When they flung him onto my chest, he flopped like a silent swamp creature, dripping with yellow goop. Gaping and groping, staring with crazy eyes, toes flexing far apart like monkey hands, he didn’t resemble anyone I knew. As I gazed into the uncanny valley of this newborn baby, I lay frozen in horror. 

Amit said, “Look at him move; he’s like a robot. Maybe he’s jerky because he’s moving through air instead of liquid for the first time.” They took him into the corner to be suctioned and poked and processed. He let out his first sound, a wail. 

“Don’t look over there,” Amit said. Turning away from the cluster of nurses with their tubes, I glanced down where a doctor was blithely stitching me up while chatting with another doctor. “Don’t look down there either,” Amit said. “Look at me. How do you feel?”

“Weirded out. Relieved it’s over.” I thought the baby was gross, but I didn’t want to say that in front of all these women who probably thought he was adorable. “Do you feel love at first sight for this baby?” 

We both shook our heads no. 

All in all, labor lasted 16 hours. I hadn’t slept in more than 24 hours, so I took a nap. Upon waking maybe an hour later, my first words were, “My vag is on fire.” 

When we settled into our hospital room, the baby was in another room under a heating lamp. Amit said, “I was looking at him through the window laying in his box. No one was paying attention to him and he’s all alone. I feel sorry for him. He’s too small to be alive.”

I felt a surge of love for Amit’s compassion and soft heartedness. “Aw, you’re so caring. He still doesn’t feel like he’s ours.” 

“I hope he’ll be happy.”

Amit’s helpless pity for this creature triggered my pity too. The feeling was familiar, like my pity for cats and dogs and most animals. I didn’t know it then, but this pity quickly segued into love. 

We hired a confinement nanny “yue sau” to live with us and take care of everything for up to the first 26 days. She cooked, cleaned, and mainly kept the baby in her room, only bringing him out for me to breastfeed. She promised to take care of everything, but I found I didn’t want her to. She kept wanting me to sleep, but I often couldn’t. At the hospital, I only slept 2 hours a night because of all the interruptions, but at home I still couldn’t sleep. Maybe I was still amped up on hormones. 

I wanted to know everything about the baby. My modus operandi was the same as how I cared for my cat— keeping notes on her ailments and patterns, constantly inspecting her for changes, continuously testing new theories in hopes of understanding her better. Similarly, I wanted to change his diaper so I could see all his poops so I knew their colors and textures to discern how he was digesting what we’d fed him 2 hours prior, I wanted to inspect every fleeting rash and groom the gunk in all his folds and pry open his fingers to get the lint he’s clutching, I wanted to learn all his noises and signals so I could anticipate his needs before he felt discomfort. 

Because of the connection between my breasts and his stomach, I knew he was awake and went to feed him in the middle of the night before he made a peep. After the second day of me constantly knocking to check on him, the nanny put a pillow on the floor of her room as a doorstop to keep the door open enough for me to stick my head in to watch him breathe. 

After 6 days, she said, “Maybe I should go home early. You don’t need me. You’re strong, and you delivered vaginally. Most of my customers don’t leave the bed for 10 days, but you went out walking and shopping today. The baby’s also particularly sweet and well behaved. It must be because he came 2 weeks late so he’s actually older.”

Although sending the nanny home early was what my husband and I had been thinking because the nanny was expensive, that night I burst into tears. “She’s supposed to want to take care of me but I’m too annoying. She wants to take care of the baby, not me.”

My husband got the nanny. “Nancy’s crying because she thinks you hate her.”

“I don’t hate you!” the nanny said. “Don’t cry or it’ll poison your milk. I’m thinking of you as my daughter because I don’t have a daughter. I’m too expensive for what you have me doing. Usually the grandparents pay for me. Of course I like you. Anyone who’s vegetarian is a good person.”

She eventually convinced me that it was purely a cost calculation she’d been making on our behalf. That night, we moved the crib into our room to do a trial run of what would happen if she left. 

At 4am, Amit found me crying and desperately asking chatgpt what to do about milk blisters that had appeared on my nipples after my pump had been adjusted to the wrong setting. “This is the nanny’s fault. She insisted I had to go on a higher suction but now I have milk blisters! And it made almost no milk whereas I was doing great on the lower setting so now I have to stay awake to breastfeed even though it hurts. She sucks! And I hate breastfeeding. Why am I doing this? My clogged ducts hurt and I’m scared of getting an infection. On reddit, this woman had a huge abscess inside her boob that had to get drained. The lactation consultant is an idiot and wants me to wake up every hour to feed him. She didn’t even ask me any questions about my goals or anything. I hate her. Why am I hurting my body? Everyone else is on formula!”

At around 5am, the nanny woke up and came out. Seeing my sleepless, tearstained face, she said, “Give me the baby. Get some rest.”

Amit said, “This was a successful trial. Now we know what could happen if we have her leave.” We moved the crib back into the nanny’s room. 

A week later, I had throbbing pain in my arms and hands from holding the baby for breastfeeding 12 hours a day. I had the special breastfeeding pillows but the internet said it was the relaxin hormones deforming my joints. I could barely move. Amit and the nanny had to dock the baby’s mouth and the breast pump onto my boobs while I sat in pain, ice packed around both arms and hands. When Amit turned on the pump, the default setting was the highest suction possible and I gasped in pain. Trying to put the flange on my nipple, the nanny spilled breast milk over me and the couch, causing me to yelp and exclaim, “You put it on upside down!” Ignoring my pain, the baby guzzled away at the other breast.

Later that night, I burst into tears again. “I peed myself heading to the bathroom and was struggling to change my ice packed, blood soaked underwear when the baby started crying. I couldn’t even move my arms to put on new underwear and had to go get the nanny without underwear. She’d seen my boobs before but not my vag. I hate this! What if I’m incontinent forever? What if I have tendonitis and carpal tunnel and arthritis and swelling and sciatica forever? My face and feet are so swollen. I can’t even sleep because of the pain radiating everywhere. What if I can’t use my hands and arms and have to learn to be like that Olympics archer who shoots with her feet? Why am I hurting my body?”

Breastfeeding was so much harder than pregnancy or labor. Many times, I wanted to quit, but I’d decided to breastfeed till 6 weeks because that’s when people said it normalized, so I kept suffering through it. I could always quit then. This was all temporary. This was a universal human experience that I needed to endure if only to build character and empathy for other moms. How did everyone else do this? Did everyone really do this? I spent sleepless days and nights icing, heating, and massaging my breasts, icing my hands and arms, and researching newborns and breastfeeding.

Just like with pregnancy, I tried many tactics and theories for breastfeeding. Just like with pregnancy, things improved due to time passing. He changed and grew every day. At 2 weeks postpartum, we moved the crib back into our room to do another trial. This time, I took care of the baby through the night by myself without incident and wrote up a checklist for nighttime, general instructions that I translated into Chinese for the nanny, and notes on my key learnings. After a few days of this, the nanny said she was going to look for flights to go home. 

I got the urge to be with other moms and babies. I went from knowing almost nothing about babies and breastfeeding to reading and watching everything I could find, but I still only had experience with my baby. I wanted to breastfeed another baby to gain context for what they were like. I texted other moms asking for advice. “You’ve changed,” my friend said. “When we FaceTimed I used to angle the camera away from my kid and avoid mentioning him because I thought it’d make you mad, but now you want to talk to him and you’re showing him to your husband.” Having a baby has unlocked the part of my brain that used to be devoted to animals. If you want to talk about babies, ping me.

He seems like the archetypal baby, doing things that probably all newborns do, but that I’m seeing for the first time: his squeaky hiccups, his tragic frown mask, his instant placid calm when he’s soothed, his inchworm-like arches and faceplants, his blind motorboat mouth, his unproductive kicks and beating fists as I’m trying to give him what he wants, his flapping hands when he’s relaxed, his fingernails pricking my chest, his sudden fling backwards when he’s had enough, his hands mashing his face as he grins with his eyes closed, his beautiful smile, his creepy laugh as he sleeps, his smears of bright orange or mustard poop that smell like fresh bread (apparently normal), his glowing skin with angry rashes that come and go in hours and days, how intently he feasts like it’s his job, which it is… So many things. I feel awe when I find his tiny, perfectly curled eyelash on my chest. Everything he does makes me laugh. His cries are so cartoonish with his quivering chin, pouting frown, vibrating tongue, and toothless mouth. His butt really is insanely soft. He’s like what all babies are like, and yet it seems freshly delightful. It’s like how all cats are similar and I can love them all, but I especially know and love the random one that’s mine. 

Breastfeeding’s release of oxytocin is like a partial dose of MDMA every 2-3 hours every day. Like with MDMA, as soon as each session starts, I feel insanely thirsty, my individual teeth clicking dryly in my mouth. After a few days of this, I was obsessed with my baby. After a week, I felt universal love for all humans. “You’re ooey gooey now,” Amit said. “You love all babies, and anyone who has ever been a baby. Don’t forget, you made me promise to prioritize us above the baby. You vowed you’d love us first, then our dog, and babies last.” But the hormones were changing me.

I saw a homeless addict and cried. This person had probably been treasured by their mother. And even if not, someone had cared about them enough to keep them alive as a helpless newborn that needed feeding every 2 hours for months. Attention had gone into this person, and now this was their life. What if this happened to my boy? There would be nothing I could do to fight the world and its suffering and my kid’s choices. I could only love him and let the heartbreak of existence wash over me without drowning in it. 

A video of kids killed in a war zone made me sob. Eyes closed, they looked just like my kid when he slept. I let myself feel the heartbreak of their pain, feeling the cuts on their bodies slice through my heart. I felt how we’re all connected, and that as long as there’s indifference, ignorance, scarcity, blame, and danger in the world, my child wouldn’t be safe. I wanted to protect him so the world could never hurt him, but I saw the futility of it, because cruelty, ignorance, and violence are inside each of us, born from the same womb as love, curiosity, and drive. All I want is for my child to be happy, but I can’t control that. I can only love him, and let my heart break again and again as long as the world exists with us in it. My child, I already weep for your inevitable hurts, but my heartbreak deepens my awe that you or any of us are alive.

After Amit proposed to me in January, the marriage visioning process has led me to rejoin the sisterhood of women. How did I leave the sisterhood in the first place? What did it mean to rejoin the sisterhood? Read on…

It all started with me wondering about my wedding gown. After 6+ years of RTR (get 40% off), I’ve long since normalized wearing bizarre outfits in my daily life, so I wanted my wedding gown to be next level “what is she wearing” crazy. I described the look as “futuristic sculptural,” wanted it to be something breathtakingly beautiful and strange that no one had ever seen before while also costing as little as possible, etc. I texted my middle school friends who I barely talk to anymore and learned that they know a LOT about style theory. I inhaled books based on the concepts they alluded to on color theory, bone structure, style essence…

My friend Kat coached and challenged me to talk with my vagina and I channeled a new persona: Nancy Hua Kardashian. Here’s what she had to say to my conscious leadership forum through my vag: 

Elated by my vision, I wrote in a chat group:

i want to have a bridal shower where a pro stylist, makeup artist, and colorist come to analyze us so we can take our learnings into the future. i love experimenting on myself and self diagnosing from articles and youtube but i've never had a pro. i think it'd be fun to learn together so we can compare how to make someone else's look work for us and why it needs adjustment, etc… nancy kardashian's purpose is to inspire and teach people how to be more beautiful than they could've imagined, and she's a real ally to me when i thnk about the purpose of my wedding celebrations. how can i bring learning about love and beauty into my events so all my loved ones can connect and grow together??

I wasn’t sure what to call this event because my experience of the normal sequence of events is that we set a wedding date, I anoint a maid of honor who plans a bachelorette party (and maybe also a bridal shower?), then we fly somewhere and get drunk. I don’t drink, we hadn’t set the wedding date (and due to all the scope creep, we still haven’t set a date. Amit is the one with the big, unique wedding vision— none of the boring parts, so much love and togetherness and fun, totally on brand for our (especially Amit’s) love of delighting people with innovative, new experiences— so while we were forming our wedding vision, I pushed forward with bachelorette weekend planning), choosing a maid of honor stressed me out (and indeed, choosing who to invite to this bachelorette weekend was also stressful and caused women to sob, including of course myself), and submitting to someone else’s plans also stressed me out because I had my own unique vision of what I wanted to do, which was not something I could hand off because, like many of my innovative notions, the idea was still forming as I was conceiving and planning it— you can’t outsource the MVP. 

In deciding who to invite, I felt fear. A middle school friend who had seemed so into the idea didn’t want to come. Why? Did she actually hate me? I was offering this irresistible invitation that I was so sure she’d like but she’s saying she doesn’t have a free weekend for months? What’d I expect— I barely talked with or saw her anymore. Since I’d entered the workforce, all my friends were guys because HFT and startup founding are male dominated— I didn’t have enough female friends. I cried and hated her, and cried and slowly let go of all my blame, and cried and told her how I felt. I cry a lot now that I’m more in touch with my feelings and liberating my feminine energy, etc. 

I had so many women I wanted to invite but didn’t for various reasons that caused sobbing. I was scared to invite women I liked “too much” (ie. more than I think was warranted based on our hang out time, or more than I thought they liked me) because I didn’t want them to think I was a friendless loser. I was scared to invite friends who I thought would say no because I was scared of rejection. I was scared to invite friends who wouldn’t dote on me as much as I wanted.

It’s weird how this was the event that finally made me see how much I’m scared of rejection. I’m not scared of rejection at all in business. Who cares? It’s just business. You pitch a bunch of VC’s/ buyers and the right ones say yes and the right ones say no. But with my friends, rejection hurts. I saw how I do this dance where I make sure I like the person at most as much as they like me, because I don’t want to feel the pain if they reject me. 

This is the video I sent to the women coming to my bachelorette weekend:

I spent hours choosing the vendors and shed many tears. Amit kept crowing, “I love how stressed you are about this!” I think he actually trusted me more in planning our wedding after seeing me plan this weekend, because previously I’d poo-pooed the difficulty in planning the wedding events he wanted and hadn’t empathized with his stress over it. I learned that minimizing/ arguing about someone else’s stress (ie. “Who cares? They’ll figure out how to get there”) might make them more stressed; people need empathy and acceptance first (ie. “You’re right, we do need to think about that”). 

I messaged a friend:

in organizing this wkd, i see how i was getting really serious bc i wanted everyone to have an amazing time and this was ironically making it really un-fun for me

When the weekend finally came, Scarlet surprised me with amazing decorations and custom bags, schedules, and decorations that she designed herself. Everyone was really nice to me and seemed happy. 

In contrast, I was scared it was going to be bad. People flew in for this! My fears of rejection/ abandonment were harder to ignore than usual. Part of me was scared that, even though no one in this group had rejected me yet, if the weekend didn’t go well, then they’d reject me. Part of me was always looking for rejection from people I loved. 

During the ceremony with Diana, a middle school friend brought up my parents and how my mom had left me, and Diana sagely nodded. My themes of abandonment kept coming up again and again. Was it so obvious to everyone? I bet most people would be surprised I felt this much fear when I seem so bold and outgoing. But I’m only fearless when I don’t care about the person yet. Rejection only hurts when I need you, that’s why needing someone is scary. 

Driving to the styling session at Danielle’s boutique with Erin Mathis, Lynn was talking about her daughter realizing that in some ways being a boy was “better.” This is how I felt from age ~15 to ~35. It’s only been in the last few years that I’ve gone through the final arc of this supercycle of my heroine’s journey, going from judging, fearing, and denying my feminine side (enshrining my Steve Jobs persona and having contempt for my Snow White) to embracing her unique gifts.

The heroine’s journey is what my movie and other creative projects show. I learned I needed to grow both my masculine and feminine sides to trust myself fully and feel more alive.

	Hero’s Journey	Heroine’s Journey
My growth arc	I’m strong and independent. I can do it myself. I need to prove I’m as good as/ better than X.	I know I can do it myself, AND I need others. I’m enough. I don’t need to compete or adopt less than/ better than values. The feminine and masculine need each other. The masculine grows lonely, senseless, and lifeless without the feminine, while the feminine is chaotic and confused without the masculine.
How I see life	What’s “heroine’s journey?” Hero’s journey is all there is and it rocks.	When you’ve achieved everything you’ve wanted and realize it’s not enough, then you see you’re in the heroine’s journey (both genders can go on both journeys)— the hero’s journey was a side quest.

I left the sisterhood of women when I entered the work world because the fields I was in were very masculine (I was the only woman in some of my MIT math classes, I was the only woman trader in the office for years, I was the CEO of a mobile SDK B2B SaaS startup and only met 1 other woman founder in any of those categories for years). The universally accepted approach to my work rewarded my Steve Jobs and other male personas, whereas my feminine personas like Snow White were more of a liability, especially because they weren’t mature yet, and I hadn’t known this or made any effort in helping Snow White grow up from a girl to a queen. In contrast, I’d put in a lot of effort in growing up my Steve Jobs, making him more and more formidable, smart, and ruthless. I loved my masculine side for his strength and only saw my feminine side’s weakness, so I pushed her aside. Until wedding planning invited her out, and I was learning about all her gifts. 

I saw how the masculine side longed for and needed my feminine side, but I needed to help her grow up before I could trust her. I saw how I’d never fully trust myself if I never trusted my feminine side, regardless of how strong my masculine side was. No matter how rich and smart and hot I was, or how many martial arts I did, I needed to invest in the side of me that was sensitive, delicate, and loving to live a life that was meaningful to me. My feminine energy had always been there, but I didn’t appreciate her and I ignored her desires (she’s so unproductive and needy). Now I saw how she was a powerful part of me, how impossible and painful it was to deny her, and how she got everything she wanted so easily. My masculine side thinks it needs to grind away and toil and suffer because that’s how he thinks he’s gotten everything we have, but my feminine side sees how the best things we got were effortless, just us being ourselves and trusting the universe. My feminine side charmed and enraptured Amit, my friends, and everyone who’s believed in me, all through unlikely circumstances that my masculine side couldn’t have conceived. 

Anyway, the style session was awesome. I’d never been to Danielle’s boutique before and it was amazing. I loved getting styled and changed my outfit plan for the photo shoot. I finally understood what stylists even do and why women packed so many things. This trip was the first in a 6+ week travel sequence for me that spanned many time and weather zones and my masculine side had packed minimally, but I saw how my feminine side needed variety due to the shapes and colors in my face (assuming I wanted my clothes to draw the viewer’s eyes to my face). Afterwards, Sonali said it was a relief that the style session was good because otherwise I would’ve been upset all weekend. Sonali’s smart. 

We had a makeup class with Soyi Makeup and everyone collectively gasped when Kelly showed how to do eyebrows properly and transformed my face. Apparently everyone had been applying blush wrong, except Lisa who always knows everything. 

Deena found a book Amit wrote at the Airbnb we were staying at and it turned out the host had a fine art tableau vivant photograph featuring Amit in her house! How lucky am I, marrying someone so famous!

Then Anna-Alexia came to do photography. I chose Anna because the women in the group are used to being photographed for Forbes and the NYT and stuff, and we know how to be cute/ hot for instagram, but Anna is another level: her portraits pushed our edges beyond professional/ pretty to: what if we’re works of art? 

The unedited outtakes:

The fine art portrait:

Anyway, this is just the start of my amazing events, some related to our wedding, others mostly not. I’m leveling up as a host and reviews have been effusive. I’m holding more events as Diana’s manifestation ceremony revealed that I want to go out into my community and have a unique opportunity to craft it to my vision. Here’s a hint of what we’re planning for our wedding, from Nancy Hua Kardashian speaking from my V, to my conscious leadership forum:

I was not always a herniated disc. When we were born, I started as a wholesomely plump, perfectly placed, healthy disc. I showed up well in scans and gave nearby nerves a respectful berth. So how did we get here: 3 months of our year disrupted and bedridden?

When we turned 18, Amit started a company, went on trips, started working out. These things hurt— curled in airplanes, bent over devices, hunched at desks— but I was always there to curl, bend, and hunch harder. 

When we turned 19, Amit started a running habit. It’s like Nancy says: being taken for granted is the gift you give the ones you love. Thus was my reward for doing my job perfectly for decades: being taken for granted. Amit barely knew I existed. He often thought of business, Apple products, new technology, but never of me. At 19, he started to run for miles. I didn’t want to admit I couldn’t take it. When it got tough, I gritted my teeth and leaned on everyone around me to suffer through it. I thought about how lots of spines had it way worse (at least Amit didn’t play football), how all the other valiant body parts (the noble brain, the gritty stomach, my old buddy the steady heart) were all counting on me.

After mile 2 of each run, I’d say, “Ahem. Perhaps you should stop? Or get cushier shoes? Or stretch?” But he would speed up, thinking, “I’m tired of being pudgy. If I could have a robot body, I would. But for now I’m stuck with this. No pain, no gain!”

To hear Amit call us pudgy, to hear he’d prefer to discard me for a robot spine— that hurt! Those words hurt more than all the hours of lifting with me versus with our legs. I let out a few tears in the form of stress fractures (that’s how vertebrae cry). But he couldn’t hear me cry. How could I speak so he could hear?

Finally, I threw myself into my neighbors. The nerves and muscles screamed, “Mosh pit time!” The back muscles jumped up and down and spasmed in violent dance at all hours of the night. 

Amit went to the doctor who diagnosed us with a herniated disc. We were bedridden for weeks, then diligently took posture classes, learned the Alexander method. It seemed we’d reached an understanding. Amit was now aware of me. Even if he couldn’t hear me, he was trying to learn how to listen. 

Years passed, then decades. Amit founded new companies, traveled to new countries. When he said, “Sit,” I said, “How many hours?” When he said, “Walk,” I said, “How many miles?” When he said, “Shoulder my luggage,” I said, “How many useless objects can you stuff into how many bags?” I saw that I was an object to him, to be enslaved, maintained, a deficit in the bank account, an obligation on the task list, ideally neither seen nor heard. Our relationship was purely transactional.  

Amit’s friends would compliment him, “You’re so fit. Look at your arms… And you don’t have any fat.” We did have nice arms, but their view struck me as biased. Internals like me, the elegant nerves, the humble gut, etc never got compliments. 

When we were 42, Amit went surfing even though the waves were high. He ignored my niggle of doubt. Nancy had already driven us all the way to the break. We paddled out.

“It’s all up to me,” I groaned as I kept us afloat. But who can win against the ocean? A huge wave pounded against me, and I tumbled in the surf. Battered and bruised, I succumbed to the bashing of the waves. I bowed to the ocean’s power. 

After being struck, scraped, and bruised by the surfboard, we crawled out of the water, and Nancy drove us home. Nancy inspected the skin of our back and said, “When anything weird happens to me at all, like I land weird when bouldering or feel a twinge when fencing, I stop and don’t do anything else that day.” 

Amit did not share this philosophy. Instead, he decided to go on a hike! Up and down the mountain we went. When we were walking home, Nancy was driving home with some guests when she saw us and picked us up. We could barely get into the car, but we stifled our groans of pain so as not to startle our guests. We can’t blame the hike, or the ocean. It was the years of accumulated neglect. I may be a bone fragment, but I was dying of a broken heart.

The next day, we couldn’t get out of bed. But we had to pee. Maybe the urge would miraculously fade… Maybe the pain would ease… Maybe we could wait until after Nancy returned with the muscle relaxers… We waited and waited until finally we got up and lurched to the bathroom. Things were really hurting. One moment we were standing over the toilet, and the next moment, we were on the floor and Nancy was leaning over us. 

One friend who was visiting us was a doctor and took our pulse. “You’re pale and sweaty.” 

Amit wondered, “How can I be pale when I’m brown?”

Nancy explained what she’d witnessed, “I called to you before leaving and you sounded weird, so I barged into the bathroom just in time to see you faint. You fell into my arms and I lowered you to the ground.”

Our friend said, “You should’ve heard Nancy’s chilling screams for help!”

We couldn’t walk, but Amit kept saying, “Don’t call an ambulance.” Nancy called our dad, a retired surgeon. Our dad convinced us, “Go to the hospital.” Amit said, “Let’s ask our neighbor where to go because he works in healthcare.” Our neighbor said, “Go to this ER; it’s good with back issues.” 

Nancy and her friends got us up the stairs and into the car. The doctor friend said, “Maybe you should crawl,” but Amit wouldn’t stoop to this indignity. We slowly thumped up the stairs and heaved ourselves into the car with our arms. 

At the ER, we waited for 6 hours. We finally got an upper back scan and painkillers that didn’t do much, even though they were supposedly the most potent drugs. Nancy got us our favorite snacks, reminded the staff of our existence, and scolded them for bringing over wheelchairs when our main symptom was that we couldn’t sit up without excruciating pain. We finally went home. I don’t know how we got out of the car and down the stairs into the house.

The next day, Amit was worried we couldn’t get up to go to the bathroom again but refused to use a bedpan and forced us to walk to the bathroom again. We didn’t faint this time, but the agony was intense. Every night, we started to cramp despite all the painkillers, heating pads, and ice packs. We’d try to suffer through it as long as possible, kneading our muscles ourselves, fruitlessly, until finally we’d wake Nancy for help. Amit doesn’t like to accept help, but we needed it. Nancy got us supplies and bathed us with hot and cold towels. She nursed us night and day. After hours of back spasms we’d shout, “How are you asleep!” Nancy would wake to massage us, apply heating pads, pull our legs. Amit decided to move to another bedroom so we wouldn’t disturb her as much, but then he convinced her to switch into the other bedroom too. 

We started going to physical therapy and Amit started pushing himself to do the exercises for hours a day. Everyone said to walk but we barely could. Nancy brought us food and every time she walked by us she’d take the opportunity to pull our legs and massage our muscles to help relax and relieve the pressure on our nerves that shot pain down our leg. Amit felt ashamed we couldn’t help with any chores or packing. 

Nancy packed up the house so we could go on our planned next excursion. She was worried about us flying part of the journey alone because we couldn’t walk or carry anything. “You look strong so people won’t know you’re injured without a cane,” so she got us three different foldable canes, one of which Amit deemed acceptable because it was well-designed.

At the airport, we got to board earlier because of the wheelchair. Despite all the physical therapy and Amit’s diligent exercising for a month, we weren’t improving. Amit paid for the lay flat first class seat so that we wouldn’t be in as much pain during the first leg of the flight. At first Nancy also got first class but then couldn’t sit with us because they wouldn’t allow her cat to be in first. She said she’d come visit us during the flight but only came once.

We made a stop in SF to get a full body MRI that Amit’s investor had a deal for. Then it was onto the second leg of the flight. Sitting for hours was agony. We tried taking many walks during the flight and holding ourselves hovering off the seat with our arms, but it was the worst pain we’d had yet. When our parents received us at the airport, they were shocked seeing us wheeled out in such a state. At least we had the cane. 

Our dad called his doctor friends to get us seen right away. Amit marveled, “What would we do without my dad? Without him the MRI would’ve taken an extra 3 months. The ER only did the upper back and not the lower back. Then the SF MRI wasn’t full resolution. All the appointments are backed up for months.”

A month after the accident, we could barely walk or sit. Each morning, we stumbled to the bathroom and collapsed on the ground to meditate, play with the cat, and check our phone. We brushed our teeth on our knees because it hurt to stand.

Amit finally admitted he had to cancel his writing workshop which he’d been waiting to do for years. He couldn’t wait for Nancy to join us and she canceled her plans too.

With our dad calling in favors, we got 2 epidurals over a period of 3 weeks. Each shot did help the pain. We started being able to hobble down the driveway before having to turn back. 

Our original summer plans were canceled, so we were continuing to work on our startup. Every day, we lay on our back for hours, holding our laptop over us in the air. It was hard to take calls or type. 

Nancy said, “You should rearrange your desk setup assuming this is going to be the new normal.’ 

Amit said, “No, I’ll be back in no time!”

“It’s been more than a month so I’d assume it’ll be at least another month.”

Amit’s family rearranged the monitor and desk so that we could lie more comfortably. Amit designed the setup so that he lay under a table on a mattress, and he ordered a platform that swiveled his computer in front of his face for calls.

The pain was improving, but we still couldn’t walk. Worse, Amit started to feel a tingling down our leg and in our foot, even when lying down. “What if I’m like this forever?”

Our dad said, “Now that we’ve done 2 epidurals, the next step we can try is surgery.” It seemed like a safe, minor surgery that would only take an hour. Amit read a paper on it and learned that people in their 50s didn’t get herniated discs anymore because their disc juice dried up by then. 

As we signed up for the surgery, Amit said, “I’m scared I waited too long to get the surgery, that it’s too late.” Luckily, once again our dad was able to call in favors to get us seen in time. All the doctors were Indian and our dad went in to see if he also knew the anesthesiologist. The surgeon made a small incision in our back and used tiny cameras and knives to remove the pieces of me that had come out of the tear. 

Afterwards, we ate cookies, fluffernutter sandwiches, Indian treats, and rested at home. It hurt to lay on our back where the stitches were, but we were walking the same day. Thank goodness for minimally invasive surgery! The hospital scheduled an x-ray but relented when our dad asked why. They also charged us extra bills and then told us not to pay those because they were supposed to bounce back to insurance. Now we know not to be overeager with bill payments. After the fact, Amit also learned that sleeping in the recovery room after surgery cost $12 per minute, but luckily insurance had kicked in by then. 

Amit learned that, to protect me, there were basic exercises he had to avoid from now on. Want to guess what they are? 

They are deadlifts, crunches, and situps, which we often used to do. Nancy was to do all the lifting for the next few months. Gone were the days when we singlehandedly packed up the car for our trips! Amit felt a bit low so Nancy asked, “What’s your positive vision for the future with your back?”

We sent an atheist prayer into the universe, “Dear god, please let Amit have a healthy body, and find exercises like swimming that are good for strengthening his back, and build a relationship with a physical therapy expert that’ll teach him the right things to do so that he can nurture and care for himself and live a long, full life where he adores his spine…”

Although Amit still felt guilt and shame for not being able to lift things and Nancy having to do the lifting and trash removal, he allowed part of himself to enjoy not having to lift things too. 

Amit found a pool. When we got in, he was worried we’d be too slow. We hadn’t been in the water since this all started months ago. We got into the slow lane and found that we were doing ok. We did a few laps. A pool attendant waved us over, “You’re swimming so fast that you have to get into the faster lane.”

Amit smiled. “No, I’m injured so I should go slower.”