The Rules of the Asian Body in America

On my wife’s battle with cancer during a fraught time for healthcare and immigration

What are the rules we expect the body to follow?

When my wife, Cathreen, had our second child, on Thanksgiving Day 2016, we expected her body to return to its pre-pregnant state. For nearly the entire nine months, Cathreen had horrible morning sickness and could barely eat. She threw up constantly. She was dizzy and spent most of the day in bed. Everyone waited for the baby, and not only for the baby, but also for the end of The Sickness.

The last pregnancy had also been difficult. Cathreen had pruritic urticarial papules and plaques of pregnancy (PUPPP), which is basically an incredibly itchy hive-like rash. She couldn’t sleep for the itch. She had to take oatmeal baths and slather herself in aloe. Eventually the doctor made her go on steroids.

According to her OB doctor, about one in 100 pregnant women get PUPPP (the internet says one in 160), but they often hardly notice, as PUPPP usually comes late in the third term before the baby is born, and birth makes the symptoms disappear. For PUPPP to appear in the third month (my wife’s case), the odds were one in 100 cases of one in 100-something pregnancies — rarer than one in 10,000.