Chapter Fourteen
They put me in a wheelchair after all. My water had broken in a hallway on the wrong floor, and by the time Jess got me down to the third one, arguing with an orderly the whole way, I didn’t have the strength left to refuse anything.
“Seven centimeters,” the resident said, checking me. “You’re moving fast.”
“Is that good?”
“For a first baby? That’s fast.”
?
My brother, Callum, arrived at 6:35, still in the shirt he’d slept in, hair standing up on one side.
“Where’s Elias?” he said, looking around the room like he’d missed him behind a curtain.
Jess caught his eye and gave a small shake of her head.
Callum’s face did something complicated. Then he came and stood on my other side and took my hand, and didn’t ask again.
?
I’m going to tell you what labor is actually like, because nobody had, not properly.
It’s not a scene from a movie, all screaming and drama. It’s endurance. It’s a wave that comes, and you go somewhere very small and quiet inside your own body, and then it passes, and you come back, and people are talking to you about ice chips like nothing happened.
Between waves, I asked Jess for the letter.
?
“Not yet,” she said.
“Jess.”
“He said give it to you if something goes wrong. Nothing’s gone wrong. He’s in surgery. You’re in labor. Nothing has gone wrong.”
“Jess, I want to read it.”
“After,” she said, and her paramedic voice came down over the sister voice like a visor. “You need to be here right now. Not in eleven pages of him. Here.”
?
She was right, and I hated that she was right, and I squeezed her hand hard enough to leave a mark during the next contraction to make my point.
?
At 7:10, the monitor on my belly did something the nurse didn’t like. She frowned, adjusted it, frowned again, and pressed a button on the wall.
“I’m just going to get Dr. Anand to take a look,” she said, in the particular calm voice medical people use right before you’re allowed to panic.
?
Dr. Anand came in fast for a woman who never seemed to hurry.
“Baby’s heart rate’s dipping with your contractions,” she said, reading the strip. “It’s recovering each time, which is good. I want you on your side, oxygen on, and I want eyes on this every minute.”
“Is he in danger?”
“He’s telling us he’s working hard. We’re going to listen.”
?
Callum went white. Jess went very still and professional, which is how I know she was frightened.
I put my hand where the monitor belt crossed my belly and talked to my son the way I’d talked to him in the nursery the day before.
“Not today,” I told him. “Today isn’t the day we lose anybody. Do you hear me? Not you. Not him. Nobody.”
?
Three floors up, in a room I couldn’t see, my husband was unconscious on a table, and a surgeon was making the first incision to take a piece of him out to save a woman I had cried in front of two days earlier.
I thought, very clearly, in between waves: we are both, right now, entirely at the mercy of other people’s hands.
I had never felt married to him more than in that moment, and he wasn’t even in the room.
?
At 7:45, the dip on the monitor happened again, longer this time, and didn’t fully recover before the next contraction started.
Dr. Anand didn’t raise her voice. She just said, to the room, in a tone that ended every other conversation happening in it:
“Let’s get the OR on standby. Just in case.”