Woman in a Pool of Blood
by me, Mary Stebbins Taitt
Artrage digital painting

Blood and Tears

by Mary Stebbins Taitt · 338 words

I lay in a pool of blood, inert. I thought I was dying, but when they came to get me, I fought like a wildcat. Finally, they threatened to put me in a straightjacket. There were more of them than there were of me. I stopped fighting and they lifted me onto a stretcher and carried me away.

They asked who my parents were and I said, no parents. That was a lie, but my father had disowned me and we weren’t speaking. I said I had no money, which was true. They put me in the charity ward at Bellevue. I had had a miscarriage and was so despondent I wanted to die.

The charity ward was a huge room full of hundreds of beds, jammed close with only a small space between them filled hundreds of poor, sick women. (Apparently, they didn’t believe in the germ theory of disease). It was November, 1965. I was 19 years old.

The woman in the bed next to me died. She lay staring at the ceiling for hours. Finally, a nurse closed her eyes and pulled a sheet over her face. She lay there beside me with her nose pushing up the sheet until I decided I did not want to die, there, nameless, in that lonely, overcrowded ward.

Okay, I'll live, I told myself, and my friends came and donated blood so that I could have a transfusion to make up for the blood I had lost. Peter. Eric. Ken.

I was four month along, but the baby had died earlier and started to be reabsorbed. I had hated her, and wept at the thought. I had loved her, and had named her Gina Maria. Suddenly, she was gone.

Now, years and years later, my parents are gone, too. I never told them about their lost grandchild. They too had been lost to me, at the time. When I found them again, I did not want to break their hearts. Instead, I half-drown in a flood of tears.