I’m pregnant in the winter again, and I walk up the hill to my lab appointment in what everyone hopes to be the last snowfall. It has been snowing old fashioned, at least what I envision winters of old to be like: light, large flakes, sometimes barely falling, sometimes blowing in whorls and eddies about the street, occasionally falling steadily. Never piling up high, just snow for days. I’m wearing two pairs of pants and a variety of layers up to my old fur hat with the ear flaps, matted and grimy, unearthed from the back of the closet. I need fur at my chin and my forehead today. My boots are sensible and supportive and not entirely unfashionable. Last season, I traded out the heavy duty grey laces for bright teal ones. The color makes me happy.
The lab is empty when I arrive, no one in the waiting room, no one at the desk. The technician calls me back before I can disrobe, and as I suspected, it is blazing hot inside the draw room. I am standing in an instant puddle from my boots, my hat beginning to get soggy, my scarf too long to hang from any available surface to adequately dry. Layer after layer comes off. I am excavating, looking for that one vein that bulges large enough to accommodate the needle. As I hunt for my limbs, the technician pecks at the computer, muttering about what a large number of tests this is and how she couldn’t possibly find them all. She has beautiful hair, pulled into a long ponytail, and very hard nails.
I sit in the chair as she lines up the vials, seven of them, and sinks the needle into my arm. There is a bland metal decoration on the hallway wall, the kind you would buy at a department store, made of various circles fused together. I look out the door, stare at the circles, and will the pain to disappear. I tell my brain to ignore it, to breathe through it, to step outside of it. It isn’t any use, but perhaps to comfort me, words from the past float into memory: I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me shall never die.
I think of my friend, dead several years now, whose life was a blur of medical emergencies, one after another. I thought of her often when I was giving birth the first time, my only significant stay in a hospital, my first intravenous tether. I think of her every time I hire someone from the medical community to inflict pain upon my body. To the phlebotomist, clicking mechanically through the vials, I am just a number. To my friend, a blood draw was a mosquito bite, a minor nuisance sprinkled throughout a path of transplants, surgeries, and horrifying half-comas from which she later described hearing her surgical team joking about her body. I am the resurrection and the life, she believed. He who believes in me shall never die.
A friend who is also pregnant texts me today to say that she has lost her baby, and she doesn’t pray much anymore but would I pray for her? I tell her I am honored, and so saddened by the news. She has given up her blood and gone home and it is all over now, there is nothing to do but wait and heal and hope for another pregnancy. I think of the same words: I am the resurrection and the life.
In three to five days my blood’s seven vials will give up their mysteries to the midwife’s watchful eye and the specialist’s impatient one. In twenty four hours, my body will make new blood to replace the old that I’ve given up. In the coming weeks and months, my friend’s sorrow will fade. A long winter will lose its sting.
I walk back home through the deepening snow, two ounces lighter.
