It Runs in the Family by Frida Berrigan Read Free Book Online

interns and nurses instead of doctors, which was fine with me. It reminded me of the clinic we went to when I was growing up, except I had more than $100 taken out of every paycheck for the privilege. But I was only going for annual checkups and the occasional antibiotic. I never needed surgery or a specialist or anything exotic.
    When I later quit my job to live a life of almost monastic service and squalor at the Catholic Worker , it was not hard to walk away from health care. I was healthy and I resented the amount of money I had paid into the system for years. I figured if I needed anything health related, I could turn to friends of the Catholic Worker . I got sick only once—fever, fainting, cold sweats, vomiting. It was no fun. It was hot in my little third floor room, so friends got me down to the ground floor and into a wheelchair. They pushed me three or four blocks to another friend’s apartment, where I slept for two days in air-conditioned splendor and drank tons of Gatorade. No doctors were needed.
    When I moved to Connecticut to live with Patrick, he looked into adding me to his health care plan at work, but it would have cost more than 20 percent of his annual income, so we decided I would walk the tightrope without a net. I did just fine. No emergencies until the day I found myself testing positive for pregnancy at Planned Parenthood in New London.
    Now what? They told me that Connecticut provides health care for low-income pregnant women and babies. It is called HUSKY Health, like the UConn sports teams. I was in luck. The local hospital even had a staff person who helped women navigate the labyrinth of paperwork and bureaucracy to ensure that everyone who qualified for the program could access it. And it was not just for pregnancy-related care—I was ten weeks pregnant when I got my teeth cleaned for the first time in three years.
    The midwives we wanted to help deliver our baby accepted HUSKY insurance. And not only were we covered; we also got to make real choices about what kind of medical care was right for us. It was incredible; it was as if we lived in France. I was really relieved to be working with midwives, especially being pregnant at 38. At any hospital, I would have been seen as high-risk and pressured into lots of extra tests and stress. In contrast, the midwives explained all the tests I could take, why people take them, and then let Patrick and I make our own decisions about what made sense for us. We did a couple of ultrasounds and made sure I wasn’t anemic and that was pretty much it. I was healthy and strong and the baby was growing just fine.
    Then the big day came. My water broke, my contractions started, our family and midwives were called, and time passed. The better part of three days came and went and we labored—me and Patrick, the baby, the midwives, my mom, and my family. Finally, the midwives said, “The baby is posterior. The baby is stuck. We need to go to the hospital.”
    The local hospital told us that I would go straight into surgery and have a C-section immediately. So we tried calling a hospital further away. There, the doctor said, “Bring her in. You can stay with her. We’ll see what we can do to give her a natural childbirth.”
    We packed up for the longest car ride of my entire life. The backseat of a Toyota Corolla never seemed as small as it did at 4 am with a baby trying to come out of me. It was forty minutes of trying to ignore contractions, ignore how slow my husband was driving, ignore how uncomfortable I was, ignore that I wanted to be wearing lots more clothes or no clothes at all. When we finally arrived at the hospital, an orderly named Ted was waiting with a wheelchair. “Frida, right? Let’s go.” I cried with relief. All of a sudden I was in a room with computers and lights and nurses and monitors. Things were being attached to my body and I was being asked if I was allergic to anything and if I wanted to be visited by the chaplain. I got an