My Beautiful Memory

My Beautiful Memory

by David Rowan
My Beautiful Memory

My Beautiful Memory

by David Rowan

Paperback(Reprint)

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Overview

Alexandra Rowan earned a double major degree in creative writing and communications. Shortly after her graduation in 2013 she died suddenly and without warning because of her use of hormone-based birth control. This book is a testament to her life, written by her father, David. My Beautiful Memory examines her life and death, and describes the difficult journey that her parents had to undertake following their loss. It concludes with an examination of the US drug industry’s influence over the regulation of these drugs that kill over one thousand women each year. Alexandra was a young woman with a love of many things, but her chief passion was writing. Latter parts of the book are written in her own words.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781785357640
Publisher: Collective Ink
Publication date: 02/05/2019
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 360
Product dimensions: 5.42(w) x 8.49(h) x 0.79(d)

About the Author

David Rowan is head of the not-for-profit Alexandra L. Rowan Foundation, which promotes creative writing via an internship program and annual writing festival at the University of Pittsburgh, in memory of his daughter. He collaborates with the National Blood clot Alliance and other organizations to raise awareness about the risks of using certain hormone-based contraceptives. David was recently featured in documentary 'Sweetening the Pill', produced by TV personality Ricki Lake in association with Holly Grigg-Spall and her Zero Books' title of the same name. David lives in Houston, Texas.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

August 1990 — Birth

The London summer of 1990 was exceptional; for many weeks temperatures had soared into the 80s. Most Brits, after their first flush of excitement about actually having a summer, were now back into their usual mode of moaning about the weather. "Another Scorching Day, No End in Sight" shouted newspaper headlines. For Roz, in her second trimester, the heat simply added to the misery of a difficult pregnancy. Lying in bed on the top floor of an old hospital with no air-conditioning, her enforced bed-rest was a taxing proposition and she sweated out the days with her fellow bedmates, staring out across the dirty slate rooftops of the city center.

Although the initial stages of her pregnancy had seemed normal, as time progressed Roz's blood pressure had gradually increased. At first the doctor had simply advised rest. When this had no effect, full bed-rest was ordered. But it was all to no end, and finally she'd been admitted to University College Hospital (UCH), an imposing Victorian red-brick complex just off the top end of Tottenham Court Road. Roz knew that this was the right place to be: As a medical secretary in Houston (and in England before we'd moved to the States), on our arrival in London she'd done research into the many hospitals near our flat and had concluded that UCH was by far the best in terms of prenatal care. She'd even sought out a position there, interviewed successfully, and ended up working at the place. She had thus got to know the ins and outs of its operation; who were the good doctors, who were the not-so-good, the cranky ward sisters and the kind ones. The hospital was an old building with many floors and definitely no air-conditioning in most of its wards. So here she now lay with the other mums-to-be, like rows of beached whales lying on their beds glistening in the heat, all windows opened, table fans whirring, waiting for the contractions to start.

Throughout her weeks of confinement there, my ritual was to climb the stairs each evening and hang out with her for as long as I was allowed. My routine was: board the sweaty, smelly, and crowded Tube near my office at Barbican; ride four stops on the Metropolitan, District and Circle line; exit at Great Portland Street and walk five minutes to the hospital entrance. After my visiting time with Roz ended, I would then make a 45-minute walk up through Camden to our place in Kentish Town, usually stopping off for fish and chips or a kebab on the way. The next day, repeat, and so on. It was a tedious routine, but we'd both embarked on our quest for a family with eyes wide open, and we considered our efforts to be worthwhile.

At the age of 39, Roz was relatively old for her first pregnancy, but was in generally good health. Neither of us had anticipated any major problems, although maybe Roz subconsciously did when she researched and selected UCH? Her rising blood pressure was a mystery to us, but not to the doctors: We had never heard of pre-eclampsia, but here it was, putting Roz on full hospital bed-rest. The causes of this sickness are essentially unknown, but the problem affects around 1 in 20 pregnancies, usually showing up in the second trimester and continuing for some time after birth. It was worrying for us both, but not overly so; we simply dealt with it and continued to look forward to our baby.

So, the days and weeks passed, me with my routine, Roz with her boring and sweaty confinement. Meanwhile, her BP numbers quietly continued their inexorable rise to danger-point.

Despite the hot weather, I'd been sleeping well, even though our apartment lacked air-conditioning: The long walk home every night and the couple of pints I usually drank along the way all helped get me off quickly once in bed. Following our move from Houston we had bought a two-bedroom ground-floor place on Torriano Avenue in a corner of Kentish Town close to where it merges with Tufnell Park. This area of London is old and working class. There were no leafy gardens and stuccoed mansions for us, just rows of terraced houses that had, for the most part, been converted into flats. Our mid-terrace place was nothing special, but it was all we could afford in the sky-high real estate environment of central London. We occupied the ground-floor garden flat, while the upper two floors had been made into a self-contained three-bedroomed apartment. It was a nice enough place, close to both work and Hampstead Heath, and within walking distance of most of central London. One enjoyable quirk of our home was that it had once been owned by Tom Bell, an English actor best known for being one of the many 'Doctor Who's' on the BBC. We sometimes received breathless fan-mail for him from as far away as Japan. Living and working in the city, we had both learned not to rely on public transport of any kind, and although I had a car, driving was next to impossible. To be more specific, driving was possible, parking was impossible: Whenever we managed to get a spot close to the flat we were always reluctant to go anywhere in the car again and thus lose our sacred parking place. I therefore walked to as many places as possible, including the hospital, resorting to the Tube only when the distance was too great, or when I was especially short of time.

During our time in Torriano Avenue, we'd both gotten used to hearing our noisy, horrible upstairs neighbor clumping around. Consequently, I could normally ignore random noises and sleep on right through them. This particular night, however, I was eventually roused by a constant banging on the front door. I awoke with vague memories of repeated ringing noises that I'd apparently managed to ignore, but this banging wouldn't go away. I got up and stumbled half-asleep to the front door, expecting to find some drunken friend of our neighbor, or even Dominic himself who had perhaps somehow managed to lose his front door key. Instead, I was greeted by two policemen.

"You Mr Rowan?" one inquired. This was odd, but I guess I was too sleepy to figure out what was happening, so I answered in a noncommittal way, suspicious of their presence so late at my front door.

"Maybe ... why?"

"Well, if you are, you need to get down to University College Hospital as quickly as possible. Your wife is in labor and they've taken her into theater. The hospital tried calling you several times, but no one answered the phone." Aha, the ringing noises!

"Err, thanks so much, I'll get down there right now," I said sheepishly, feeling like an idiot for being so cagey with them. They gave me long-suffering looks and turned around to leave.

"Good luck, mate," said one as they got into their police car and drove away. It was just about 1:30 a.m. on Tuesday, August 21st, 1990.

With such an emergency in progress I had no thought of preserving our precious parking space, but quickly dressed and jumped straight into the Volvo to head for the hospital. At that time of night the drive was brief. What was a 45-minute walk was a 10-minute drive. I didn't even bother to worry about parking illegally; I really needed to get inside — if the hospital had sent police to get me, things could not be good. This obviously wasn't going to be a normal birth; Roz was only at 30 weeks, far too soon to deliver. God knows what I was thinking as I ran up the steps and into the hospital entrance. I turned left and pushed through heavy oak swing doors towards the maternity wing.

As I rushed down the corridor, a team of nurses and doctors came the other way. They were pushing a strange platform-on-wheels type of contraption. The trolley had several intravenous (IV) bags on poles, big lamps shining down onto the platform, and all kinds of beeping monitors and other equipment. In the middle of this paraphernalia was a small bundle of white sheets with wires and IV lines disappearing into them.

"You're not Mr Rowan by any chance, are you?" asked one of the nurses. When I answered in the affirmative, she said, "Well, here's your new daughter. We're just taking her to the neonatal intensive care unit. They'll be able to take much better care of her there."

I looked down at the bundle of linen. There, almost buried in the sheets, was a tiny, tiny baby, wires and tubes all over, around, in and on her. She had a large clear plastic pipe coming out of her mouth, her head was covered in some sort of knitted woolen bonnet, and one of her arms was taped to a small wooden board that allowed a hair-thin IV line to safely enter her veins. This was not a baby-looking baby: She was thin, with no fat anywhere, her skin like pinkish-brown translucent parchment. Each leg was the size of one of my fingers, her arms even thinner. She wasn't moving much or making any sound. This was my daughter, and she was beautiful. Although she didn't have the name yet, here before me was Alex, 2 pounds 9 ounces of miracle. I followed the team to the neonatal unit.

I suppose that most folk would imagine the neonatal unit in a hospital to be a quiet place, low-lit, even contemplative, with only babies' cries to punctuate the silence as diligent nurses quietly got on with their job. That certainly would have been my uninformed mental image before walking through the doors. Not so: The intensive care unit (ICU) portion of the neonatal unit of UCH was a noisy, brightly lit hive of activity. The noises didn't come from the "premmies," but from all the monitors and other equipment attached to them that were constantly alarming and being silenced. Nurses and doctors bustled about everywhere. The ratio of staff to patients was high, maybe even one to one, certainly one doctor and nurse for every two or three babies. Talk between the staff was constant, which was comforting because the nurses especially seemed to be taking great pains to advise doctors and parents of every development or issue that arose. In fact, the only quiet adults in the room were the babies' parents, who sat or stood silently around the incubators staring down worriedly at the new life before them. It was all a bit of a daze for me and I wasn't taking much in. The nurse who had spoken to me earlier in the corridor approached.

"Mr Rowan, we need to get your daughter into a proper incubator and hooked up so we can start treatment. She has the usual premature infant's immature lungs so we'll be feeding her oxygen, and we will need to get a good line into her so we can hydrate and feed her. Perhaps you can go and visit your wife while we get on with our work?"

God, Roz! I'd forgotten all about her in my focus on the baby. "Oh, right. Where is she?" I asked.

"She's up in Intensive Care on Floor Two. Just say who you are and they'll let you right in."

Oh great, wife and daughter both in ICU; this was not good. "OK, thanks. I'll go on up," I said, but as I was about to leave I was told to wait just a second. The nurse retrieved a polaroid camera from a cupboard and took two pictures of tiny Alex wrapped up among all her sheets, wires and tubes. She still wasn't moving about much.

"Here you are, you can show these to your wife," the nurse said smilingly as she handed over the photos.

I went up to ICU and was taken immediately to Roz. She was in a bed, also with all kinds of drips and monitors hooked up to her. She looked both pale and peaky at the same time. She was pretty out of it, but after a short while became aware of my presence.

"Is it all right?" she asked weakly. I took out the pictures and held them up for her.

"The baby's fine," I said, not wanting to worry her. "Look, here's some photos — she's a she, not an it."

Roz stared woozily at the two polaroids. "Oh God! Has she got everything?" she asked. At first I couldn't understand the meaning of her question. However, after I took a second look at one of the pictures I noticed that, the way Alex was lying, it almost looked like she had only one arm!

"She is perfect," I assured her, "and she's being well taken care of downstairs, so don't worry, you concentrate on getting better."

Roz faded off into a drug-induced sleep while I held her hand. I arose and asked around to try and find out what could have happened that would end up with both wife and child in ICU. Apparently things had initially been going as per usual that day. When I had left at about 8:30 that evening, Roz's blood pressure, although still slowly on the rise, was within acceptable limits. However, later in the night her BP had suddenly spiked, an event that is fairly typical of pre-eclampsia. When a patient's blood pressure suddenly goes off the charts like this (300+), the inevitable consequence is kidney failure. The doctors therefore had no choice; they had to deliver the baby early in order to save the mother. It was a calculated risk. At 30 weeks gestation, there was apparently a 90 percent chance of the baby's survival, whereas leaving Roz with sky-high BP values meant a serious risk of kidney failure or death for both mother and child. It was a simple decision. Roz had been quickly prepped for an emergency caesarian. By chance, I had arrived immediately after the delivery, although if I'd been a lighter sleeper I could have got there in time to see Roz before she went into theater.

So, I had a wife with possibly damaged kidneys, whose blood pressure was still dangerously high, and a daughter with multiple premature delivery issues who had a 1 in 10 chance of dying. Who the hell do I spend my time with? Thus began my yo-yo life of bouncing between ICUs.

Work was out of the question. I spent my waking time at the hospital, splitting it about two-thirds with the baby, one-third with Roz. After a couple of days Roz improved enough to be moved out of ICU, though she remained in hospital. This was an important step for her, as it finally allowed her to meet our tiny daughter, who still lay in the intensive care unit of the neonatal department.

Alex was needing lots of oxygen to breathe due to the immaturity of her lungs. When babies are born at full term, their lungs are lubricated by a "juice" (surfactant), the production of which is stimulated by the birth process. This makes the lung membranes flexible and capable of the necessary expansion and contraction that is breathing. Not so with a premmie, whose lungs are stiff like cardboard, and are thus unable to supply the required volumes of air to breathe: This is why Alex needed all the oxygen.

As we soon learned, it was very fortunate that Alex could tolerate the vital IV supplying her with fluids and drugs. Imagine an adult's vein and how difficult it sometimes is to find one — when donating blood, for example. Now imagine how small the vein of a baby is. Now imagine how small it is when the baby is ten weeks premature. We quickly learned how important it was to have a good line into a baby. The hospital team was all too aware of the need for successful IVs; certain members of staff had been trained exclusively to perform the unbelievably difficult task of finding veins the size of a human hair and running in a line. 'Trained' is probably not the correct word; it is more of an art that some staff could do and others couldn't. Without this oh-so-important supply line, a baby quickly deteriorates. We saw nurses and doctors despair when they couldn't get the needed drugs and fluids into a tiny body because of unreliable IVs. These poor children would then die slowly in front of their parents, the nurses, and us. It was always heartbreaking, and a somber reminder of the fragility of newborn premature infants.

One of the scariest moments for us during those first weeks with Alex didn't come from any medical issue, however; it was the day when the nurses said that we would need to bathe our daughter! I still have a vivid memory of nervously holding her above a small plastic tub containing a couple of inches of warm water. She was tiny, barely bigger than my hand, and still covered in wires, tubes, and sensors. We took off her miniature nappy, and I slowly lowered her down into the water, terrified that I might drop her or rip out some of the lines. Poor Alex looked worried herself, as if she was just as scared of being dropped as I was of dropping her. We managed to pull off the job without incident though, and got her safely back into her incubator. Just as when the nurse had taken polaroid pictures for me on the night of Alex's birth, we learned that this whole bathing thing was simply a way of getting us to bond with our baby and to humanize this little bundle of skin and bones. It was standard procedure for all parents on the neonatal unit, and it soon became a part of our routine, no longer a scary task. We both became completely devoted to our feisty little Alex, who liked to cry long and loud whenever something was not to her liking, much to the amusement of the staff, who often noted that she was the best crier in the unit.

(Continues…)


Excerpted from "My Beautiful Memory"
by .
Copyright © 2018 David Rowan.
Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Preface 1

Chapter 1 August 1990-Birth 3

Chapter 2 Houston and a New Life 21

Chapter 3 The High-Risk Option 29

Chapter 4 Norway-and Return to London 35

Chapter 5 A Family Comes Home 39

Chapter 6 Back to Norway 42

Chapter 7 Return to Houston 61

Chapter 8 The Outdoors Life Begins 67

Chapter 9 Animals 73

Chapter 10 Middle School 82

Chapter 11 At the Dojo 94

Chapter 12 Robotics, Rides, and Rosebud 99

Chapter 13 The Outdoors Life Continues 110

Chapter 14 High School Junior Year 122

Chapter 15 High School Senior Year 134

Chapter 16 High School Graduation 140

Chapter 17 Off to Pitt: Freshman Year 154

Chapter 18 Sophomore Year 170

Chapter 19 Junior Year 181

Chapter 20 Senior Year 197

Chapter 21 Graduation 217

Chapter 22 The Real World 230

Chapter 23 October 30th 241

Chapter 24 The Rothko Chapel 258

Chapter 25 Ashes 266

Chapter 26 Life Goes On 270

Chapter 27 Activism and Its Toll 278

Chapter 28 Facts and the Future 291

Appendix A Bluescale Academy 301

Appendix B The Mage 305

Appendix C It's Not You It's Zee 317

Appendix D Distances 327

Appendix E No Rain 339

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