My name is fished from the database. Bundled into a wheelchair despite the fact that I can walk, a thin brown woman pushes me. I wonder how she is able to move my bulk with her puny size. Her bored eyes blink to display the eyelashes glued to her lids.

We are swallowed by the gunmetal gray of the elevator, whose shininess spits our reflections back at us. Though the images are indistinct, I close my eyes against the picture of my round as- a- pie face. In seconds we spew onto an upper level and the attendant punches in a code with a two-inch fingernail. The doors whoosh open.

I am greeted by the punch of antiseptic smothered in artificial roses. I remove my clothing and don a hospital gown, the extra large strains across my corpulent belly. My hand finds my midsection, the skin stretched taut around a mound of muscle and bone.

The first nurse appears, brown haired, mousy, tiny pearls pinpointing her ears. She is shiny and content to be where she is, to be who she is. Letters scribbled on the whiteboard, in curly childish letters, Becky. The bed sheets wind around me and yet I shiver. The room is frigid, arctic air pumped from the angry mouths of black vents. Becky starts my IV and produces heated blankets. I burrow inside a cocoon of them, like a caterpillar in her chrysalis.

You and she converse about the exciting news of the day. Anesthesia comes in, a tall man with milky skin and gray blue eyes. Unruly white hair tufts from his eyebrows. He asks me the standard questions and finds nothing of concern. Soon, the epidural. The thought of a needle in my back is alarming. You nod and give him one of your certain smiles and so I push the anxiety down, burying it; making it disappear. Anesthesia tells me to curl myself into a ball, laughable at 39 weeks along. I try, there’s a brief spot of heat, like the tip of a hot pencil stabbing my lower back and then it is done.

My doctor arrives. Even though we’ve met for many months, I dislike her. Her hair and manner are too sharp. The offending hair, gray white, slick with gel stands in points at the crown, a tiny bed of nails. She fabricates a strange smile, the parting of teeth, the reluctant creep of facial muscles.

They wheel me into an operating room. I leave you standing by the bed, apprehension you’re trying to hide, creeping onto your face. This time your smile is less certain, wavering, like hot air in the desert that shimmers just above the road. It is there and then gone.

The OR is a white room, with white walls, devoid of anything but humming machines. The rubber wheels of my chariot squeak against the pristine gray floor. Echoes push against the walls, there is nothing to cushion the sound. The nurse, a male, turns when I arrive, black hair crawls down his forearms to his hands resting atop thick fingers. Crinkles at the corners of his eyes ooze kindness.

The procedure is complete. Instead of one, now I am two, another heart outside my body has joined us, the biggest baby born in the hospital that day, her time well spent in the womb. I smile with groggy relief.

In my arms her baby beauty is intoxicating. She doesn’t open her eyes, dreaming as though she still swims inside me. A sticky prayer of thanks drips out of me like maple syrup from a tapped tree. A breath of her is summer rain, moonlight and toes buried in the sand. The future and the past twisted together, a daisy chain of time. She is the only thing that matters.

Hours pass, the shifts change, another nurse, Dianne comes in to check the pad beneath me. A crimson river shimmers underneath my naked bum when she shifts the sheet. You frown and comment. Was there this much blood the last time? Maybe. Some time later, Dianne finds the same amount of blood (or more) on the pad. The red of it is startling so bright against the immaculate white cotton. You ask her to call my doctor. Worry brackets your mouth. Dianne says she wants to wait a while before doing so. The bleeding will ‘probably’ stop.

Time trickles, leaking like the bathroom sink, too many drops to count. I can’t keep up with it. When next I look out the window the sun has retreated to her house. My eyes are fuzzy. At shift change, I can’t read the board, though I try. You put on your unhappy, demanding voice. The edge in you is enough to make anyone obey. I recognize it from childhood.

The doctor is called and she comes very quickly, surprisingly fast. She provides assurances at first but then sees the blood. Morphine. A plunger of the stuff shoots cold as frostbite into my veins. I hate an IV in the hand. Later it will ache and bruise turning blue, purple and green.

The doctor tells me there is material left inside my womb. It is causing the bleeding. She must put her hand inside me. The pain is like a fantasy, unreal, extreme. It blots out all light and air, the blackest, deepest eclipse of my world. She cleaves me in two with a sharp instrument. I ask what tool she uses to rip me apart. When she stops, I pant with the effort of resisting. In the tug of war between my body and the pain, I am losing. She assures me the only tool is her gloved hand. They push morphine again but I know that it will not touch this beast. This monster laughs from the corner as it devours my mind, dining on my body and spitting my bones out, until all that remains is dust. The doctor splits me again and this time someone is screaming; a lady is very unhappy. When I come back into the room from wherever I went, I know that the screaming lady is me.

I see you beside the bed. Your face is horror, like half of the comedy and tragedy masks perched in New Orleans shops at Mardi Gras, the mask is your freckled skin turned to a petrified rictus.

I know that I should be scared and I am but I don’t have much energy to devote to it so I am low level scared. Your face tells me that I’m not scared enough. You will be scared for the both of us. Later I marvel at your fortitude. We came in for the happiest of life events, the birth of your grandchild. Joy bubbled out of you, exceeding mine. Then you watched me bleed for many hours. You watched me scream and scream and scream. How you were able to sit and view this nightmare tells the story of our strength. Yours, mine and our ancestors, from the tree rooted in Africa with branches stretching to Jamaica and then the US. The blood I bleed is mine and yours and our great great grandmothers, black women who endured and thrived despite the unwavering desire of many to kill us.

My doctor admits she can’t reach whatever it is she has been grasping for. Despite ravaging my battered womb the material remains. You call husband. Exhaustion has stretched me like taffy. I am not in the right shape to have acceptable conversation, to make words work. He asks to speak to me and I mumble incoherently. I want to tell him to take care of the baby and the toddler but I can’t push anything out of my mouth other than a mumbled I love you. I want to make him understand that all that matters is the baby.

They wheel me away again and this time your eyes hold naked fear, the other side of the coin is terror. You try to smile, hoping to telegraph confidence but there is nothing of comfort in your face or manner. I remember that my daughter is well. And she’ll have you and her father to raise and love her if I am unable to. She is all that matters.

After my second surgery of the day, I return. You wait in a room filled with relief. It is palpable, drifting through the air and pinging off the walls, like atoms colliding in solid matter. I can’t tell if the relief belongs to you or if it is mine, a hot air balloon that challenges the popcorn ceiling. Another prayer of thanks singes my heart, burning itself into my flesh, twisting in my blood.

I will not be among the black mothers who die from lack of basic medical care, bleeding out in a hospital bed surrounded by the very best Western medicine. I will not die today.