People ask -- what if your mother had been aborted?
In 1951, a woman in her early third trimester wasn't always decorating a nursery -- they knew it still wasn't certain they'd be having a healthy baby. So much could still happen.
Like my grandmother -- she wasn't expecting her baby until at least March. That Christmas Eve, the last she and my grandfather would have as non-parents, though, wasn't the usual extended family celebration that was her family's tradition. She'd been too sick, for awhile now, to do much of anything.
Granny wasn't a woman to let illness get her down -- during the late '20s, she trudged to school every day the untreated malaria she suffered (they were too poor for a doctor) let her -- about every other day, sometimes only one out of three. The other days she was having febrile seizures. She kept working as long as she could even when my grandfather told her to quit -- what's morning sickness when we need to save for a baby? Even as an octogenarian, she didn't want pain medicine when she broke her hip.
The doctor who came to the house that day examined her. He'd seen the symptoms, even if there wasn't really a definite name for the constellation of symptoms. Swelling. High blood pressure. And that was just the start -- he knew the things that would happen if the pregnancy continued. They weren't pretty. They often ended in death.
He left my grandmother to rest, and gave my grandfather the cure -- two bottles of castor oil. Said they could try for another baby, but he wouldn't recommend it. He suggested they adopt.
He brought them in to my grandmother, and she knew what it meant. And it did take both bottles.
Fortunately, my mother was born on Christmas Day, and was feisty enough to live. My grandmother was extremely sick for a month afterwards, including having at least one seizure. Mom was an only child. Grandpa wasn't going to risk losing his wife when he'd been given a gift by both of them surviving.
