On a September evening in 2005, I flipped absently through the TV channels from my spot on the sofa. Nothing grabbed my attention until I paused on “The Office,” a new comedy that I had heard of but never seen. The piano theme song played and images of snowy Scranton, Pennsylvania, filled my screen, followed by clips of the characters that I did not yet know by name: Pam at reception, Dwight punching numbers into an adding machine, Jim holding a phone to his ear.
Then the camera focused on Michael, played by Steve Carell, sitting behind his desk, with a small gold statue in his hand. When he spoke, it felt almost like he was talking directly to me.
As the episode unfolded, I became mesmerized. And I laughed — out loud — for the first time in weeks.
I had forgotten that I still knew how.
One month earlier, my husband and I stared dreamily at the fuzzy images of our baby girl on the ultrasound screen. We were at our 19-week anatomy scan, an appointment that I had looked forward to with nervous anticipation.
“She looks great,” my OB-GYN said.
Although I’m a worrier by nature, I exhaled. We had escaped a bleeding scare at week nine. I had eclipsed the treacherous first trimester. Our baby was growing normally. The doctor had said so, after all.
“The Office,” for those unfamiliar with the sitcom that aired from 2005 to 2013, was a hilarious mockumentary, starring Carell, Mindy Kaling, John Krasinski, Jenna Fischer and Rainn Wilson. The U.S. show depicted the daily lives of the staff at Dunder Mifflin, a paper supply company in Scranton, and was adapted from the British show with the same title.
When I first tuned in, the show hadn’t even been guaranteed to run a full season. Thankfully, the series’ popularity exploded, leading to 201 episodes, nine seasons, five Emmy awards, and a multitude of quotable phrases. (Many claim that’s where “That’s what she said!” was popularized.)
One week after that ultrasound, I noticed mild back pain after work. “It will go away,” I told myself as the TV hummed in the background. I rested on the couch with my feet up, trying to distract myself by grading my third grade students’ math tests.
As the afternoon melted into evening, my pain gradually intensified — so much that I eventually couldn’t walk up the stairs without hunching over. When I finally called the doctor’s after-hours emergency line around 11 p.m., the nurse stated what was already pretty obvious: I was most likely in preterm…
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