The Great Pause
I’ve been waiting to find the right place to begin this essay. I think, once I come to an ending, I’ll know the best place to begin. In the meantime, I make notes in my journal. I collect quotes. In the evenings, I sit on our balcony and I write a diary, which is not something I can usually be bothered to do, but I think it will be helpful for when this chapter of my life ends and I can see where it begins, and I write a beautiful essay about the whole thing.
The essay will be about pain? Or endurance? Or the impossibility of endurance? Or rebirth? Or motherhood?
I’m waiting to find out.
In the meantime, the summer stretches on, the pandemic stretches on and I’m still stuck in the in-between. Maybe this chapter of my life does not have a plot arc, I start to think. It seems what I’m waiting for is more waiting.
I know the swerve will come one day. That’s how it goes. There are periods where the days bleed into one another, indistinguishable, and when you look back you can only remember snapshots and sensations. The smell of distant fires in the air, the weight of a child’s head in your lap, the sound of rain beating into the windshield. Then one day, there’s a turn, something ends, something begins, and now you have a signpost, a place where you can say, there was before that happened and there was after.
For example:
December 31, 2019. I am mostly alone in the high-rise office where I work. On a clear day, the views will break your heart, but today the sky is low, the air is sodden and I can barely see the buildings downtown, a fifteen-minute walk away.
I work in media relations in the healthcare system and there’s not much to do. It’s the holidays; all the media outlets are running with a skeleton crew. My husband calls and we talk about our plans for the night: I’m going to make a steak, he’s going to make cocktails. Hopefully our three-year-old daughter goes to bed and stays there.
Then I get an email from my colleague who works with the public health teams. She’s off on January 2 and I’ll be covering for her. She wants to let me know that the epidemiologists are monitoring a cluster of atypical pneumonia cases associated with a market in Wuhan, China. “Just an FYI,” she writes. “In case, you get any calls about it.”
Another example:
February 14, 2020. The pain starts in my back, and at first I think it’s just from sitting too long. I ignore it. Me and my co-worker go into a conference room to call our colleague in public health – the one who emailed me about atypical pneumonia on New Year’s Eve. In the six weeks since, that mystery ailment has been classified as a novel coronavirus and then christened COVID-19. Our days are now mostly dedicated to triaging and responding to media requests about this virus.
Some days it’s so busy that by the time I get off the phone with one reporter, I’ll have voicemails from two more.
Our public health co-worker is going on vacation and we’re getting notes from her on what she needs us to cover. The conference room has a view of the city, of the ocean, of the mountains, and the mountains beyond those mountains. It is late afternoon and the light is golden.
Over the course of the call, the pain in my back intensifies and radiates across my pelvis. It gets so bad, it’s hard for me to focus. I look out in the far distance, towards the mouth of Howe Sound, towards the wild world that lies beyond the city. I try my best to pay attention. I make notes, but when I look at them later, they’re scattered and incoherent.
When the meeting ends, I look at the app on my phone. Shit. It’s my period. I take three Advil from the bottle I keep at my desk.
That night, we’re booked on a ferry to go to the Sunshine Coast. We have an Airbnb for the Family Day long weekend. Getting on a ferry seems so impossible, I decide not to think about it.
As soon as I walk in the door, I tell my husband I need to lie down. He comes into the bedroom and lets me know he ordered sushi from my favorite place, since it’s Valentine’s Day.
I cannot possibly eat.
I hope the Advil will kick in. It doesn’t.
It’s time to go. I take more Advil. I fill a hot water bottle to take with me in the car.
My husband tells me we don’t have to go. We can wait till the next morning.
But we’ve paid for tonight at the Airbnb – it wasn’t cheap – and tomorrow the ferries will be booked up already. We could spend the better part of the day stuck at the terminal, waiting to get on.
In the car, my husband asks me what I want to listen to. I don’t know, music, I tell him.
He puts on Paul Simon, my favorite.
He tries to ask me questions. I hear him, but I don’t really register what he’s saying, as though he’s speaking from a very far distance.
We park in the line up for the ferry, and I get out of the car, stumble into the bathroom and throw up.
My hot water bottle, which at one point provided a little relief, has gone lukewarm. I take more Advil, although it can’t be more than two hours since I took it last, and I’ve already maxed out the daily dosage. I twist in my seat, trying, failing to
.ind a more comfortable position. It feels like someone is driving a hot poker into the base of my back and splitting me open. It feels like my insides are twisting and tearing themselves apart. It feels like childbirth, but worse because there is no break between contractions and no baby at the end. It is pain for pain’s sake.
When we get on the ferry, I stay in the car, which is technically against the rules, and my husband takes my daughter up to the play area. The Advil finally kicks in, somewhat, the pain recedes a little. I fall into a shallow, dreamless sleep.
When I wake up my husband is strapping my daughter in the car and the ferry is docking.
As we drive up the coast to our rental through the heavy country dark I start crying. Not from pain, but from fear.
“There’s something really wrong with me,” I tell my husband.
Did I see these moments as turning points when I lived them? I’d like to say so but I didn’t. I got our first media call about COVID-19 on January 2, when I am waiting in line to buy a rice bowl for lunch. I have a memory of listening to the reporter’s voicemail as I looked out the restaurant window and watched people darting down Broadway, obscured by hoods and umbrellas in the pouring rain.
In the months after, I rewrote this moment and made it charged and ominous: As I listened to the voicemail, I had a sinking sense of being at the start of something dark and extraordinary. I watched all the people, oblivious, speed walking through the downpour, and knew that years from now, I’d look back at this as the moment I understood the world was about to change.
Really? I thought no such thing. I was hungry and feeling a little pent up and bored since it was a slow day at work and almost everyone else was on vacation.
That virus is in China, it’s a nothing story, I thought to myself. And of course, the only media call I get all day is during my lunch break. Of course.
After the ferry ride, I make an appointment with the doctor. She sends me to get an ultrasound and calls a few days later with the results. There is a “cystic structure” on my right ovary, two centimeters in size.
“This isn’t something to worry about!” she says cheerfully.
I need a follow-up ultrasound in six weeks. If the cyst disappears or gets smaller, then it’s nothing. If it stays the same or gets bigger, then it’s… not nothing.
“It could be endometriosis,” the doctor says. “That’s a very common condition, and it would fit your other symptoms.”
If it isn’t nothing and it isn’t endometriosis, it might be cancer. She doesn’t say this, but I work in health care and I’m a hypochondriac. I can always fill in the little pause at the end of the sentence when the doctor is thinking, “Should I tell her about that? Not yet. No point in thinking about that now.”
That night, my husband is out, and my daughter is asleep. I pace around the quiet apartment and Google endometriosis on my phone: painful, chronic, incurable, poorly understood, a common cause of infertility.
Then I Google ovarian cancer: aggressive, dif8icult to treat, usually found at an advanced stage, total hysterectomy, often fatal.
A text message pings through from my husband. He tells me he’s just found out a friend of ours is pregnant. That afternoon, she and her partner heard the baby’s heartbeat for the first time.
I throw my phone against the wall and shatter the screen.
March 11. Now here is a day where everything changes and everyone knows it. Tom Hanks announces he has COVID-19. The NBA suspends their season. The World Health Organization finally gets around to stating the obvious and declares a pandemic.
That night, I am driving home with my daughter in the backseat. There is a breathtaking red-orange sunset, so bright it stings my eyes. It is enough to make the colorless, industrial landscape of northeast Vancouver look briefly gilded and dreamlike.
I am driving in the direction of the port, with its monstrous cranes, looming on the horizon like the skeletons of ancient beasts, when I think, I should have gotten my period by now.
My last period was on February 14, so it has been nearly a full month. My cycles are usually 24-26 days. Today is 28. I should at least have cramps.
That morning, I felt a little nauseous, so I waited to have breakfast at work rather than eating at home. At the time, I thought nothing of it.
Am I pregnant?
Our method of birth control – pulling out – isn’t exactly 100% reliable, but it has worked for us for years, and we haven’t had any accidents recently. Still, we had sex around the time I would have been fertile.
It’s possible, I realize. Definitely possible.
For most of my life, my deepest held, most secret fear was that I wouldn’t be able to have children.
I was fat, sarcastic, untidy, the total opposite of the girls I grew up believing were beautiful and desirable. Finding a partner seemed like a real long shot, but then I met my husband and got married in my mid-twenties.
During the early years of our relationship, I pestered my husband about having children even though we were both haphazardly employed and living in a crumbling one-bedroom rental. Privately, I fretted about infertility. I read blogs by women trying to conceive (TTC) and learned all the strange acronyms (IUI, IVF, PUPO, DPO). I compared their symptoms and situations to my own. Ultrasound photos and birth announcements made my stomach flip and sink, even though I’d never tried to get pregnant. It was like I was grieving a loss that hadn’t happened yet.
It’s hard to explain why I wanted a child so badly. Aside from my daughter, I don’t particularly enjoy kids; I am awkward and halting around them. I’m also introverted and independent to the extreme. Almost all of my favorite activities are varying degrees of incompatible with young children: reading and writing quietly, savoring long, boozy dinners at nice restaurants, traveling to remote and wild places that don’t have amusement parks or doctor’s offices or gift shops with souvenir stuffies to offer as bribes.
On paper, if anyone could love a life free of children, it would be me, and yet there was nothing I feared more.
My desire for a child was overwhelming and instinctual. The echoes of an ancient will for the survival of the species, or perhaps the visceral pull of fate.
Finally, it was our time to try. And it worked, right away.
When my daughter was born, I knew I was meant to be her mother, and everything I’d done in my life – all the triumphs and humiliations, the missteps, the achievements, the choices I seconded guessed – all of it now seemed essential and right because it had led me to her.
I had always wanted a second child, and after the ease of my daughter’s conception and pregnancy, I assumed I would have one. I relaxed a little. I was still in the first half of my thirties. There was no rush. I took my media relations job, a mat leave contract, knowing it wouldn’t make sense for me to get pregnant until I was back in a permanent position. That was okay, we had time.
And then the ferry, the ultrasound, the pain, and the sense my insides were poisoned and twisted and incompatible with life. The sinking realization that perhaps it was already too late.
As the world falls apart, I hold onto the dream of the little life inside me. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday; the days pass and my period doesn’t come.
I marvel at the luck, the miracle of it – when my womb seemed so broken and diseased, when I started to lose hope, when all the little routines and comforts of our daily lives were shuddering to a stop. At the darkest moment, the light broke through.
There’s still the matter of the cyst, maybe nothing or maybe not, but the wild good fortune of this could-be-conception colors everything with hope. The baby is there. The cyst is nothing.
I don’t tell anyone I think I might be pregnant, not even my husband. Let’s hold onto this a little while longer, I say to the could-be baby maybe inside me, this time when it’s just us.
Wednesday, March 17. My daughter’s daycare closed abruptly the afternoon before. My husband is at home, teaching high school English on Zoom, while my daughter watches Frozen in the other room. This will be my last day in the office, and most of my co-workers are also planning to start working from home.
At a mid-morning meeting, I look out the window at Broadway, usually choked and bustling on a weekday morning, now mostly desolate, just a handful of people visible on the streets, walking with eyes down, hands in their pockets.
I twist and shift in my seat, straining to relieve the growing, burning pain at the base of my back.
I try to focus on the content of the meeting. Social media posts. Provincial health orders. Flow charts and spreadsheets. The pain crystalizes into a tight knot and then bursts into electric waves that ripple across my back and down my legs.
I twist again, cross and uncross my legs, try to focus on the scene outside. The strange abandoned city, which looks so peaceful and innocuous in the gentle light of early spring. An inverted spring this year, rather than a time of new beginnings, a season of suffering and death.
The cramps I’d had at the beginning of my daughter’s pregnancy were nothing like this. My period is ten days late. Is there something stirring to life inside me or just blood and rot?
When the meeting ends, I go on my lunch break and buy a pregnancy test at the Shopper’s down the street.
By the time I get back to the office, the pain is incandescent and unrelenting. I tell my manager I have a backache and need to go home.
I take the test that evening. Pee into a teacup and swirl the test stick like a coffee stirrer. I try to sit in the living room with my husband and daughter while I wait for the results, but I am so nervous, I have to go pace in my room alone. Even with my spectacular pain, even with all those little slivers of doubt – I feel sick but not exactly pregnant – I am sure it will be positive. It is just such a perfect ending, such a good story.
Years later, I think, I will tell this baby the story of the earliest days of her existence. Driving home in the wild sunset, sensing the first twinge of her inside me. Those long days I thought of her, dreamed of her, as the cases climbed and the world shut down. Walking the empty streets to the drugstore on the last, sort-of normal day. Waiting for the test in my bedroom, so nervous I could barely breathe, while her father and sister played with Legos on the living room floor, oblivious.
I return to the bathroom, and where you’re supposed to see the second line for pregnant there is bright, stark white.
Sometimes you don’t recognize the moment your life changes until it’s passed, and some moments seemed charged and pivotal, but they’re not. The could-be baby was a late period. All those days I dreamed about my pandemic baby, my little wonder, my best surprise, I was not sensing budding life inside me. I was trying to wish myself out of where I really was. Limbo. No diagnosis. No answers. No way of knowing if I’d ever have the child I desperately wanted. A life put into a holding pattern, days slipping away, marked by pain or its absence.
In March, there are more days of pain than not.
A week after my last day at the office, I get a call that my follow-up ultrasound is canceled indefinitely due to COVID-19. I sit at the kitchen table and cry until my work phone rings. I pick it up and say, “Hi, this is media relations,” as I wipe my eyes with my sleeve.
I hear some people call the lock down “the great pause,” but nothing that is alive can pause. Children grow. Cells age and die. The ovary releases an egg, and when it withers, unfertilized, blood and tissue slough away. Our bodies are always in motion. So it’s hard to be trapped in place, waiting. Waiting for the case numbers to drop, for the clinic to open, for the outcome to be clear – Is it cancer? Is it fixable?
Will the pain last forever?
3:00 a.m., the morning of May 13, I am walking circles in my living room. The pain woke me up and is still too hot and urgent for me to sleep.
Our apartment looks out on a little park, and in streetlight shadows, the trees are shuddering, their leaves still fresh and fragile. I think of another early morning, three and half years earlier, when I woke up with contractions and paced this same room, still not quite believing I would have a baby soon. Thinking of my daughter’s pregnancy and birth opens up a gash inside me. All those astonishing, fleeting moments, will I ever get to have them again? And why isn’t it enough for me to have had them once when so many people don’t even get that?
I don’t know, but it’s not.
At 8:00 a.m., I sit at the kitchen table with my work laptop, reading and re-reading the same email. The pain filters into my thoughts, splits the words apart.
My husband is saying something, something about politics, something he saw on Twitter.
“I’m in pain, I didn’t sleep, I can’t make small talk right now,” I snap at him. His eyes shift downward, I register a look of hurt, but I can’t bring myself to care.
I am in varying degrees of pain almost every day now, but I work anyway.
We are so busy. The calls and emails never stop. I have a co-worker who does the same job as me, and in these long, wild days, we rely on each other, splitting all the work, texting each other memes and jokes throughout the day to keep each other sane. I don’t want to leave him alone, which means doing the job of two people, but by 9:30, I accept that I have no choice. All the muscles in my lower back and pelvis are wrenching and contracting. I cannot sit up anymore.
My husband is in our bedroom with the door closed, teaching on Zoom, so I put on a movie for my daughter and lie down on the twin bed in her room. I try to distract myself with the Internet, but I’m past the point of cheap escapes. I have sharp fragments of thoughts – an email I should have replied to, the opening line of a song my daughter likes to sing, the cyst, the baby who wasn’t there, how many weeks pregnant would I be now? If only she had been.
I’m not sure how much time has passed when I see my daughter in front of me. She pulls at my arm and she’s whining about something. She’s hungry or maybe the movie is over and she wants a new one.
I stagger into the kitchen and put some goldfish in a bowl for her. I turn on a frenetic TV show about a rainbow princess and her pet cat.
“Mommy.” She wants me to stay.
“Mommy has an owie, I can’t help you right now.” “Can you watch with me?”
“I have to go lie down,” I tell her. “I’m sick.”
There are tears welling in her eyes, but I cannot stand up any longer. So I turn away from her and walk towards the bedroom.
She follows me in, and when I lie down, she comes right to the bed. “Mommy!”
“Muriel! I’m sick, leave me alone!”
I say it more sharply than I mean to, but every single part of me is given over to pain, and in the moment, it enrages me that she would ask me to spare any precious energy on her. It takes all of me to endure; I have nothing to give.
She gives her head two quick shakes, the way she does when she knows she’s done something wrong, and runs out of the room.
In the living room, she is sitting on the floor. I lie down next to her. “I’m so sorry I got mad. I know I scared you,” I say. “I’m sick.”
My husband finds us there when he breaks for lunch, on the floor together, crying.
After that, I go on birth control, although I swore it off in my twenties because it made me anxious and depressed. It’s a moot point now. I am anxious and depressed either way. My daughter qualifies for day care because my husband and I are both essential workers, so we send her back. Cases are dropping; the risk is low enough. I know it is better for her to be back with other children, rather than at home with me and my pain.
The dark spring stretches on. The rhythms of my body cease. The pain doesn’t go away but it becomes manageable. My follow-up ultrasound appointment remains cancelled, but I begin to see the upsides of stasis. I run, I work, I draw pictures with my daughter. In the evenings, after the sun goes down, I sit on the balcony, wrapped in a blanket against the chill and write little notes about the strange, new every day: waking up early on Sunday mornings to stand in line at the grocery store, having recurring dreams about driving, .lying, leaning into the wind on a ferry deck, hearing the whirr of a plane engine while walking one Saturday afternoon and looking up to watch it pass over ahead. Everyone else out on the street looks up too. It makes me think of the weeks after 9/11 when the skies were so clear and empty, and then when planes came back, for a little while, they seemed miraculous.
As long as the world remains paused, I don’t have cancer, I don’t have endometriosis. I don’t have to face the answers or what they might mean for the future I hope to have. I am suspended between the worlds of sick and healthy, lucky and unlucky, ignorant and afraid. And for a while, once I get used to it, there is comfort in being nowhere in particular at all.
It only takes a few days after routine medical services reopen for me to get my ultrasound rebooked. The cyst is still there and bigger, but it doesn’t look like cancer.
I suppose I should be happy I’m not dying, but I mostly feel numb, because I still don’t have an answer or an ending, or the promise of one any time soon.
I wait two more months for the next step – an MRI – then two weeks for the results. The cyst is still there, ever bigger, not cancer, probably. My doctor refers me to a special clinic for endometriosis, where I will be evaluated for surgery. That was two months ago, and I’m waiting again, this time for my appointment date.
I will probably need surgery and then I will wait some more. Wait for surgery, wait for recovery, wait to see if the pain goes away, wait to see if it comes back, wait to find out if I am still fertile. Then perhaps, there will be the wait of pregnancy, or the wait for my grief and regret to subside, to become accustomed to a life that’s different from the one I hoped and expected to have.
So I’m still waiting for the ending and without an ending how do you really know what a story is about? We write meaning into our lives retroactively. A routine phone call on my lunch break becomes a dark harbinger of a world about to change.
February 14 is not Valentine’s Day, it’s the day I realized I was sick. Once I dreamed of telling my could-be baby about the moment I first sensed her on my drive home from work, and now I think of that moment to remind myself how easy it is to give into fantasy and denial when the present is agonizing and uncertain.
That’s why the waiting is so hard. I don’t know what all these moments mean. I don’t know what to remember and what to forget. This might be the story of how I had my second child or it might be the story of how I learned I would never be pregnant again. Perhaps it will be about survival, or perhaps it will be about all the things I can’t transcend – pain, grief, and longing for the other lives I might have lived.
I read and re-read my journal from the lockdown. In April, I wrote about a day when my pain was very bad. After dinner, I went right to bed and collapsed into a brief and restless sleep. I call these “pain naps” and I had them fairly often at that time. They are not so much sleep as my body giving up and shutting off for a time. Pain consumes energy; it consumes everything in its path.
When I woke up, the intense stabbing had subsided to a more bearable ache, my husband had put my daughter to bed and there was a bit of daylight left, so I went for a run. During the lockdown, there were more people in the streets than I have ever seen before or since. People walking and biking and sitting in lawn chairs in the parks. There were almost no cars; I jogged down the middle of the street.
My run took me along Wall Street, at the northernmost tip of Vancouver. To my right, the North Shore peaks rose above Burrard Inlet, a black expanse in the twilight. The sun dropped behind the mountains and for a moment the sky was a deep, otherworldly purple.
I paused to switch the music on my phone and looked over my shoulder to see a full moon rising over the hills to the east. It was bright orange and unbelievably huge. It did not look like the familiar moon at all, more like an alien planet, an unexpected vision. Most of the people on the street had stopped to look at it as well.
In stasis, life slows down and these moments come into view. Without the pain, without the nap, perhaps I wouldn’t have gone for that run. In another timeline, with no pandemic, maybe the moon would have just been another full moon. It wouldn’t have seemed so strange and beautiful.
How many more full moons will I see before I die? There is a finite number. Now that I’m stuck between one place and the next, I count the full moons, I count sunrises and sunsets, I count every day without pain. While I wait, I try to focus on all the little heartbreaks and miracles in the in-between days, the days that mean nothing at all, except at the moment you’re living them.
Jane Campbell (she/her) has an MFA from the University of British Columbia. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including Fourth Genre, Hazlitt, Grain, EVENT, Show Me All Your Scars: True Stories of Living with Mental Illness (In Fact Books), and Best Canadian Essays 2017 (Tightrope Books).
