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T A B L E++T A L K

Parents who are still in college discuss term papers and diapers in Table Talk's Mothers Who Think area.

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R E C E N T L Y

Time for one thing
By Kate Moses
If you've been drinking my eggnog, you better not drive
(12/02/97)

Reading between the whines
By Inda Schaenen
The sevenfold path to coping with seven-step parenting manuals
(12/01/97)

BY CAROLINE LEAVITT | I didn't exactly choose my obstetrician for all the right reasons. I admit there were some: He was tops in his field, he delivered 99 percent of his own babies, his office stocked all the latest and greatest in magazines and, best of all, you never got a chance to read them because you never had to wait more than five minutes. The main reason I chose Roy was because of the way he had delivered my friend Emma's baby -- with so much genuine awe and wonder and boundless joy that he had actually exclaimed, "Oh my God, she's beautiful!" and meant it.

I liked going for checkups with Roy. I was so thrilled at being pregnant in my 40s that everything delighted me -- the dizzying morning sickness, the varicose veins, the weight gain if I so much as looked at a cough drop -- and my elation seemed to fuel Roy's. We were a great partnership, joking, trading stories, both exulting over my swelling belly. My pregnancy was so blissful and uneventful that it seemed clear to both of us that if pregnancy was a profession, well, I was really good at it, and my rapid promotion to motherhood seemed in the bag.

Until, that is, I gave birth.

My son, Max, was born at 3 in the morning, a routine delivery. My husband, Jeff, beside me in green scrubs, started quietly to cry as Roy held Max up. Looking at Max, I felt as if a shining constellation had exploded within me.

Three days later Max came home. Seven weeks, five operations and two near deaths later, I came home to him.

I had a Factor VIII inhibitor, a blood disease caused by the pregnancy, a condition so rare there had been only four cases like it before me. It stops your blood from clotting. With this disease, any movement can cause instantaneous, fatal hemorrhage. The good news? It goes away. The trick is to make it through the two or three years that might take.

I didn't see my baby for seven weeks. I couldn't remember seeing Jeff. I swam in a hallucinatory sea of morphine and anesthesia and the drugs they gave me to make me forget what was happening to me. When I rose finally from my delirium, it was Jeff who filled in the details: the five operations that no one thought I would survive, the nurses praying at my bedside, holding my hand, whispering incantations into my ear. And it was Jeff who told me that the most terrifying moment of all, the moment when he began to realize just how grave things had become, had been when he had come across Roy in the waiting room, silently weeping, my chart in his hand.

Sometimes, with illness, enduring the cure is more devastating than the disease itself. It was that way with me. I couldn't move. No opening was left untubed. There was so much blood taken and given that my veins began to collapse. Everything caused pain. And worst of all, I couldn't see my baby. The medicine made me so paranoid that I began to imagine a medical conspiracy. I was sure the doctors were doing experiments on my son. I trusted no one but Jeff -- and Roy, who came every morning at 10, who patiently told me Max was fine and I was simply too ill to see him, who explained everything he knew about my disease over and over, as many times as I needed to hear it. Sometimes, he did nothing more than sit in a chair and calmly listen to me abuse him, accusing him of orchestrating the disease, of keeping my son from me, screaming at him to just not bother to come back anymore, and then waiting anxiously for his next visit to begin the very second he left.

N E X T+P A G E: The cruel joke of recovery