An Idea. Spring 2024
Ru Lee, my third (and final) baby, arrived in the world on a Thursday morning with an orchestrated urgency; a scheduled emergency: get this baby out at a time appropriate to the rota but within this window please. She came at 37 weeks, the culmination of a pregnancy that felt, in no uncertain terms, like a prolonged test of endurance. Hyperemesis gravidarum, gestational diabetes and a bout of inappropriate sinus tachycardia, all of which sound, variously, like Victorian ailments or the names of mid-tier indie bands, meant that by the eighth month, I felt like an episode of House. Albeit probably a rejected one, a confusing case but with a very boring storyline.
At one point, a few weeks before, I shuffled to St Margarets station at 4:30am while Alex stayed back with our other progeny. I’d woken to a resting heart rate of 159 that appeared to be steadily climbing. I tried a bath; attempted meditation (a skill I’ve never possessed, so why anxious, third-trimester me thought she might master it at 3am is unclear); put on my favourite comedy podcast (Off Menu), but eventually gave in and called antenatal. They advised me to come in. Immediately.
With no family nearby, driving feeling distinctly unsafe, and an Uber incompatible with barely managed hyperemesis, I waddled the 200 metres to the station, and, once admitted, they gave me beta blockers. They then proceeded to watch, with visible concern, as my already-low blood pressure plunged beyond 79/50. I lay there, feeling increasingly unmoored, while a nurse stood beside me squeezing IV bags, trying to coax fluid into reluctant veins in order to raise my blood pressure to something approximating normal.
Eventually, after weeks of tinkering, an iron infusion here, marginal dietary improvements there, micro dosing beta blockers and toying with steroids to increase my blood pressure so we could up the other meds, the consultants decided to address the “root cause” of all this biological melodrama.
The root cause being, of course, the baby.
And so we were told to come in the next morning. Bring a bag. Bring the father. Alex, pragmatic, loyal, peckish, woke early and had a bowl of crunchy cornflakes the size of a mixing basin. A small but twofold domestic injustice, given that I had a) spent four months on my GDM diet and was b) now nil-by-mouth ahead of surgery. Then he bought a bun and a coffee at the station. We took the train because I had developed a deep, almost personal vendetta against the Kingston car park, and the idea of navigating it pre-op felt like it might be the straw that broke my aching back.
Alex changed into purple scrubs, which he later described, not inaccurately, as making him look like a massive, self-important plum, and just as I was being wheeled into theatre, turned to me and asked, with complete sincerity, if I had any idea how long the whole thing would take. “I’m a bit hungry,” he said. But I was too busy being prepped to birth our third child, and too tired to argue with a man dressed like a bottle of Ribena. Also - he’d sat through this process twice before.
I lost a lot of blood. The baby needed oxygen. I was sterilised.
It sounds bleak, written flatly like that, but in the moment it was serene. She arrived to Pink Moon and I lay while she was monitored by the paediatric team, small and furious and mine. We named her Ru Lee, though her siblings call her Love; her two-year-old brother’s voice when he says it contains none of the performative affection people often show babies, just a quiet ownership. Love Lee. It suits her.
In the strange daze of painkillers and adrenaline that followed, I had an idea; or rather, the stubborn prelude to one. A refusal to let the mess of postpartum life stop me from pursuing something that felt both ridiculous and necessary: I decided I wanted to start a business. An app specifically, imagined in the midst of all the medical drama of the preceding months, amid the disorienting white hum of a recovery ward, while being intermittently checked for haemorrhaging. It made as much sense as anything does when you're stitched and luminous with anaesthetic and not yet sure what hour it is. But there it was. The start of the idea.
