8. Jenna
CHAPTER EIGHT
Jenna
They took me back almost the moment we walked through the doors, which I understood, even through the fog of pain and fear, was not a good sign. A calm hospital is a hospital that makes you wait. Nobody made me wait.
A nurse got me into a gown and onto a monitor with quick, practiced hands while asking me questions I could barely track, when did the bleeding start, on a scale of one to ten where was the pain, and I answered as best I could while Paige stood at the head of the bed holding my hand, having apparently decided, without either of us saying it out loud, that she wasn't going anywhere.
She'd abandoned any pretense of composure by then, her own face pale and set, but her voice stayed steady every time she spoke to me, telling me I was doing great, telling me help was already here, telling me Sophie could hear my voice and needed to hear it stay calm.
The monitor picked up Sophie's heartbeat, and for a moment the sound of it, fast and present, was the only thing keeping me from coming apart entirely.
Then a resident I hadn't met came in, looked at the strip the monitor was printing out, and her expression changed in a way that made my stomach drop even before she said anything.
"We're seeing some decelerations in the heart rate that we don't love," she said, already moving toward the door to get someone else, "and given the bleeding you're describing, I want Dr. Okafor's partner in here right now, and I want to get you prepped in case we need to move quickly."
"Move quickly to what," I asked, though some part of me already knew.
"Possibly a C-section, if things don't stabilize in the next few minutes. I don't want to alarm you. I want to be ready."
Everything after that moved with a speed that felt like watching a film reel skip frames, whole minutes disappearing between one clear memory and the next.
A doctor I didn't recognize, older, steady-voiced, examining me and conferring quietly with the resident.
Someone explaining, in the calm, careful tone reserved for information people don't want to hear, that I likely had a partial placental abruption, that the baby was showing signs of distress, that waiting to see if things resolved on their own carried real risk, that they recommended moving to an emergency cesarean section right away rather than continuing to monitor.
"Is she going to be okay?" I asked, and I don't know if I was asking about Sophie or myself, maybe both at once, the two of us so tangled together in that moment that the question didn't separate cleanly.
"We're going to do everything we can, and moving now is how we give her the best chance," the doctor said, which wasn't the same as yes, and I understood that, and I signed whatever they put in front of me anyway because there wasn't a version of this where I said no.
A different nurse, older, with a quiet, grounding presence, took my free hand while someone else started an IV, and told me her name was Dolores and that she'd delivered more babies in this building than she could count and that fear was normal, expected, nothing to apologize for, and that the best thing I could do for my daughter right now was let the team do their job while I breathed as steadily as I could manage.
I held onto her voice the way I'd held onto Paige's in the car, another steady presence in a night that had otherwise come completely unmoored.
Paige stepped out for a moment to call Ruth, some instinct telling her that Grant's parents deserved to hear this from a steady voice rather than a panicked one, and I could hear fragments of it through the curtain, emergency C-section, don't know yet, I'll call the second there's news, Grant's on his way, delivered in the same flat, controlled tone she'd used with me in the car.
I understood, hearing it, that she was managing an entire family's fear single-handedly while I lay there being prepped for surgery, and I felt a fresh wave of gratitude for my sister that I didn't have the breath to voice out loud.
"Where's Grant?" I asked Paige, as they started wheeling my bed toward the operating room, the fluorescent lights sliding past overhead in a blur.
"He's still on his way. I'll go find him the second he gets here."
"He's not going to make it, is he."
Paige didn't lie to me. I've loved her for a lot of reasons over the course of my life, but I loved her for that, in that moment, for not offering me a comfort she couldn't guarantee.
"I don't know. But you don't need him in that room right now.
You need to focus on her. I'm right outside, and the second there's news, I'll get it to you. "
They wouldn't let Paige come further than the doors of the operating suite, hospital policy, only one support person and only once things were further along, and in the end there wasn't time even for that.
I remember the anesthesiologist explaining what she was doing before she did it, the strange, total absence of feeling that spread up from my waist, the sensation of pressure without pain as they worked, a blue drape blocking my view of my own body being opened.
I remember being cold, and someone tucking another warmed blanket around my shoulders.
I remember asking, twice, if Grant had arrived, and being told, both times, gently, that he hadn't, not yet.
Someone had turned on a small radio somewhere in the operating room, low enough to be almost subliminal, some forgettable instrumental version of a song I couldn't place, and I found myself fixating on it strangely, grateful for anything that wasn't the sound of my own fear, grateful for the ordinary, procedural bustle of a team that did this every single day and clearly weren't panicking even if I was.
I want to say I thought about him the whole time, that my anger and grief filled up every second of that surgery, but the truth is more complicated than that, and I think it's important to tell it honestly.
Mostly, in that room, I thought about Sophie.
I thought about the two years it took to get pregnant, the two losses before this one held, the yellow nursery and the fox print and the going-home outfits I still hadn't finished picking.
I thought about the ultrasound where we first saw her heartbeat, a flicker on a screen that had made both Grant and me cry in a dim exam room, and about the two of us picking her name off a list of nearly forty options because it was the only one we both loved without hesitation.
I thought, with a fierceness that surprised me, that I would get through whatever this was because she needed me to, and that everything else, Grant, the party, the fifteen minutes that had apparently cost us this, could wait until there was room in me to feel it fully.
Then I heard her cry.
It's a sound I will never fully be able to describe to anyone who hasn't heard their own child make it for the first time, thin and furious and absolutely, unmistakably alive, and it broke something open in me that had been holding rigid since the moment I felt that first wrongness in my body hours earlier.
I cried, and laughed, and asked if she was okay, and someone told me she was seven pounds one ounce and breathing well and absolutely beautiful, and they brought her around the drape for a moment so I could see her face before they took her to be cleaned and checked, tiny and red and outraged at the whole experience of being born.
"Hi," I whispered to her, my hands still numb, unable to hold her yet, tears running sideways into my hair. "Hi, Sophie. I've got you. I'm right here."
In that moment, holding nothing but the sight of her, I felt something I hadn't expected, a love so immediate and total it left almost no room for anything else, everything else receded for a few precious minutes.
It didn't erase what had happened. I want to be honest about that too, because there's a version of this story where meeting my daughter washes everything else away, and that isn't what happened.
The anger was still there, banked low, waiting.
But for those first few minutes, it was Sophie's cry and Sophie's face and the astonishing, overwhelming fact of her, finally real, finally here, and I let myself have that, uncomplicated, for as long as it lasted.
They finished cleaning her up a few feet away while the surgical team continued closing my incision, and I could hear a nurse cooing at her, telling her she had a great set of lungs on her already, and somewhere in the middle of the ordinary, competent bustle of a hospital doing exactly what hospitals do, I felt myself start to shiver, the adrenaline finally draining out of me all at once, my teeth chattering hard enough that the anesthesiologist noticed and added another warmed blanket, telling me it was completely normal, that my body had just been through something enormous and this was simply what enormous looked like on the other side of it.
Dolores stayed close through the last of the closing, checking on me periodically with the same grounding calm she'd offered before the surgery started, and at one point, catching the direction of my gaze toward the corner of the room where they were weighing and measuring Sophie, she said quietly, "First hour's always strange.
All that fear, and then all that love, arriving in the same fifteen minutes.
Your body doesn't always know which one to feel first. That's normal.
That's just what tonight is." I held onto that small, plain kindness longer than I expected to, a stranger's steady voice making sense of something I didn't yet have words for myself.
It didn't last very long, that suspended, uncomplicated joy.
As they finished closing the incision and moved me toward recovery, the practical world came rushing back in, and with it, the question that had been sitting underneath everything else since the moment I read Grant's text in an empty living room.
Where was he. And what, exactly, was I going to say to him when he finally walked through the door.