195: Florida’s Abortion Law Almost Killed My Wife

Allison Langer  0:03  
Music. I'm Allison Langer.

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  0:04  
I'm Andrea askowitz, and this is writing class radio. You'll hear true personal stories and learn how to write your own stories together, we produce this podcast, which is equal parts heart and art. By heart, we mean the truth in a story. By art, we mean the craft of writing no matter what's going on in our lives. Writing class is where we tell the truth. It's where we work out our shit. There's no place in the world like writing class, and we want to bring you in today.

Allison Langer  0:38  
We bring you the sixth story in our seven part series called our abortion stories to support yes on four an amendment to bring back abortion rights in Florida. So a few weeks ago, we did a live show here in Miami featuring seven amazing stories, just heartbreaking and heartwarming. The stories were super triumphant and covered all aspects of abortion and health.

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  1:02  
Getting people to come to the abortion show was kind of a hard sell, because I think people were like, Oh, my God, abortion. But like, even the story that you're about to hear right now is going to make you stand up and cheer the stories are triumphant. Okay,

Allison Langer  1:18  
so we're going to bring you guys one a week, one story week until the election, which is on november 5. 2024 you're listening after November 5, I really urge you to still listen to these stories. They're amazing and they're really informative. They're well written, and everything is totally worth listening to. So if this is your first time listening to this whole series start with Episode 190 to learn how the show came to be and why we feel stories can change hearts and laws. This is the first time you've ever heard about writing class radio. Go to Episode One, that story, my story, shows how sharing our stories, writing our stories changes lives

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  2:02  
today's story is by Derek, and if you weren't convinced by Dr Cecilia grande story in the previous episode, that the state of abortion rights and the state of healthcare is a crisis, Derek's Story will drive home that message back with Derek story

Allison Langer  2:23  
after the break,

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  2:27  
we're back. I'm Andrea askowitz, and you're listening to writing class radio. Here's Derek cook reading his story. We didn't give up.

Derick Cook  2:37  
Good evening. I wasn't being rude, but if you guys would've could see what I see on my phone, you be happy. I would like to tell you the story about my wife and your cook and our miscarriages and what we endured. From the first moment I saw in your face, I knew she would be my wife. It only took a year for us to get married, and it wasn't long before Anya told me she was ready to have a baby. I already had a son from my previous marriage, and I wasn't ready to have any more kids. But the more we talked about it, the more excited I got. I still have a video on my phone where my wife is so excited that she was pregnant, but it was only a few weeks before we had a miscarriage. Then we had another miscarriage, another miscarriage, and plenty more after that, despite the heartbreak, we wasn't ready to stop trying. One thing I can say about my wife is She's a warrior, and if you knew who my wife, Anya Cook, was personally, you would say the same. But everything she does is calculated when all of this was happening, and you took pregnancy tests every day, she took pictures, she took notes, she even tracked down the hormone levels. And yet, every time we got pregnant, it ended in a miscarriage, then we had a special baby. I named this baby bunny because every morning I would go to work, there was a white bunny running around my front yard. And I do not I didn't know where it came from. So I said, You know what I'm gonna give that baby, that my wife is pregnant with, a nickname. Bunny was special. She was a fighter, and she was such an active baby. When my wife was 16 weeks with with bunny, we went out to dinner to celebrate, and on our way back to our truck after dinner, and you felt a drip run down her leg. Said. She said, Hey, did you throw water on me? And I said, No, I did not throw any water on you. She said, I hope this is not what I think it is. I was saying the same. We will end up going to the emergency room, and we waited for 40 minutes while the amniotic fluid leaked down my wife's leg, and there was a boy, a little boy, who pointed at my wife and asked his mom, Mom, what is going on with that lady? And all his mom could say is, son, just mind your business

when we had to wait for the doctor. He said, You're going to lose the baby, and we had to wait 12 to 24, hours before the baby could come out.

And he said, There's nothing he can do. Then he explained about the 15 week banner that had just gone into effect. I remember thinking, what about your oath? What about helping patients in need? All he could do is apologize and explain that he could not lose his license or go to jail so my wife didn't get the necessary care that she needed. He didn't send us home, and Anya told me she was going to die when the baby died,

she just had a bad feeling her body wasn't right, but I was in denial. I said, we're going to get over this. But my wife is very smart. I sure wish I had a brain like my wife.

She researched online how to get the ML, they flew it back up, but, but then it was too late the next day, and you asked me to take her to the hair salon. She had a friend that died without getting her hair done, and she didn't want to be a burden on her mother without and having her mother deal with that. So I took my wife to the hair salon, and while I was sitting in the truck, she called me from the bathroom and said, Babe, she's here. I ran into the bathroom and I saw bunny hanging down from my wife. I told my wife, don't look I would carry that burden for the rest of my life.

Sorry. Anya was bleeding a lot, and I separated the baby for my wife, and then she really started bleeding. And finally, her ambulance showed up and rushed Anya to the hospital. Anya lost nearly half the blood in her body that day on the bathroom floor. The doctor said the operation should take about an hour. It turned into eight hours. At one point, the doctor asked me if I want to focus on saving my wife life or saving my wife uterus. And I say to myself, What kind of question is that? But I did choose the right answer. It would save my wife life and save my wife uterus, because I knew it was very important for my wife to have a baby. Me and my wife are very private people. We didn't even want our family to know because we didn't want to put the burden on them. We'd rather deal with it ourselves, but I realized the burden was too strong for me, so I'll call her mom, I call her dad, and I call her sisters. I then started to pray, after a security officer told me, you need to go pray.

I went into a trance for about an hour of praying, and I thought I got up, my wife, family, and the whole hospital staff was standing behind me,

and they all started praying with me. That's there's a huge difference between hearing about abortion laws and having to live with them. Before this, I can honestly say I never used to think about it too much. I just figured out that it was someone, if they want to do it, that was their choice and it should be. No one else's business.

But when that 15 week ban came down, I feel like a lot of you here, I was confused and I was pissed off, and then they turned around and tell us 15 weeks wasn't enough, and now they implemented a six week ban. Today, I asked myself, How can our government come into our homes and interfere with the choices that we make with our families? When onion got out of surgery, the doctor said, I don't know what kind of prayers you did, but she's going to be okay.

Talking about this, it's never easy, especially when the fact that I lost my daughter.

She was the only baby to make it up to 16 weeks. She was the 17th baby. And all those miscarriages my wife had. We lost bunny in 2022 and I want you guys to know that when I walked on this stage tonight, I didn't know how I was going to deliver this message to you,

but I wanted to make it personal, and I didn't want you guys to think that this is script, because it's not.

When I walked on the stage tonight and look at my phone, there's two people in my life right now. That's my wife, Anya, and my nine week old daughter.

Her name is Anil. Her nickname is still bunny.

Allison Langer  12:21  
I love that he tells us at the end, it's not scripted. And I was cracking up, because we are pretty scripted, and we love our storytellers to have, like a script and we work on it for cutting out like one little word here and asking more information there. And he went so off script. It was great. Yeah, he didn't listen to a damn word we said.

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  12:43  
He started with the phone, which was his own thing, which I was like, Wait, what is he saying? But then he brought it back at the very end. That's the sign of a really good storyteller. But

Allison Langer  12:55  
also, I think it's different, like when you're reading something off a page for whatever. It's different than when you're telling a story live even with a page, even when you're kind of reading, also because you want to put your own personality into it. And I thought it worked. It really, really was. It

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  13:14  
was amazing. Yeah, this story, God, it totally gets me. And this just listening to it right now. I mean, I listen to it on stage and listening to it right now. It's gorgeous. It's so powerful. We tell storytellers to be in the moment. Be in your story when you're reading. And Derek Cook was 100% in it. He was really feeling every every step of it. And he knows his story really well, but he didn't really go off script, only from the beginning, only the beginning, in the end. And I know because I worked with him on a story, but so gorgeous. I hate

Allison Langer  13:55  
that his family had to go through this because of our stupid ass abortion ban. And this was already a 15 week one, and like he says in the piece, that now it's six weeks, so it's brutal. I mean,

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  14:12  
this happened in 2022 and it was when his wife was had a miscarriage at 16 weeks, and then they sent her home. Ah, I mean, that's one of the exceptions, is when, when you have a spontaneous miscarriage, but still, because there was a fetal there was there was fetal cardiac activity, they sent her home.

Allison Langer  14:35  
No, she wasn't having a miscarriage. She was her amniotic fluid leaked out, and so they're waiting for her to have the abortion, like the miscarriage to begin. Okay, okay, we sent her own

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  14:48  
Well, one of the exceptions, what we learned from Dr grande in that previous episode was, I can't remember what she called it. There were three exceptions, and one of them had was like, when your water breaks

Allison Langer  14:59  
three. Exceptions, a ruptured membrane, that's this, which means the water broke. Yeah, ectopic pregnancies, which mean pregnancy is not in the uterus, and molar pregnancies, which mean the patient, patient has an abnormal, aggressive placenta. So, but if this is the case, why didn't they take her? You know, Anya in and perform the evacuation, because

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  15:24  
doctors are afraid, because there's, there's this, all this gray area, because there was still cardiac activity, so the fetus was still alive, so they were waiting for the fetus to die, or they were waiting for her to get so sick that they had that they had to save her life, and that's that gray area, and so they sent her home. Crazy, God, that is so so bad. What I love so much about this story is okay. So we get the gruesome horror show of medical care right now, but we also get this really beautiful love story, the parts where how we learn about how Derek, like, I love her brain. I wish I had my wife's brain. Like, there's such a I don't know he, like, worships her. And then he takes this other part where he takes her to the hair salon, and we learn about, like, what were her priorities? She didn't want to burden her mother with dying without having her hair done. So he takes her the hair salon, which is like, What a sweetheart. Like she didn't just go by herself. Well, obviously, I guess not, because it was like she thought she was gonna die. Oh my god. And then that scene, yeah, horrible. And the way he was like, I'm gonna carry this burden. Don't look I'm gonna keep this horrific, just the reverence he he has for her came through throughout that that made me love them both so much.

Allison Langer  17:00  
Yeah, and it just goes to show that it's a whole family tragedy and problem and everything. So it's not just, oh, a woman's decision. I mean, it affects the entire family. Well,

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  17:11  
Dara Cook has become a very active participant and advocate for men for choice, and men for choice has become a really big player in abortion rights right now, and it's very cool.

Allison Langer  17:25  
I hope they have success because men listen to men to see yes. I really hope that that the voters speak and say, improve. Me wrong.

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  17:35  
One thing I want to say before we go is that Anja cook told that, like, two minute version of the story at the Democratic National Convention, and Derek was on stage holding their baby. It was so beautiful. Oh my god,

Allison Langer  17:52  
do we know the baby's name?

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  17:54  
I think he told that. He said it at the very, very end.

Derick Cook  18:02  
I Oh, her name is Anil. Her nickname is still bunny.

Allison Langer  18:08  
Well, thank you guys for listening and thank you, Derek, for sharing your story with us. Derek Cook is a high school football champ, a drummer and guitar player. Because of what Derek went through, he told us he wants to write a book. I hope he does. Writing class. Radio is hosted by me, Allison Langer and me Andrea askowitz. Audio production by Matt Kendall, Evan serminsky and Aiden glassy at the sound off media company. Theme music is by Kenny karade. There's more writing class on our website, including stories we study, editing resources, video classes, writing retreats and live online classes. If you want to write with us every week, or if you're a business owner, community activist group that needs healing, entrepreneur and you want to help your team write better, check out all the classes we offer on our website, writing class, radio.com Join the community that comes together for instruction, an excuse to write and the support from other writers to learn more. Go to our website or patreon.com/writing class radio, a full list of our sponsors and a link to donate to yes on four can be found in our show notes. A new episode in this series will drop every Wednesday until the election.

Andrea Askowitz  19:23  
There's no better way to understand ourselves and each other than by writing and sharing our story. Everyone has a story. What's yours? 

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  19:35  
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