The Tribune

IN 2006, while sitting outside her home with family members and enjoying the cool night breeze, my patient (who’s chosen the alias Kelly) felt an urge to urinate. She dashed but before she made it to the restroom, she felt warm liquid trickling down her legs.

Kelly scrambled to unzip her soaked pants and as she sat down on the toilet, she felt a sharp pain like a knife stabbing her insides over and over, from her rib cage to her groin.

The pain was horrendous and as she cried, she looked down and saw blood hemorrhaging out of her as her legs shook uncontrollably. She was 18 at the time.

After hearing a loud noise, Kelly opened her eyes, then legs and looked down a second time, this time in utter disbelief. Heart pounding, she screamed in horror at something emphatically contradistinct from the life she envisioned as a young girl who loved to daydream. The toilet seat and floor were entombed by her dark-red blood and the events of that day changed her life forever.

As a child, Kelly, born in Nassau the youngest of six children, was the daydreamer of her large, close family. She dreamed of flying over a large meadow filled with bright yellow and white dandelions. The warmth of the sun comforted her as the wind at her back helped her soar. And as the hummingbirds sang and the wind blew west, the small alabaster florets from the dandelion flower danced around her in a melodic frenzy. Swaying up and down, before being blown away into the distance, she watched until these exposed puffed seeds disappeared from her vision, blissfully wondering where, and with whom, they eventually domiciled.

For the most part, Kelly hoped that the seeds might carry blessings to her friends and family, miles away. Legends also suggest that if you close your eyes, make a wish and blow the florets, all of your own dreams will come true. So, she blew as hard as possible hoping that someday when she awoke her deepest wishes might come to pass. And one such wish did come true when the boy she loved, said that he loved her in return.

Kelly first met her crush when she was 16. He was handsome and strong and funny and there were butterflies in her stomach every time he was near. Their courtship was slow and started with friendly flirtations. Kelly was initially afraid to express her true feelings because she suspected that she wasn’t his type. Then one day, they were laughing like they often did and he told her without warning that she looked beautiful and he wanted her to be his girl.

The dandelions of her dreams swirled around her as she floated in happiness. But Kelly’s happiness abruptly turned into fear when at the age of 18 her menstrual cycle stopped and she realised that she was pregnant. Entirely ill-equipped to raise a child, with the self-awareness to understand what that entailed, she made the painful decision to have an abortion. When it was performed, Kelly was two weeks pregnant. Out of fear and embarrassment, she told no one.

Five months later, she needed to have an annual physical performed for work. Given he’d already treated her that year, Kelly naturally returned to the same doctor who performed her abortion hoping that he could quickly attest to her good health. To both their surprise, Kelly’s blood work revealed that she was still pregnant and now five-and-a-half months into her gestational period. Shock morphed into confusion, anger and then fear. Kelly’s doctor informed her that the fetus was likely dead but to be sure, he performed a second-trimester abortion but only blood was extracted. With no fetal tissue visible, he felt confident that the blood work was a false-positive.

The decision to have an abortion is a deeply personal one and a right that should be held by every woman without judgement. In the US, medical and surgical abortions can typically be performed up to 24 weeks of pregnancy. Abortion in The Bahamas is still illegal and can only be performed in cases of rape, incest, if the pregnancy poses a risk to life of the mother or there are developmental challenges for the fetus. In a medical abortion, like the one Kelly had, the patient is given two different medications which are taken one to two days apart. The first pill (mifepristone) blocks the principal pregnancy hormone, progesterone, while the second pill (misoprostol) causes the lining of the womb to disintegrate.

Kelly ethically had only two more weeks to end her pregnancy. So, to be safe, her doctor inserted three misoprostol tablets into her vagina. Following the procedure, Kelly returned home, tired but relieved. Trying to sleep, the heat made her nauseous so she stepped outside and sat with family, telling jokes and enjoying the gentle winds that whistled through their coconut trees, the scene described at the start of this story. Twenty minutes later, when she got up to use the restroom, she was screaming in disbelief.

Kelly had given birth. The fetus was floating in a toilet bowl full of blood as Kelly lay slumped over on the ground. Her sister came running in and seeing what happened, quickly scooped the baby out of the toilet. The body was so small and fragile that she rested in the palm of her hand as she made soft crying sounds resembling a newborn kitten. The ambulance rushed them to the hospital. Kelly remained in the hospital for one day. Her daughter, who I’ll refer to as Aaliyah, weighed one pound, two ounces at birth. She was placed in the neonatal ICU where she remained until discharged three months later weighing exactly four pounds.

By the end of the year, Kelly and her boyfriend were pregnant with their second child, a boy, who I’ll refer to as Andrew. This pregnancy was relatively straightforward until her water broke at home in the shower when she was nine months pregnant. Before she could do anything, her son was pushing his way through her vagina and she caught him before he slipped out. Her feet were now submerged in a watery-blood solution pouring toward the drain hole and though less traumatic, it naturally reminded her of Aaliyah’s birth. In this case, however, Andrew weighed considerably more at 7 pounds 13 ounces but because of Kelly’s complications with her first birth, they were both kept in the hospital for three days before being discharged.

Aaliyah’s development was wrought with challenges. She struggled with frequent, severe, respiratory illnesses as a toddler and required both speech and gait therapy. But despite each setback, she thrived and today she’s as healthy and strong as ever, blissfully unaware of the numerous times she crawled towards death only to defy all odds in each case and survive.

Despite enjoying a full-term gestation, Andrew also had challenges. At three months, he appeared dehydrated and had to be admitted to the hospital because he stopped eating. Preliminary test results confirmed that he was malnourished so his treating physician notified social services to investigate possible negligence. Kelly wasn’t allowed to see her son for four days until a specialist examined Andrew and determined that he was lactose intolerant.

Then, when Andrew was five years old, he was admitted to the hospital for two weeks suffering with broncho-pneumonia and the day he was discharged, Aaliyah was admitted with the same diagnosis. Fortunately, through it all, Kelly’s boyfriend, the father of her children, stayed by her side providing much-needed emotional and financial support.

In Kelly’s childhood dreams, the wind always blew west, because that’s where many wealthy and privileged Bahamians live. And while she no longer dreams of flying over meadows, to this day, she wonders what fantastical stories lie within all the people whose shoulders the dandelion seeds land upon. Imagining that their lives must be comparatively easier, she’s fascinated by how their life truths might compare to her own. Because daydreams aside, Kelly’s life has never been filled with white and yellow dandelions and sadly she’d soon be faced with the greatest crisis of her life, infinitely more harrowing than any of her previous trials.

This is The KDK Report.

Part two of this series will be published next week