The Second Time: On the closing of Grady Memorial’s maternity ward

I was scrolling through Chrome last night when I saw that OhioHealth was going to close the maternity wing at Grady Memorial Hospital. The unit is scheduled to close on July 31.

My baby is six months old and she was born there in December. When I first saw the news article reporting this, it all felt so surreal. My baby was lying next to me asleep and the house was quiet. I read and reread it over and over again not believing that an institution as big as OhioHealth could do that to a place that was so dear to me.

The first time I gave birth I was a graduate student in Connecticut. I was new to the country and my support system consisted only of my husband. Before my pregnancy, I had been struggling with depression and was using alcohol to cope with it. That didn’t make me a bad person but the notes in my chart had other things to say. They reported the struggle but they didn’t know the person. One of the OBGYNs read my chart before she ever read me and decided from her position of certainty and distance that I was a risk to my own child. She wrote it down and put it in the file and the weight of that judgment settled on me so heavily that when I left to do my field research work, I didn’t want to come back to the country due to fear that I would lose my child. This doctor didn’t seem to care that I had completely stopped drinking from the moment I found out I was pregnant. For her I was just a document. I was afraid to let out a single word in my doctor’s appointments for fear of being misunderstood. I made sure when I went to the appointments that I monitored my face and words just in case they would write them down on my chart and use them as evidence to make my child a ward of the state. The chair of my department was the one who convinced me to come back and finish my degree and from then on, hospitals have been a traumatizing environment for me. I cannot go in there alone and my husband has to take me to all my appointments and be in the room with me not because I am incompetent but because I don’t trust health practitioners.

When I got to thirty-nine weeks, I was so exhausted. I asked whether I could do an elective induction but the doctors there said they had to put me on a waitlist. Forty weeks came and I hadn’t given birth. From then on they called me every day to tell me that no bed was available. I would cry after each of those calls because I was so tired, afraid and very far from home. When I finally gave birth it was not a moment of joy. It was just the end of a traumatic experience. I was so grateful that I didn’t have to go to that hospital again and I didn’t have to deal with those doctors. I didn’t enjoy my pregnancy or the birth. My first child was proof of surviving hardship.

We moved to Ohio and I became pregnant again. From the very first appointment at 460 W Central Street, something was different. I felt safe. I didn’t feel the urge to perform. My appointments were brief and warm. When the doctors had concerns, they explained them to me plainly and clearly, and when they referred me elsewhere, they told me why. I rotated through the whole team: different doctors, different nurse practitioners, and different medical assistants. My favorite APRN at the Pacer office helped me navigate my insurance to get a breast pump and told me matter-of-factly that when I reached thirty-nine weeks, I could simply speak to my doctor and make a plan for induction just in case I passed my due date.

I could just ask.

It had never occurred to me that that was an option.

At forty weeks I went in and saw one of the OBGYNs and he could see how tired I was. I was barely eating well, walking, and breathing. He listened to me. I asked him whether he could induce me because I was well past my due date. He checked my records, looked at the calendar, and before the appointment was over, I already had a date. He would induce me then if the baby had not come naturally by itself. It was a blessing to have a date, and I looked forward to it. The last days of my pregnancy were not spent in tears and depression. They were spent in joy and anticipation. I couldn’t wait to meet my baby. I felt heard. Like I mattered. I felt that I was in control of my own body and I was given the dignity of being a person. The doctor didn’t know this but I was grateful for it. When the day finally came, I was admitted and induced, and I gave birth after one push. The doctor checked everything and left. The nurse assigned to me that day stayed with me the whole day. In the pain she helped me sit up, do breathing exercises, and go to the bathroom. When I had a contraction, she held my hand and told me everything would be fine and it was almost over. One might argue that that was her job, but the way she extended her care and helped me through the pain was heavenly. For the first time, the absence of my mum was not heavily felt. I knew the nurse was there for me, and it didn’t feel like an obligation.

My husband and I only have each other as a support system, so we had no one to watch our three-year-old. The nurses at Grady offered to watch her so that my husband could be in the room with me while I brought our second child to the world. They made sure I didn’t do it alone, and I am eternally grateful to them. In the evening when my husband and I were exhausted and we still had our three-year-old to manage, the nurses offered to watch the newborn while we slept. They watched her through the whole night while my husband and three-year-old cramped up on the small sofa bed to rest. I have never experienced anything like it. Not in a hospital or anywhere else.

The day I was discharged, it was snowing and raining at the same time. The nurse assigned to me that day pushed my wheelchair all the way to the emergency exit. She checked the car seat herself before she handed the baby over. She told us goodbye in a deep and personal way. I wanted to hug her, but I didn’t because I wasn’t sure whether that would violate her boundaries. I wish I had asked because I would have hugged her.

A few days later, a card arrived signed by every nurse on the ward congratulating me on the birth. I had never received anything like that. I saved the card, and I still look at it every once in a while.

A week after I gave birth, I got postpartum high blood pressure and ended up back in their ER, and I was back in the maternity ward. When I couldn’t walk, they helped me, and the whole time I was there, not a single person made me feel like I was trouble. Every moment spent there gave me a chance to recover.

In their communique, OhioHealth said their decision came after careful evaluation. They said fewer than ten percent of the county babies born at their hospitals were born at Grady. They added that patients could go to Riverside or Dublin Methodist instead. Those two facilities are thirty-five minutes from where I live. A lot can happen to a woman in labor in those thirty-five minutes. Additionally, OhioHealth said that they spoke with all the practitioners affected by the closure of that maternity wing. I don’t know whether they came to an agreement, but if their intention was to disperse that team to the rest of the hospitals, then it is my opinion that they are making a huge mistake. All those nurses and doctors in that wing are not a department that can be redirected. They cannot move what they built to another hospital the way they move furniture. It took them years to provide the level of care they provided my family those few days. It lives in that specific building with those specific people and their specific way of being in a room with a woman who is afraid or exhausted or alone, and when the unit closes, it does not relocate. It ends.

The thirty-seven people whose jobs are being affected are not abstract to me. They are the people who gave me back something I didn’t know I had lost. After my first birth I didn’t know that giving birth could feel like being held. I thought I had  to live in fear of hospitals and healthcare practitioners for the rest of my life. Grady showed me I didn’t have to. Those thirty-seven people made sure of that.

There are pregnant women right now who don’t yet know what kind of room they are going to give birth in. They don’t know yet whether they will be received as a person or processed as a file. Some of them have already had my first kind of experience and are carrying that with them into their new pregnancy without knowing that the second kind I received at Grady exists.

Institutions are very good at counting what is measurable: the percentage of county births, beds available, and fiscal year figures, but they don’t always know how to count what it costs a woman to give birth somewhere that does not see her and what it gives her to give birth somewhere that does. I know the difference because I have lived inside both.

My daughter is six months old. Every time she looks at me and hugs me, I feel so warm. Those nurses gave me that. They gave me a new version of motherhood I get to carry forward, where I was not afraid, I was not a document, and someone pushed me through the snow, checked the car seat, and meant it when they said goodbye.

OhioHealth cannot put that on a spreadsheet.