That evening she emptied what was left of her stomach contents and couldn’t keep down a morsel for two straight days, until she finally went straight to the doctor’s office with the same symptoms. She hoped he had something to help with this stomach flu bug that simply would not let up. Half of the elementary school she taught at was perpetually sick with something, so it seemed a logical conclusion. Rather than offering her a quick remedy of Pepto-Bismol to put the symptoms behind her, he instead confirmed a long road ahead of her:
“You’re expecting!” he had declared.
“Expecting what?” she asked dumbly, unaware of the pregnancy brain that would only worsen.
“A baby, of course!”
By the time her baby bump grew the size of a grapefruit—the doctor had compared it to—Bernadette swiftly lost her teaching job, since obviously a pregnant woman was incapable of caring for children. Along with the job went their second income that allowed them to afford a proper home to raise their growing family in. But that wasn’t all Bernadette lost. Next went her entire wardrobe, shoes that fit, handfuls of her hair, and sleeping through the night without umpteen pit stops to the bathroom.
Like Sam, the word grapefruit held a whole new meaning.
Bits of Bernadette’s sanity continued leaving as she cleaned marker off the walls during Alonzo Jr.’s terrible twos, demonstrated toilet training on his wooden potty chair during the tedious threes, and recently learned just how opinionated he could be during his feisty fours. Some days she wasn’t sure they would make it to the fantastic fives that her mother assured her waited around the corner.
“How can you be so sure you’re pregnant? We have been eating a lot of carbohydrates lately.” Sam bit into her third shortbread cookie, only now noticing how her own skirt waist felt a little snugger than usual.
“I just know.”
“It could be indigestion.”
“It could also be a baby.”
Having never been pregnant herself, Sam had no real idea of the changes—the varied alarm bells that rang and whistled, announcing Intruder Alert! Terrorist Attack!—a woman’s body went through the moment those tiny cells took hold. If she knew how powerful a singular cell could be, how a pea-sized cluster could topple an entity a thousand times bigger, make her sob at the slightest offense or sprint for the bathroom at the faintest smell, Sam would have never asked the question, because when a woman knew, she knew.
“I’m two weeks late, and I’m already feeling the morning sickness, so I’m pretty certain.”
“You could always pee on wheat and barley,” Sam suggested with a mischievous grin.
“I’m sorry, what?” Bernadette asked, laughing.
Sam was full of weird facts and unusual humor that few understood, with Raul and Bernadette, and maybe even Thomas Cook had he been given the opportunity, being the only exceptions. Such as how in ancient Egypt, medical professionals asked potentially pregnant women to urinate on bags of wheat and barley. They believed that germination of the grain indicated not only pregnancy, but gender: wheat for a boy and barley for a girl. Surprisingly, this method was 70% accurate when scientists tested this theory in 1963.
“Just some bad homeopathy humor.” Sam chuckled. “But joking aside, I’ve got just the thing to help with the morning sickness.” And then Sam remembered her father and the grapefruit, and decided it was best to leave the health advice to a real health expert. “On second thought, you should let your doctor take care of you.”
“Actually, I’m thinking of using a midwife this time around.”
“A midwife? Why?”
“When I was pregnant with Alonzo Jr., my doctor prescribed me something called DES to prevent miscarriage, claiming I had low estrogen. I never felt right when I took it… but the doctor insisted I keep taking it. And if I didn’t? Judgement and condemnation and a list of reasons how I was going to fail my baby.”
During her Nosartin research, Sam had come across a study done on DES, the complicatedly long drug name that Bernadette was referring to that treated low estrogen. For almost twenty years, since as far back as 1953, trials unequivocally showed that the drug wasn’t effective, in fact possibly dangerous for the baby, and yet Bernadette’s doctor still prescribed it?
“I didn’t know they were still prescribing that…”
“And don’t get me started on how the doctor tuckered out a few hours into my labor and tried demanding I get a C-section in order to speed things along so that he didn’t miss his golf tee time. I just want to have the kind of pregnancy and birthing experience that I feel most comfortable with, you know? And ever since you told me about your dad’s heart medicine and the pharmaceutical scandal, I just don’t know what to think anymore.”
“Well, there’s something I haven’t told you about my father’s death…” Sam began, afraid that being honest with her friend would completely discredit everything else she told her about DES, Thomas Cook, or anything health related. But if there was one thing Sam valued most, it was integrity, so she shared her darkest secret with her closest friend. “My father’s medicine was not the cause of his death. I wrongly blamed the pharmaceutical company for something I actually did wrong.”
“Sam.” Bernadette cocked her head as she always did when making a most important observation. “Trust your instincts. You sniff something’s not on the up and up? Follow that trail. I love you, honey, but you need to believe in yourself more.”
“It’s hard to trust myself when I made a terrible mistake.”
“We all make mistakes. It’s an unintentional consequence of life. But you know Cook was paying doctors to prescribe things—which is unethical. Even if the medicine didn’t cause your dad’s death, the conflict of interest and kickbacks are illegal and still need to be exposed.”
By now Alonzo Jr. was jumping up and down at the living room window, exclaiming that there was a strange man stealing Sam’s pony and making his way up their front yard.
“That must be Raul with Fido.”
“Ooh, does this mean I get to finally meet your boyfriend?”
Bernadette was dying to meet the man who stole Sam’s heart, even if he did look a bit disturbing as his gaze darted to and fro like a paranoid pothead.
“Is he okay?”
They both noted the odd way Raul paced, holding the lead rope to the infamous pet that dethroned Bernadette as the village villain and placed Sam at the top of the hit list.
“He’s probably just deep in thought,” Sam rationalized. Though on second glance, something definitely looked off.
“So what’s the deal with Fido the House Pony, anyway?” Bernadette asked, gazing out the frosted window at the thigh-high mini-horse whose velvety lips rummaged through the snow in search of grass.
“There’s not much of a story there. It was a year after my dad died, and I was driving through the country and saw him, skinnier than the rails that fenced him in a pasture of dirt, with no water. He looked like he was on death’s doorstep, so I simply trespassed onto the property, opened his gate, and led him out to my car by tying my scarf around his neck.”
“You’re kidding!”
“I managed to entice him into my convertible with an apple I had on hand, put the top down on that freezing winter day, and drove him home with me—perilously slow, I might add. I’m pretty sure the wind chill was in the negatives that day, but Fido didn’t seem to mind. I think he’d rather freeze to death in my car than starve to death on that farm. So when I finally got him home, he headed straight into the house! I realized then and there he wasn’t a pony but in fact a dog. So I named him Fido and it stuck.”
As Sam finished her story, a bang on the door was followed by Raul yelling, “Sam! You need to come out here urgently! It’s bad—really bad!”
