I. Ruby lost her virginity in July of this year, not long after she turned 28. Five days later, she knew, with deep certainty and not a little dread, that she was pregnant. Her nipples grew and darkened, she says; her abdomen tingled. The man she'd slept with
refused to see her, and when he finally agreed to meet up, he insisted on buying the morning-after pill. She refused to take it, and they didn't talk much after that.
Soon after, Ruby started seeing doctors, one after another. A curious pattern quickly emerged: No one but her could see the fetus.
Ruby spent the first few months of her pregnancy shuttling back and forth between her parents' house in her hometown and New York, hoping to move to the city for good. She underwent at least two ultrasounds between July and October, one at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York and one at a facility in her hometown. (To protect her privacy, Jezebel is identifying Ruby by a pseudonym, and omitting some details that could potentially identify her.) Multiple blood and urine tests also came back negative for pregnancy.
But Ruby knew something was there, and as her stomach started to swell, she only became more certain. She felt a stretching sensation in her vagina and occasional, fluttering contractions in her uterus. She grew increasingly frustrated and desperate as all the test results continued to be, in her mind, inconclusive. She made an appointment with a specialist on the Upper East Side who she hoped might be able to tell her what was happening. But then, on the night of October 8, she walked into the emergency room of NYU Langone Medical Center. She wanted another ultrasound. She couldn't wait.
The ultrasound technician there didn't see a baby either. Ruby thought his scan had been far too brief to show anything. Things grew tense, and something happened between them. Ruby calls it an argument; the hospital, citing medical privacy laws, declined to comment.
After a little verbal tussling, Ruby says, the ultrasound technician told her she would be taken to see an OB-GYN, who would examine her further. Instead, she was taken into a psychiatric seclusion room and held down by four male orderlies, one pinning each of her limbs. She was given injections of Ativan, an anti-anxiety drug, and Zyprexa, an antipsychotic. She screamed, thrashed, and finally, defeated and sleepy from the medication, fell asleep. When she woke up, she was in a locked ward at Bellevue Hospital's psychiatric center. (This is Ruby's own recollection of events, but the fact that she was physically restrained in the emergency room is also backed up by court testimony given by her psychiatrist.)
Ten days later, Ruby sat at a table in the visitation room on her ward, her eyes welling up with tears behind her glasses. She's very tall and extremely thin, with long arms, dark hair pulled back in a long, low ponytail and thick eyebrows. She wore a black long-sleeved top and slacks, with a green sleeveless dress layered over them. The sleeves of the top were rolled up, revealing a row of thin white self-harm scars on her left arm.
"I shouldn't be here," she told me, her voice cracking. "This is horrendous. I'm just contained in here."
Ruby talked fast, smoothing her hair back and fixing her glasses whenever her thoughts started to race. She held a pile of papers: printouts from her ultrasounds, material on rare pregnancy disorders with handwritten notes in the margins. "I never go on YouTube," one of them read. John, an on-again, off-again boyfriend she'd met through OKCupid last year, sat across the table from her, looking pained. (John is not the man she believes impregnated her. His name has also been changed.) He'd brought her a piece of pizza, but she was too agitated to eat much.
At Ruby's request, John had sent out a series of frantic emails to media outlets over the previous week.