Four years ago, you gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. Five days later, you abandoned her on the steps of a hospital in Yiyang City. It was February and must have been a chilly night underneath the southern Chinese moon. I wonder how many blankets you owned with which to wrap your delicate newborn baby. Maybe you sacrificed your own garments to fortify the only threadbare cloth used to insulate her tender skin.

~~~~~~

Cathy Crenshaw Doheny is an award-winning freelance writer, specializing in creative nonfiction. Her works have been featured in various online and print publications in the US, Canada, Australia, and Ireland. She is the winner of the Kaixin Inaugural Writing Competition, as well as a multi-award winner on the Notes and Grace Notes site. You may read more about her writing at http://cathydoheny.blogspot.com

Tags: Adoption, birth mother, china, chinese adoption, Daughter, Love, mother, pregnancy

Dear Doctor,
I am writing this after your death because I could not bring myself to do so while you were alive. It has been years now since your death but parts of me are still haunted by what you did to me.

I came to you with the trust of an innocent, someone who life had not done wrong yet. You were a doctor. A man who saved peopled, who helped those who were in need.

Here I was just a few weeks pregnant with no insurance and scared to death. I came to your office and saw a nurse who was nice. She told me I was six weeks along and everything I was experiencing–like the nausea, dizziness and bloating–were normal. I saw you briefly after speaking with the nurse. You looked like a hard man. My gut clenched but my mind shot down my intuition. You were a doctor, not someone to fear. I was sent home with an appointment to return at the twelve-week mark.

The next week, not only was the nausea worse, but so was the bloating and dizziness. I called your office. “It’s just morning sickness,” you told the nurse to tell me.

I fought through it for another week. Then it got bad. It got really bad.

I came back to your office again afraid, uncertain. On the ultrasound, there was barely as spec on the screen. The nurse would tell me nothing. Then you came in.

You said that you were not sure the baby had a heartbeat. You said part of it was mine. You said there was nothing you could do if I was to miscarry. You sent me home and told me to bring back any tissue that expelled.

You told me that.

You, a doctor, told me to go home where I would miscarry my baby and then you told me to bring it back for tests.

Shaking and crying, I went home, alone, still sick, but now, I was truly afraid. I called a friend. She picked me up immediately and brought me to her doctor, a nice gentleman who had sympathy in his eyes and my gut said, “Trust this man.”

He did an internal ultrasound, what you should have done, and found my baby.

My baby was long dead. My baby had started deteriorating. The fetus was being absorbed back into my bloodstream. Do you know what this can do to a person? You’re a doctor, you are supposed to know. I could have died.

You sent me home to die.

That is what was happening in my body. My baby was killing me because my body was not opening to expel him or her.

I went in for a D&C the next morning. They had to remove everything that they could as quickly as they could so I would not die. Thankfully, the damage did not affect me enough to prevent me from having two beautiful sons later in life.

But there was damage from you not taking care of me like you should have. Years after my last son was born, I went for a tubal ligation that gave me more scares than it should have. That is because to do the procedure, they had to go through scar tissue the D & C had left behind. They asked me if I had had numerous abortions because the scar tissue was so bad. It felt like they were asking me if I was a whore because of you. I had to explain to them the only thing close to an abortion I ever had was the D&C, which, if done earlier when the baby had died, would not have caused as much scar tissue.

I learned after my miscarriage that you had some troubles keeping your medical status as a doctor. It was in the papers that you were not giving teenage girls adequate care. It turns out that you did not like unwed mothers and felt unwed teen mothers did not deserve the care you deemed proper to a woman with a husband. How shameful of you. You were a doctor, a man people looked up to for help and care no matter what their age.

I have not forgiven you. I will not forgive you. What you did when you left me to die was unacceptable. I will be haunted for the rest of my life because of what you did and didn’t do.

You are dead now, but that doesn’t ease the wounds you created. It doesn’t make all your wrongs just go away. I have to live with what you did to me every day of my life.

I spit on your grave. I curse your soul to a hell far worse than even I can imagine, and my imagination is quite vivid. In fact, I take that back. I don’t curse you. I will forget you. I will hope and pray that you are forgotten.

Men like you should not be remembered.

Signed,
Linda: The girl you didn’t care about.

~~~~

This letter is a condensed version of the original, which will appear in the first Unsent Letters print compilation.

Linda St.Cyr is a professional freelance writer, artist and poet. She has been published in numerous online publications including Club Mom, Associated Content and outlets of Demand Media. She is currently working on a novel while raising two children in the beautiful Pocono Mountains. To learn more about Linda and her writing, please visit her author’s website at the following link:  http://sites.google.com/site/stcyrlinda/

Tags: baby, bad doctors, doctors, medical, miscarriage, pregnancy, teen pregnancy

When I came to you, scared, alone, young, pregnant, and you told me I might have cancer, I did not expect you to hug me or hold my hand or even to provide any emotional support whatsoever. I didn’t expect you to sit with me all day and answer all my questions. I wasn’t looking to be coddled.

I did, however, expect you to be human.

So when I asked you, “What about the baby?”

And you answered, “What are you doing having sex so young anyway?”

I was stunned.

You proceeded to preach to me about how teenagers shouldn’t be having sex without being prepared to deal with the consequences.

At the time, I said nothing, but the tears fell from my eyes.

You couldn’t even find your soul then and said, “There’s no reason to be crying. You got yourself into this.”

First, I know that teenagers shouldn’t have sex if they aren’t prepared to deal with the consequences. I was. I planned to have the baby. I did have the baby. She’s a healthy adult now, thank you very much.

And as for getting myself into it, I’m not sure how I caused myself to have cancer. It wasn’t cervical cancer caused by HPV that is being so advertised today, but rather a type of cancer I could not have caused myself to have at the age of 16.

So was it your belief that I had cancer because I had sex? Is that the message you tried to implant in my brain?

When the nurse came in after you had left and asked me what was wrong, I will never forget how she mumbled under her breath, “That bastard.”

If not for that nurse, I might have continued seeing you. I might have let you continue to berate me.

I’m grateful she was there, and she directed me to a new doctor.

Not that it matters to you, Dr. Pride, but I am now cancer free, and have been for years. My daughter, the child you didn’t want me to have, is a happy and healthy adult in college.

But when I came to you, I was scared, lonely, and had questions. You treated me like I was nothing, beneath you, not worthy of your time.

I remember something on an episode of the Golden Girls that Dorothy said that I think sums up how I feel perfectly: “One day [sic], you’re going to be sick and afraid, and when that day comes… as angry as I was, as angry as I am and as angry as I always will be, I still wish you a better doctor than you were to me.”

Signed,
Not A Kid Anymore

Tags: bad doctor, bad doctors, doctor, health, letter, pregnancy, teen, teen pregnancy

My Dear Ex Friend,

The idea of this letter has been in my head for several years. I never wrote it before because I didn’t want to hurt your feelings or put you on the spot about your behavior.

I guess what I need to know is this: What happened? What changed? What’s your problem?

Our friendship, I thought, was lifelong. We became friends in the first grade, and we soon became permanent fixtures in each other’s lives and families. I knew everything about you; you knew everything about me. We became roommates in college and shared our lives–good and bad–with each other.

When you married, you asked me to be your maid of honor. When I married, you were mine. I met your little girl shortly after her birth. My husband and I took time out of our lives and drove to your home to meet your daughter. This visit involved a drive of several hours, but that is was what we did. That’s what friends do.

Now, it’s my turn to express my enormous disappointment in you and our friendship. Shortly after I announced my pregnancy, things changed with you. You didn’t call or email as much. We would get the random photo or card in the mail, but not much else. At my baby shower, you were two hours late. Your gift looked like you stopped on your way and picked out whatever you could find on the clearance rack and then threw in a little stuffed toy for good measure.

After we had our baby boy, I invited you to come up and meet him. You didn’t come. I should remind you that we live in the same hometown that we grew up in, the same town your parents and grandparents still live in. This trip would not have been out of your way. I continued to invite you to our house every weekend for the first seven months of our son’s life. Your response would have been one of the following: “I can’t. I have to work”; “Maybe, I’ll let you know later” (However, I would never hear from you later.); and I even received this one a few times, “Yeah, I’ll call you when I’m getting ready to leave.” (Guess what? I never got a phone call and you never showed up.)

After seven months of playing this game, I was done. I continued to respond, although not as enthusiastically, to your emails and stuff. Then, our son’s first birthday arrived. Should I invite you or should I just forget about it? Well, I decided to invite you. A year had gone by and you had yet to meet him; maybe this would finally be the breaking point.

Oh, my goodness! You responded and it was a yes!

Finally! Oh, but you’ll have to come early because you have plans late that evening. Well, the party started at one o’clock, so I would think that would leave you enough time, but whatever. At least you’re actually going to come. The week of the party, you sent a birthday card to my son. That’s weird, if you were planning on coming to the party why would you mail the birthday card ahead of time. Why?

Oh, well, at least you were coming to the party. The day of the party arrived and you didn’t come early. It was one o’clock and you were still not there. The party was over and you never showed. You never called. I wondered what happened.

Later that evening, I received an email from you. Something came up, on that Saturday afternoon that just had to be taken care of. You hoped I understood.

Really, you hoped I’d understand. Well, maybe if it hadn’t been 365 days since my child was born and you still had yet to meet him, I would have understood. But, no, I don’t really care what came up. I don’t care one little bit. I don’t understand.

I am angry and I am done… again. I stopped all contact with you for almost two months. No response to emails, nothing. Then, I began to feel bad and once again, I call you. Everything seemed fine, as we talked on the phone, so what do I do? I invite you to our home, once again, for the following weekend. Your response was an astounding yes and you said you’d call me later when you knew which day you would be up. I’m so happy again.

Well, later that week, I never heard from you. You never came.

You have still not met my son.

Let me tell you what my life has been like since then. I spent about a week crying, a lot, even crying myself to sleep. The realization had finally set in that you didn’t care about me or my family. We are not friends anymore. When a long, 20 plus year friendship, ends, without any real explanation, it’s a very difficult thing to understand.

Did I hurt you somehow? I don’t recall. Did I offend you? No, I don’t think so. I talked to other people about what they think happened. The overall conclusion was that you became jealous of me for one reason or another. Maybe you saw how happy I was and you were envious of that, because you were not happy and you did not want me to know about your relationship troubles.

Maybe you were jealous because I was quitting work to be a stay at home mother. Maybe you were jealous over our new home. There were a lot of theories, but nothing that anyone knew for sure.

Shortly after our last conversation, I found out I was pregnant again. We now have two children that you will probably never meet. We have moved into our new home, which you will probably never visit. A lot has changed, for the good and bad that you will never know. Our friendship is gone. I am over it and healing has occurred. I don’t want or need anything from you. I have moved on. I still don’t know what happened, and I don’t really need to know anymore.

You did need to hear these words, though. You did need to know how much you hurt me. Oh well, once again, I am saying: I am done.

Signed,
No Longer Your Friend

~~~

Kristi Cramer is a freelance writer, mother of two precious little boys, and former educator. She writes nonfiction articles on parenting, family and education. She is currently trying her hand at fiction writing and story-telling. Please visit her blog site at www.raisegoodkids.today.com

Tags: ex friend, ex friendship, friend, friendship, lost friendship, pregnancy