SPECIAL ISSUE: HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE
WORDS - Tiffany FitzGerald
Illustration - SIngha Hon

Protecting my heart—both the organ and the symbol of my emotional and spiritual life—is difficult. Approaching 40, I fail often, sometimes spectacularly. Although chronic hypertension demands that I watch my salt intake, I adore and almost constantly crave it. I add extra soy sauce when nobody’s watching. Despite a growing body of research supporting the connection between oral hygiene and heart health, I almost never floss. And I allow folks with low vibes to drain me instead of walking away, out of fear of being labeled “cold-hearted.”

I was diagnosed with high blood pressure in my mid-twenties, a biological inheritance made worse by grief. A few years earlier, I lost my mother at that particular moment in a parent-child relationship when you begin to really see one another and appreciate each other as individuals rather than mere reflections. By the time her hair started falling out, my mother and I delighted in each other’s company. The official cause of her death was cancer, but I will always believe she died at least partially of a broken heart. Her soul’s home had been damaged beyond repair by the unnatural disaster of her oldest child and only son’s murder. I was a quiet, poker-faced thirteen-year-old at the time. No one asked how I was. (Many years later, a family member or two would ask how I had been.) My grades never slipped. I never acted out. Black girls and their hearts soldier on. These days, they call it magic.

Society demands so much of the hearts of womxn of color. It asks that they bend but never break; give but rarely receive; pour from their deepest reserves into the Black and Brown children it is actively trying to destroy; hope that this won’t be the case despite all evidence to the contrary; hustle and provide and achieve but never undermine a man’s place or ego; ride and ride and ride and eventually, die. A dead Black woman is infinitely easier to love, honor, and cherish than a cold, hard bitch with boundaries and a belief that she deserves more than to merely survive. 

And yet this bare minimum was all I wanted when I found myself, at 38, pregnant with my second child in the age of coronavirus and living in New York City, where Black mothers are 12 times more likely to die from prenatal and childbirth complications than their white counterparts. I just wanted to survive, and I was terrified that I wouldn’t. A Black person’s pregnancy can be hard on the heart and soul. I was automatically considered high-risk, being of “advanced maternal age” and suffering from chronic, barely manageable hypertension. 

But at what should have been one of the most hopeful moments of my life, it was the other killers, systemic and personal traumas and the disease of white supremacy, that reduced me to desperately trying to figure out how to simply not die. So I did what magical Black girls do when staring down statistics that try to take us under: I reminded myself whose daughter I was. I researched and tracked down the Beyoncé of maternal-fetal medicine specialists in New York, if not the country, and this magical Black doctor took me on as her patient.

I enjoyed a relatively easy and uneventful pregnancy, and after a scheduled induction and a fast and furious labor, I gave birth to a perfect, healthy baby we called Ezra. I felt remarkably strong afterward, but a few days later my blood pressure skyrocketed. I was readmitted and diagnosed with postpartum preeclampsia, a serious and sometimes fatal condition characterized by dangerously high blood pressure and protein in the urine after childbirth. I was numb with fear. Stories about the preventable deaths of Black mothers had been all over the news that spring. Womxn of color are rarely guaranteed the dignity we all deserve in this country. It is not enough to have money or education, nor is it enough to be a model patient or show the deference some doctors’ egos demand. The system views Black bodies as disposable, whether those bodies belong to elite, world-famous tennis players or first-time moms from the Bronx.

I spent two and a half very dark days away from my family, but I was lucky. Thanks to a certain amount of privilege, I had the ability to make (and pay for) informed health care choices. As a result, I was treated by people who were at the top of their field and, perhaps more importantly, I was cared for. Finding a Black woman doctor was non-negotiable; I only wanted a Black woman taking care of me. They are the only people who ever have.