Notes on Bed Rest
July 29, 2025 at 02:36AMAnna Russell takes us on a claustrophobic journey in this essay about her experience of enforced bed rest during pregnancy. Largely confined to her flat, she must conquer time itself. What do you do when you are scared of doing anything? When are the consequences of doing too much going to turn dire? Russell presents the mental anguish of walking this tightrope for her unborn child.
Pregnancy is forty weeks long, but it feels much longer on bed rest. When you’ve been asked not to move much in order to protect your unborn child’s life, time stretches out before you like a vast, inhospitable landscape. You must navigate this terrain, carefully, by the subtle markings left behind by previous travellers. In this strange land—a deserted space—time becomes a location, a place to get to. I will get to twenty-four weeks. I will get to twenty-eight weeks. If I can make it to thirty weeks. In the ten weeks I spent on modified bed rest, I sometimes imagined my body as a ship with holes in it travelling toward the safety of land.
In reality, I was not going much of anywhere. I shuffled between the bed, the bathroom, and the sofa in our living room. Our apartment, though charming, inconveniently occupied the top two and a half floors of a converted Victorian terrace house, and somehow contained four flights of stairs. Our bedroom was a cozy attic space that the previous tenants had probably used to store luggage. Lying on the sofa in the living room, I stared out the windows at the brick façades and clay chimneys of the houses opposite ours. Above them was a wide patch of sky, where I watched each afternoon fade into night.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/07/28/notes-on-bed-rest/
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