The Tumor

By Kris Ann Valdez

PROMPT—Never will I forget ...

I gave birth to a monster.

Never will I forget how the calcified, tumorous creature coaxed every doctor and nurse from the surrounding corridor into my delivery room to marvel.

Do you mind? they mumbled, ogling, as if they’d earned their way into the depths of a crime scene, and deserved a good show.

Go ahead. I glanced at the beast with mixed feelings of wonder and fear. I’d never birthed a monster before.

Next to me, my OB fidgeted on her stool. We need to do some testing. I’m concerned that—she inhaled the antiseptic air—and the rest of her sentence was swept away in a swell of more visitors.

What are your concerns? I pressed, confusion closing my throat. I gripped the bed’s sides to hold myself in.

The tumors, my OB said.

As if responding, the baby wailed from his pterodactyl lungs, more like a screech than a cry. My husband and I glanced at each other—our other two hadn’t sounded anything like prehistoric dinosaurs when they were born. This one, we knew, would be different. Dr. Petersen pinched the back of her glove, and I wondered if the palms under the plastic were sweating like the soft flesh under my breasts. My mind hummed.

Strange sounds crawled from behind Dr. Petersen’s lips, slow and careful, forming words I could barely comprehend. We should start with some tests. Her gaze shifted away from me. We need to rule out cancer.

Cancer?

My mind replayed the last few months, analyzing every ache, every fatigue during my pregnancy for a sign I must have missed, a reason for this terrifying word. I glanced down at my baby with his large, panicked eyes and couldn’t breath.

A wave of visitors, two more nurses, and an old, gray male doctor entered.

Never seen anything like this! The old gray doctor stroked his chin. Beneath his professional veneer, I sensed a morbid fascination, a detachment that made fear gnarl and twist inside me.

I sucked in air, longing for privacy. A respirator, perhaps. Something that would give me a strong breath and peace for a second—did such a device exist? Where better to ask for such a thing than a hospital?

Cancer? Really? I whispered as if my OB were playing a cruel joke. The baby’s cries echoed in my head, and I felt the stinging pressure of liquid gold building in my ducts.

My husband stepped in, worry etched in his forehead, and gripped my hand. So what’s the plan?

I’m going to get pathology involved, said Dr. Petersen.

We glanced at the counter. Meanwhile, a nurse handed me my perfect baby boy swaddled in the hospital’s signature striped blanket. For two months, we’d attended weekly fetal specialist appointments because they were worried from the ultrasounds that he was deathly ill.

Now, I held him, a healthy six-pound mass, and it was my health stretched between unknowns in a dizzying shift of fates, as my monstrous, alien-like placenta was prepared for the lab.

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Kris Ann Valdez is a freelance journalist and creative writer. Follow her @krisannvaldezwrites and @annvalwrites (pen name). She writes from Phoenix, Arizona.