The Adventures of a Pumpkin and a Running Back Boy

Lexi, the Ticking Bomb

               

Lexi, the Ticking Bomb

"There's no easy way to say this, so I'm just going to be straight with you. You won't have an easy birth. If I'm being generous you have fifty percent chance of dying giving birth..."

He was still talking, but I wasn't listening anymore. Medical terms and reasons why a C section wasn't an option and excruciating details about my defective reproductive system...

I just couldn't focus. Blake was holding my hand. He was squeezing it, but I couldn't squeeze back.

Fifty percent chance of dying giving birth... My head was completely empty. The doctor only caught my attention again when he got up.

"I'm going to give you a few minutes, to process this. I just want you to know you don't have to decide anything right away, but the clock is ticking. The further in your pregnancy you get the more dangerous it will be to terminate. We can talk options once I get back."

Options. Terminate.

The doctor left us in the room, but we stayed silent. Blake was just holding my hand, stroking it with his thumb. I had no idea what I was supposed to say. I had no idea what I was supposed to do.

And then I just blurt, "We haven't traveled."

"What?" I wasn't looking at him, so I had no idea how he looked right now. I was just staring out the window. At the city behind it. At everything I still hadn't seen.

"We haven't traveled. Sure, we went to see your family in England but we didn't stay long. I didn't go to study abroad because I wanted to stay with you, but I've wasted time. We should have gone to see the world. I always kind of wanted to just drop at the airport and buy plane tickets to wherever..."

"Lexi..."

"I barely saw anything. I've barely lived..." Sure, I had a nice life so far, I couldn't actually complain, I had found the love of my life, I had an amazing family and incredible friend. But it wasn't enough. I was nowhere near close to being ready for it to be over. I finally looked over at Blake and he looked absolutely miserable. I bit the inside of my lip to keep myself from crying. "Is this how it felt, when you thought you were going to die? Did you feel like this for years?"

"I don't think it was quite like this, no."

"I'm not ready for it to be over so fast," I admitted. Barely twenty two years old. I wasn't even done with school yet. 

"Come on Pumpkin, this isn't a death sentence. People still think they'll win the lottery with even less odds."

I wanted to be a glass half full kind of person, but with my life in the balance it wasn't the most obvious state of mind I could turn to. I wasn't even a mom yet, but I was already a bad one. I was a bad one because there was a part of me that thought about taking the way out. This pregnancy was an accident. It wasn't something we wanted right now. We were still so young. We were nowhere near ready to be parents.

Maybe this was just the universe's way of telling us we shouldn't be parents right now. Or ever really. If we didn't have a baby now, we wouldn't have a baby later. The thought was so piercing, so painful that I felt a sharp pain in my chest.

I couldn't keep this thought to myself. I didn't think this was a time were we should be keeping anything to ourselves.

"If we don't have this baby, that's it for us then," I tell Blake. "No mini-Blake. No mini-Lexi."

We turned our chairs so that we were facing each other now and Blake held both sides of my waist, his thumbs rubbing the side of my belly and pressed his fore head against it. I barely had a baby bump yet. It just looked like it was taco night and I had overindulged as always.