>The Fragility of Life

I was seven months pregnant and I had to pee.

It wasn’t an unusual situation at that stage in my life, but it meant a detour from the elevator lobby outside my obstetrician’s office and a mad, waddling dash for the public restrooms across the hall. It also meant attempting to edge around a man pushing his wife in a wheelchair down the hallway. Just as I got around them, she puked, all over herself.

“Oh. Shoot,” she mumbled awkwardly. Her husband stopped, unsure of what to do next. I looked down and realized from her bald head and puffy face that she must have just completed a chemo treatment. In the most uncomfortable of juxtapositions, my obstetrician’s office, unofficially known as Baby Central here in Nashville, shared the floor with the Oncology Center.

“I’ll get some paper towels,” I volunteered, and I opened the door to the ladies room so that the woman’s husband could wheel her inside, where she could clean herself off. I grabbed a bunch of paper towels, wet them in the sink, and handed them to her. “Thanks,” she muttered, not meeting my eyes. I paused, unsure of what to do next. “Can I get you anything else?” I asked.

“No. Thanks.” She wouldn’t look at me. I went on to the bathroom, then propped the door open for her as I left. “There’s no one else in there,” I told her husband. I left. It was a small moment, an insignificant one, and yet I was so rattled by it that I couldn’t tell anyone about it until now, more than a year later.

I suppose I felt guilty that while I was wallowing in self-absorption coming out of my doctor’s office every month or so, obsessing over the baby’s heart rate, counting down the days until his due date, monitoring my weight gain with an eagle eye, right across the hall, women my age were fighting cancer. I would stand at the elevators each month, flushed and round bellied alongside other pregnant women who were breathlessly comparing ultrasound pictures or chatting with their husbands about whether to reserve a VIP suite in the maternity ward of the hospital. Meanwhile, another 30-something woman with a scarf around her head and a wad of cotton taped to the inside of her arm would stand across from us, staring down at her feet, willing the elevator doors to OPEN. DAMMIT.

Even now when I return to visit my doctor each year, I can’t imagine what that woman is going through, but I try. Thanks to the blogs I’ve read over the last few years, not to mention the health scares I’ve had personally, I try. I don’t know what to say. There isn’t anything to say. But I make eye contact. And I smile. And I think about the woman over and over again, months, even years down the road. And I wonder if she’s okay.

This post originally appeared on Parents.com.