The Pakistani Disease

The bizarro dreams just keep on coming.

I woke up completely drenched in sweat last night and terrified. Jason had gone to a friend's house after I fell asleep (remember, I sleep during the day time thanks to my job), and I actually had to call him, feeling every bit the meak, needy pregnant girl I was playing, and ask him if he would come home soon.

There's just something about nightmares, even after you've pinched yourself and woken up, that seem so permeatingly frightening and real in the moments directly after, no matter how silly the contents.

I laid in my sweat puddle for a full half an hour before Jason walked through the bedroom door (I ask too much of him-- in one of the rare instances he gets to sit with a friend, playing guitar and not talking to me about baby this and baby that, he gets summoned home and comes without so much of a groan). He got in bed next to me, stroking my head to help me fall back asleep (at this point I'm two hours way from my 2AM work roll call). And the second he asked me to tell him about it, the dream, only then do I understand how irrational my lasting fear is.

I was about to go into labor and was getting one last ultrasound before the big event. Jason is out of town, so it's only my mom in the room with me.

The tech grows quiet, examining my about-to-be-born child, and stands up quickly to summon the doctor. He enters, and quietly, sadly, tells me my baby has Partisimin-syndrome. I just made that up because what he said, the name, came out in a jumble, in the voice of a Charlie Brown grown-up.

This rare disease, he tells me, is only seen in Pakistani people. This doesn't seem to puzzle him so much, even though I'm not Pakistani. Those are just the facts. I immediately start panicking, aside from the obvious bad news, because Jason is going to think I've cheated on him with a Pakistani person! And I don't even know any Pakistani people! And why do these things always happen to me?

The doctor is flipping through a diagnoses book. "Well, it can apparently also be caused by Propofol, which you took two weeks ago."

Propofol--aka Twilight Sleep--is the drug that killed Michael Jackson. It's what I've been given countless times before a colonoscopy.

The disease, he tells me, is characterized by an extraordinarily enlarged forehead, nose and lips. They show me the ultrasound results, and sure enough, there's my baby, looking like a Pakistani Elephant Man. And, oh yeah, it also causes mental retardation. This is where my breakdown really begins. I'm standing up, screaming, tearing at the walls and shaking the doctor by his shoulders. "HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN??" I'm shouting. "I CAN GET HIM A NOSE JOB, BUT I CAN'T GET HIM A NEW BRAIN! AND I DON'T EVEN KNOW ANY PAKISTANI PEOPLE!!!"

The doctor, the ultrasound tech, my mom, and another nurse-aide are in the room. She's been standing timidly in the corner the whole time during my melt down. The doctor has obviously forbidden her from speaking, as she's some sort of student, not a medical professional. And she's Pakistani.

So I'm standing there screaming, and they're all staring at me with blank expressions. I keep demanding that someone HUG ME, how could no one be hugging me when I'm going through this?? And they all just keep staring.

Suddenly, the quiet Pakistani girl jumps out of the corner in defiance, the doctor giving her the evil eye, and throws her arms around me. She lets me bawl into her arms. And now, only now, I feel a little better. It's going to be ok. Me and my Pakistani Elephant Man baby will be just fine.

The doctor takes me to the bed where I'm supposed to start pushing, and everyone is surrounding me, waiting for the big moment.

Then I woke up. And even with Jason's attempts, I never fell back asleep before work, so I'm now running on four hours.