‘You okay?’
‘Great,’ she murmured, hoping and praying that she was. The music played on and Diego suggested that they sit this next one out. Izzy was about to agree, only suddenly the walk back to their table seemed rather long. The music tipped into the next ballad and Izzy leant on him as the next small wave hit, only this time it did make her catch her breath and Diego could pretend no more.
‘Izzy?’ She heard the question in his voice.
‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘Can you get me outside?’ she said, still leaning on him, waiting for it to pass. ‘In a moment.’
Their exit was discreet. He had a hand round her waist and they didn’t stop to get her bag, and as the cool night air hit, Izzy wondered if she was overreacting because now she felt completely normal.
‘Izzy.’ Discreet as their exit had been, Gus must have noticed because he joined them outside, just as another contraction hit.
‘They’re not strong,’ Izzy said as Gus placed a skilled hand on her abdomen.
‘How far apart?’ Gus asked, and it was Diego who answered.
‘Six, maybe seven minutes.’
‘Okay.’ Gus wasted no time. ‘Let’s get you over to the hospital and we can pop you on a monitor. I’ll bring the Jeep around.’
‘Should we call an ambulance?’ Diego asked, but Gus shook his head.
‘We’ll be quicker in my Jeep and if we have to pull over, I’ve got everything we need.’
‘I’m not having it,’ Izzy insisted, only neither Diego nor Gus was convinced.
It was a thirty-minute drive from Penhally. Diego felt a wave of unease as Izzy’s hand gripped his tighter and she blew out a long breath. He remembered his time on Maternity and often so often it was a false alarm, the midwives could tell. Izzy kept insisting she was fine, that the contractions weren’t that bad, but he could feel her fingers digging into his palms at closer intervals, could see Gus glancing in the rear-view mirror when Izzy held her breath every now and then, and the slight acceleration as Gus drove faster.
His mind was racing, awful scenarios playing out, but Izzy could never have guessed. He stayed strong and supportive beside her, held her increasingly tightening fingers as Gus rang through and warned the hospital of their arrival. A staff member was waiting with a wheelchair as they pulled up at the maternity section.
‘It’s too soon,’ Izzy said as he helped her out of the Jeep.
‘You’re in the right place,’ Diego said, only he could feel his heart hammering in his chest, feel the adrenaline coursing through him as she was whisked off and all he could do was give her details as best as he could to a new night receptionist.
‘You’re the father?’ ahe asked, and his lips tightened as he shook his head, and he felt the relegation.
‘I’m a friend,’ Diego said. ‘Her…’ But he didn’t know what to follow it up with. It had been just a few short weeks, and he wasn’t in the least surprised when he was asked to take a seat in a bland waiting room
He waited, unsure what to do, what his role was—if he even had a role here.
Going over and over the night, stunned at how quickly everything had changed. One minute they had been dancing, laughing—now they were at the hospital.
The logical side of his brain told him that thirty-one weeks’ gestation was okay. Over and over he tried to console himself, tried to picture his reaction if he knew a woman was labouring and he was preparing a cot to receive the baby. Yet there was nothing logical about the panic that gripped him when he thought of Izzy’s baby being born at thirty-one weeks. Every complication, every possibility played over and over. It was way too soon, and even if everything did go well, Izzy would be in for a hellish ride when she surely didn’t deserve it.
They could stop the labour, though. Diego swung between hope and despair. She’d only just started to have contractions…
‘Diego.’ Gus came in and shook his hand.
‘How is she?’
‘Scared,’ Gus said, and gave him a brief rundown of his findings. ‘We’ve given her steroids to mature the baby’s lungs and we’re trying to stop the labour or at least slow down the process to give the medication time to take effect.’
‘Oh, God…’ Guilt washed over him, a guilt he knew was senseless, but guilt all the same. However, Gus was one step ahead of him.
‘Nothing Izzy or you did contributed to this, Diego. I’ve spoken with Izzy at length, this was going to happen. In fact…’ he gave Diego a grim smile ‘…an ultrasound and cord study have just been done. Her placenta is small and the cord very thin. This baby really will do better on the outside, though we’d all like to buy another week or two. I knew the baby was small for dates. Izzy was going to have an ultrasound early next week, but from what I’ve just seen Izzy’s baby really will do better by being born.’
‘She’s been eating well, taking care of herself.’
‘She suffered trauma both physically and emotionally early on in the pregnancy,’ Gus said. ‘Let’s just get her through tonight, but guilt isn’t going to help anyone.’
Diego knew that. He’d had the same conversation with more parents than he could remember—the endless search for answers, for reasons, when sometimes Mother Nature worked to her own agenda.
‘Does she want to see me?’
Gus nodded. ‘She doesn’t want to call her family just yet.’
When he saw her, Diego remembered the day he had first met her when she had come to the neonatal ward. Wary, guarded, she sat on the bed, looking almost angry, but he knew she was just scared.
‘It’s going to be okay,’ Diego said, and took her hand, but she pulled it away.
‘You don’t know that.’
She sat there and she had all her make-up on, her hair immaculate, except she was in a hospital gown with a drip and a monitor strapped to her stomach, and Diego wondered if she did actually want him there at all.
She did.
But how could she ask him to be there for her?
She was scared for her baby, yet she resented it almost.
Nine weeks.
They’d had nine weeks left of being just a couple, which was not long by anyone’s standards. Nine weeks to get to know each other properly, to enjoy each other, and now even that nine weeks was being denied to them.
How could she admit how much she wanted him to stay—yet how could she land all this on him?
‘I think you should go.’
‘Izzy.’ Diego kept his voice steady. ‘Whatever helps you now is fine by me. I can call your family. I can stay with you, or I can wait outside, or if you would prefer that I leave…’
He wanted to leave, Izzy decided, or he wouldn’t have said it. The medication they had given her to slow down the labour made her brain work slower, made her thought process muddy.
‘I don’t know…’ Her teeth were chattering, her admission honest. Gus was back, talking to a midwife and Richard Brooke, the paediatric consultant, who had just entered the room. They were all looking at the printout from the monitor and Izzy wanted five minutes alone with Diego, five minutes to try and work out whether or not he wanted to be there, but she wasn’t going to get five minutes with her thoughts for a long while.
‘Izzy.’ She knew that voice and so did Diego, knew that brusque, professional note so well, because they had both used it themselves when they bore bad tidings. ‘The baby is struggling; its heartbeat is irregular…’
‘It needs time to let the medication take effect.’ Izzy’s fuzzy logic didn’t work on Gus. He just stood over her, next to Diego, both in suits and looking sombre, and she felt as if she were lying in a coffin. ‘We want to do a Caesarean, your baby needs to be born.’
Already the room was filling with more staff. She felt the jerk as the brakes were kicked off the bed, the clang as portable oxygen was lifted onto the bed and even in her drugged state she knew this wasn’t your standard Caesarean section, this was an emergency Caesarean.
‘Is there time�
��?’ She didn’t even bother to finish her sentence. Izzy could hear the deceleration in her baby’s heartbeat, and knew there wouldn’t be time for an epidural, that she would require a general anaesthetic, and it was the scariest, out-of-control feeling. ‘Can you be there, Diego?’ Her eyes swung from Diego to Gus. ‘Can Diego be in there?’
For a general anaesthetic, partners or relatives weren’t allowed to come into the theatre, but the NICU team were regularly in Theatre and after just the briefest pause Richard agreed, but with clarification. ‘Just for Izzy.’
‘Sure,’ Diego agreed, and at that moment he’d have agreed to anything, because the thought of being sent to another waiting room, knowing all that could go wrong, was unbearable, but as he helped speed the bed the short distance to Theatre, Diego also knew that if there was a problem with the babe, he wanted to be the one dealing with it. This was no time for arrogance neither was it time for feigned modesty—quite simply Diego knew he was the best.
The theatre sister gave Diego a slightly wide-eyed look as she registered he was holding hands with her emergency admission, whom she recognised too.
‘Diego’s here with Izzy,’ the midwife explained. ‘Richard has okayed him to go in.’
‘Then you’ll need to go and get changed,’ came the practical response. ‘You can say goodbye to her here.’
And that was it.
Diego knew when he saw her again, she would be under anaesthetic.
Izzy knew it too.
‘I’m glad you’re here…’ She was trying not to cry and her face was smothered with the oxygen mask. ‘You’ll make sure…’
‘Everything is going to be fine.’ His voice came out gruffer than he was used to hearing it. He was trying to reassure her, but Diego felt it sounded as if he was telling her off. ‘Better than fine,’ he said again. His voice still didn’t soften, but there wasn’t time to correct it. ‘Thirty-one-weekers do well.’
‘Thirty-two’s better.’
‘I’ll be there,’ Diego said. ‘And it is going to be okay.’
He couldn’t give her a kiss, because they were already moving her away.
He turned to Gus, who as her GP would also have to wait outside the operating theatre, and exchanged a look with the worried man. ‘Go and get changed, Diego,’ Gus said, and his words shocked Diego into action. He changed his clothes in a moment, then put on a hat and made his way through to Theatre.
‘Diego!’ Hugh, the paediatric anaesthetist greeted him from behind a yellow mask. ‘Extremely bradycardic, ready for full resus.’
‘Diego’s here with the mother.’ Brianna was there too, ready to receive the baby, and her unusually pointed tone was clearly telling her colleague to shut the hell up.
The surgeon on duty that night had already started the incision, and Diego knew the man in question was brilliant at getting a baby out urgently when required, but for Diego the world was in slow motion, the theatre clock hand surely sticking as it moved past each second marker.
‘Breech.’ The surgeon was calling for more traction. Diego could see the two spindly legs the surgeon held in one hand and for the first time in Theatre he felt nausea, understood now why relatives were kept out and almost wished he had been, because suddenly he appreciated how fathers-to-be must feel.
Except he wasn’t the father, Diego told himself as the baby’s limp body was manoeuvred out and the head delivered.
This baby wasn’t his to love, Diego reminded himself as an extremely floppy baby was dashed across to the resuscitation cot.
He never wanted to feel like this again.
He never wanted to stand so helpless, just an observer. It would, for Diego, have been easier to work on her himself, yet he was in no state to.
He could feel his fingertips press into her palms with impatience as Hugh called twice for a drug, and though the team was fantastic, their calm professionalism riled him. Richard was fantastic, but Diego would have preferred Megan. Megan pounced on tiny details faster than anyone Diego had seen.
‘She’s still bradycardic,’ Diego said, when surely they should have commenced massage now.
‘Out.’ Brianna mouthed the word and jerked her head to the theatre doors, but he hesitated.
‘Diego!’ Brianna said his name, and Diego stiffened in realisation—this wasn’t his call, only it felt like it.
Brianna’s brown eyes lifted again to his when Diego would have preferred them to stay on the baby, and he knew he was getting in the way, acting more like a father than a professional, so he left before he was formally asked to.
Chapter Ten
‘THAT’S it, Izzy…’ She could hear a male voice she didn’t recognise. ‘Stay on your back.’
She was under blankets and wanted to roll onto her side, except she couldn’t seem to move.
‘You’re doing fine,’ came the unfamiliar voice. ‘Stay nice and still.’
‘Izzy, it’s all okay.’
There was a voice she knew. Strong and deep and accented, and she knew it was Diego, she just didn’t know why, and then she opened her eyes and saw his and she remembered.
‘You’ve got a daughter.’ His face was inches away. ‘She’s okay, she’s being looked after.’
And then it was fog, followed by pain, followed by drugs, so many drugs she struggled to focus when Diego came back in the afternoon with pictures of her baby.
‘She looks like you,’ Diego said, but all Izzy could see were tubes.
‘Are you working today?’
Diego shook his head. ‘No. I just came in to see you.’ And he sat down in the chair by her bed and Izzy went to sleep. He flicked through the photos and tried very hard to only see tubes, because this felt uncomfortably familiar, this felt a little like it had with Fernando and he just couldn’t go there again.
He certainly wasn’t ready to go there again.
There was a very good reason that a normal pregnancy lasted forty weeks, Diego reflected, putting the photos on her locker and heading for home—and it wasn’t just for the baby. The parents needed every week of that time to prepare themselves emotionally for the change to their lives.
He wasn’t even a parent.
It was Tuesday night and a vicious UTI later before anything resembling normal thought process occurred and a midwife helped her into a chair and along with her mother wheeled her down to the NICU, where, of course, any new mum would want to be if her baby was.
‘We take mums down at night all the time,’ the midwife explained, when Izzy said the next day would be fine. ‘It’s no problem.’
Except, privately, frankly, Izzy would have preferred to sleep.
Izzy knew she was a likely candidate for postnatal depression.
As a doctor she was well versed in the subject and the midwives had also gently warned her and given her leaflets to read. Gus too had talked to her—about her difficult labour, the fact she had been separated from her daughter and her difficult past. He’d told her he was there if she needed to talk and he had been open and upfront and told her not to hesitate to reach out sooner rather than later, as had Jess.
She sat in a wheelchair at the entrance to NICU, at the very spot where she had first flirted with Diego, where the first thawing of her heart had taken place, and it seemed a lifetime ago, not a few short weeks.
And, just as she had felt that day, Izzy was tempted to ask the midwife to turn the chair around, more nervous at meeting her baby than she could ever let on. Diego was on a stint of night duty and she was nervous of him seeing her in her new role too, because his knowing eyes wouldn’t miss anything. What if she couldn’t summon whatever feelings and emotions it was that new mums summoned?
‘I bet you can’t wait!’ Izzy’s mum said as the midwife pressed the intercom and informed the voice on the end of their arrival. Then the doors buzzed and she was let in. Diego came straight over and gave her a very nice smile and they made some introductions. ‘Perhaps you could show Izzy’s mother the coffee room.’ Diego was firm on t
his as he would be with any of his mothers. If Izzy had stepped in and said she’d prefer her mum to come, then of course it would have happened, but Izzy stayed quiet, very glad of a chance to meet her daughter alone.
‘I already know where the coffee room is,’ Gwen said, ‘and I’ve already seen the baby.’
‘Izzy hasn’t.’ Diego was straight down the line. ‘We can’t re-create the delivery room but we try—she needs time alone to greet her baby.’
Which told her.
‘You know the rules.’ He treated Izzy professionally and she was very glad of it. They went through the handwashing ritual and he spoke to her as they did so.
‘Brianna is looking after her tonight,’ Diego said. ‘Do you know her?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘She’s great—she was there at the delivery. I’ll take you over.’
Nicola, Toby’s mother, was there and gave Izzy a sympathetic smile as she was wheeled past, which Izzy returned too late, because she was already there at her baby’s cot.
Brianna greeted her, but Izzy was hardly listening. Instead she stared into the cot and there she was—her baby. And months of fear and wondering all hushed for a moment as she saw her, her little red scrunched-up face and huge dark blue eyes that stared right into Izzy’s.
Over the last three days Diego had bought her plenty of photos, told her how well she was doing and how beautiful she was, but seeing her in the flesh she was better than beautiful, she was hers.
‘We’re just giving her a little oxygen,’ Brianna explained as Diego was called away. ‘Which we will be for a couple more weeks, I’d expect…’ She opened the porthole and Izzy needed no invitation. She held her daughter’s hand, marvelling that such a tiny hand instinctively curled around her index finger, and Izzy knew there and then that she was in love.
‘She looks better than I thought…’ Izzy couldn’t actually believe just how well she looked. Her mum had been crying when she’d returned the first day from visiting her granddaughter and Richard, the consultant paediatrician, had told her that her baby had got off to a rocky start.
St Piran's: The Wedding of The Year / St Piran's: Rescuing Pregnant Cinderella Page 25