Not Through Loving You

by Patricia Preston

  She took out her phone. She had a message from her father, Julian, who was in Berlin. He wanted to know if everything was all right with her.

  Everything is great, Dad. That’s what he expected from her. I’m working on some new songs.

  While Dallas is in Alaska?

  I’m not a wilderness person like him.

  It seems like he is going up there fairly often and you never go with him.

  Lia winced. We’re okay with that. Sometimes a break is a good thing.

  Dallas loves you, and he needs you. Don’t forget how essential you are to his career. As soon as I get back, we’ve got to get to work on the video shoots for his new album.

  With a sigh, she stuck her phone in the shoulder strap bag she carried and looked out the window. She supposed this was an average-size hospital for a city of fifty thousand, but it was small compared to the huge medical complexes she and Dallas had visited when he made celebrity appearances for good causes. From Johns Hopkins to Cedars-Sinai, she had seen hospitals that were on the cutting edge of research and medical treatments.

  “Hello.”

  She turned to see Aaron standing in the doorway. She blinked in surprise as she saw him for the first time in blue scrubs and a white lab coat, which transformed him into a doctor. The clothes definitely made him.

  She held his gaze for a moment and wondered what it would be like to be someone who could save a baby’s life. What would it be like to feel that adopting an unwanted baby was something meant to be? She admired more than just his looks, and a part of her wanted to get to know him. Another part knew that was pointless.

  “Morning.” She crossed the room to where he stood in the doorway. He had not taken the time to shave, and the stubble looked sexy on him. She wondered if he were like the TV doctors who had sex in the linen closets and that sort of thing. The thought brought a smile to her face, and he narrowed his blue eyes as if her smile bothered him.

  “This way.” He didn’t bother with small talk.

  She trotted alongside him down a hallway with pastel yellow walls and colorful nursery rhyme paintings. “How is the baby today?”

  “Stable.”

  “Good.” What an amazing conversation they were having.

  He stopped beside a locked door marked STAFF ONLY. He entered a code on the electronic keypad and pushed the door open. Lia followed him into a corridor where the glass wall on the right revealed the work area of the newborn nursery. She glimpsed a nurse weighing a protesting red-faced newborn while another nurse swaddled a baby.

  “How cute,” Lia commented. “The babies are so tiny.”

  “Those are above-average-size newborns,” Aaron informed her.

  “They look tiny to me.” After all, she had no experience in the baby department.

  He pushed his way through a pair of swinging doors into a small room with sinks and posters about hand washing and sterile technique. “We have to scrub up.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means wash your hands,” he replied. “And put this on over your clothes.” He handed her a package that contained a disposable paper gown. “I don’t want you to contaminate anything.”

  She glared at him for a second. “I’ll try not to.” While he washed his hands in one sink, she used the other one and followed the chart on the wall. Then she put the thin, sterile paper gown on over her clothes. Aaron led the way out of the room and past a nurses station where an older nurse did a double take.

  Aaron started to talk as they reached an area he called the special-care nursery where medical equipment beeped, clicked, or continuously made swooshing sounds. “This is where we keep the preemies and babies with medical problems, depending on their size and the severity of their condition. It’s a special-care nursery with NICU pods. This is a level two-and-a-half nursery because we overlap with level three NICU nurseries on some care levels. Babies that are less than three pounds are flown to Memphis or Nashville as well as babies requiring more intensive care than we provide here.”

  For the first time, uncertainty started to build inside Lia as she considered the seriousness of this nursery. It wasn’t like the images on TV where cute babies were lined up in front of a window. They walked past two babies in small, open beds. Blindfolded, they lay under a bright blue light. Her heart filled with sympathy and distress.

  “Do they ever die? The babies?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Aaron answered without elaboration. “We have four NICU pods. John is the only baby in one at this time.” He directed her attention to the back wall where three large spaces had both freestanding equipment and devices attached to the walls. Each had a curtain that could be pulled for privacy. “Sunday is usually a quiet day. Labs and X-rays are kept to a minimum.”

  She followed him to the first pod. A red rocking chair was the only friendly thing she saw as Aaron continued his professional assessment of her sister’s baby. “John is in an incubator. An incubator is a lifesaver when it comes to preemies like John, who need help to survive. The incubator helps him maintain his body temperature.

  “A heat sensor connects John to the incubator, so when his body temp starts to drop, the incubator’s heater comes on and warms him up. It has a fan that keeps the warm air circulating around him and a built-in humidifier.

  “The interior provides a sterile environment, which is important when it comes to preventing infections. There are access ports so he can receive care without being removed from the incubator, and it helps shield him from outside noise, enabling him to sleep better.”

  Aaron took a blanket from the top of a large, plastic box that Lia thought resembled a coffin. She stepped closer to get a look inside the incubator. Her heart practically stilled as she looked at the baby who was bare except for a disposable diaper.

  She had never once imagined Candace’s baby as so tiny and frail. Patches with wires trailing from them decorated his bare torso. A tube was inserted in his nose and taped to his cheek. Bandages and a splint covered the lower half of his left arm, securing an IV line, and his head rested inside a small clear hood.

  Her mind railed at her sister. Candace, how could you do this? How could you let this happen? Was there not a single drop of decency in you?

  Aaron continued to talk while she felt helpless as she realized her sister’s legacy was such a terrible tragedy. “He was born in respiratory distress. He’s been on a ventilator and CPAP. For the past couple of days, he’s been breathing on his own. The oxygen hood helps him so he doesn’t have to work so hard to breathe. That’ll help him gain weight. Breathing uses up calories.”

  Lia felt her own lungs struggling to expand.

  “Today he weighed in at three pounds and fourteen ounces. I’m hoping by the end of the week he’ll reach the four-pound mark. Right now, he is both tube fed and bottle fed. I hope to discontinue the tube feedings soon.”

  Aaron slipped on a pair of purple latex gloves and stuck his hand through the incubator’s access port and indicated the different leads coming from the electrodes stuck on the baby’s body. “These are connected to the cardiorespiratory monitor on the wall. It tracks his breathing and heart rate. If either is abnormal, an alarm will alert us.

  “This is a blood pressure monitor wrapped around his left leg, and this is the pulse oximeter,” Aaron pointed out the blue wrap around John’s right foot with a faint red light glowing inside the wrap. “It uses a light sensor to detect how much oxygen is in his blood.”

  Aaron placed his index finger against the palm of John’s right hand, and the baby gripped his finger. “I put a central line in his left arm. That’s different from a standard IV in that I threaded the line up through the arm and into a larger vein near the heart. Medicine and extra nutrients are delivered via the central line.”

  Lia peered through the clear walls of the incubator where the baby lay on his back. Beneath the oxygen hood, his head was turned toward Aaron. He had a dusting of dark hair covering his scalp, but she couldn’t real
ly tell anything about his face. He lay still, as if in a deep sleep or maybe dying. She glanced at the monitors that were humming and clicking. Steady green lines ran across the screen of the cardiopulmonary monitor in zigzag fashion, indicating the baby had a heartbeat.

  “John still has episodes of apnea and bradycardia.” Aaron removed his hand from the incubator and discarded the gloves. “That means his heartbeat slows down, and he quits breathing sometimes. Premature babies can forget to breathe. If there’s any risk of apnea after he’s discharged, he’ll need a home apnea monitor. An alarm will sound if he stops breathing, and if he doesn’t respond to patting stimuli, he’ll have to be resuscitated. I have parents with high-risk babies like John take a course in infant CPR before the baby goes home.”

  “CPR on a tiny baby like that?” She couldn’t even imagine it.

  “Yeah.” Aaron shrugged as if it were nothing. “His white blood count is low and has been since he was born. He’s had a transfusion, which helped. Anemia coupled with his immature immune system makes him vulnerable to infections, and I’m keeping a careful watch on that.

  “Sepsis could be fatal. He already has pneumonia as well as hypoglycemia and hypothyroidism. Plus he has some problems with reflux,” Aaron continued in a matter-of-fact tone of voice while Lia’s anxiety mounted. “It’s too early yet for his hearing and his vision screening. He reacts to verbal stimuli, so I think his hearing is intact. I don’t know about his vision. Retinopathy of prematurity is a concern. We don’t know exactly what causes ROP in some preemies and not in others. It can range from stage one, which is mild, to stage five, blindness.”

  Lia gasped. “Are you saying there’s a chance he’ll be blind?”

  Before Aaron could reply, a male nurse appeared. “Dr. Kendall.” The nurse motioned for him as he spoke in a worried voice. “I need you to come take a look at a baby for me.”

  “Wait here,” he told Lia, and he left the nursery with the nurse.

  Disconcerted, Lia stood beside the incubator and considered what Aaron had said about the baby. Heart problems, breathing problems, and problems she didn’t remotely understand. Plus possible blindness? The strength drained out of her body. She needed to sit down.

  She turned to the rocker. Aaron had tossed the blanket that had been covering the incubator across the seat of the rocking chair. As she lifted the blanket from the seat, she saw the suns and rainbows printed on the plush blanket.

  “No. Don’t go there,” she told herself as the first thing that popped into her mind was Gilda’s prophecy about the rainbows. “Don’t even go there.” She folded the blanket and laid it on a steel cart that stood on the other side of the rocker.

  Before she had a chance to sit in the rocker, a low, bellowing noise startled her. The sound came from across the room where the two babies lay beneath the blue lights. She had thought an alarm would have been more like a siren than a foghorn. There was no rush of medical personnel in response to sound.

  She stepped out of the NICU pod. Was she the only person who heard that? She glanced around and saw a man in scrubs at a nurses station on the other side of a glass panel. Was the glass soundproof? She caught a glimpse of closed-circuit flat screens. Then the alarm stopped abruptly. The man came out of the room and walked casually over to the babies beneath the lights.

  “Are you a doctor?” Lia asked, upset that he seemed so unconcerned when obviously something was wrong.

  “No,” he answered. “I’m a nurse and a monitor tech. She’s got a loose lead wire,” he said as he checked the leads on the baby’s body and reset the monitor before he returned to his post at the nurses’ station.

  Lia collapsed in the rocker, relaxing for a just a second before she saw that Candace’s baby had his eyes open. Scooting near the incubator, she got her first close-up view of the baby’s face beneath the clear plastic oxygen hood.

  She studied the structure of his face, the shape of his lips and brows. “You look like Mom,” she whispered in surprise.

  He gazed at her with the deep blue eyes common to newborns, and she wondered if he could see her. “Hi.” She placed her palm on the side of the incubator. “It’s your Aunt Lia. You are such a cutie.”

  His eyes remained open as he pursed his lips and squirmed slightly.

  “I’m sorry about everything. About your mother,” she said. “I’m sorry you’ve had such a rough time of it.” She had never imagined that he would have so many serious medical problems. “I know this is a hard way to begin life, but you’re gonna make it.”

  He puckered his lips again and let out a whimper. His face crinkled into a frown as he tried to cry, and Lia hopped out of the rocker.

  “Are you okay?” She looked at the monitors like she actually knew what they meant. The baby thrashed his limbs and began to whine louder. “You’re not okay.”

  Desperate, she called, “I need some help here.” Where was the staff? Where was Aaron? This was the most inept hospital she’d ever seen. It was a miracle the baby had survived, and it seemed to her a baby with so many medical problems should be in a children’s hospital anyway.

  An older, heavy-set nurse appeared. She reminded Lia of a drill sergeant in Mickey Mouse scrubs. She carried a small baby bottle that contained an ounce of formula and had a red nipple attached.

  Annoyed, Lia said, “The baby needs to be examined. He just started crying for no reason. Something is wrong with him.”

  “He’s hungry.” The nurse looked at Lia the way you look at someone who isn’t very bright. “Baby John knows it’s time to eat.”

  Lia bristled as Nurse Know-It-All marched over to the incubator. She slid her hands through the incubator’s access ports, moved the oxygen hood, and sat the baby upright, supporting his head and shoulders with one hand. She stuck the red nipple in his mouth.

  “That’s how you’re going feed him?” Lia asked in horror. Just sit him up and shove a nipple in his mouth? No cuddling or rocking?

  The nurse looked up as the baby sucked on the fast-flow nipple. “Who are you?”

  “I’m his aunt,” she answered, and she saw the surprise on the nurse’s face, followed by a scowl that pissed Lia off.

  “I’m Baby John’s primary care nurse, Helen Craig, and yes, this is how he is fed.” She turned her attention back to the baby. Once he had gulped down the ounce of formula, the nurse put aside the bottle, tilted the baby forward into the palm of her right hand, and rapped on his back until he spit up a little bit of the formula. She quickly wiped his mouth, lay him down, and put the oxygen hood over his head. Then she went to check on the babies under the lights where she changed their diapers in a few seconds and moved on.

  “Unbelievable,” Lia murmured as her temper rose at the indignity of it all. “That was so uncaring and unfeeling. I don’t like this place at all.” She had always been given to quick decisions, and once she made up her mind, it was made up.

  It was made up now. “I’m going to get you out of here before they let you die,” she told the baby. “Aunt Lia’s gonna take care of everything. Including getting you a real name.”

  She glared at the name card on the incubator that read “Baby John Doe.” That was a name for nobody. When she heard the murmur of voices, she looked up and saw that Aaron had returned. He and the delightful nurse, Helen, stood at the entrance of the nursery, talking.

  “Dr. Frankenstein and Nurse Ratched. What a pair,” she fumed as the two of them parted company and Aaron headed toward the NICU pod.

  “If you’re ready to go, I’ll see you out,” Aaron said as if it were all said and done now.

  Wasn’t he going to be surprised? She didn’t say anything until they stepped into the main hallway. The door labeled STAFF ONLY closed soundlessly behind them. “Could I have a word with you in the waiting room?”

  He shot her a curious glance. “All right.”

  “It won’t take long,” she assured him as they turned the corner where a short hallway was flanked by elevators and the small wait
ing room. She was happy to see the waiting room was empty as it probably was most of the time.

  He followed her into the room and stood with his hands in the pockets of his white coat. A sock monkey peered out of one of the pockets. “Yes?” His professional demeanor was completely intact. Yet his gaze lingered on her mouth for a moment too long.

  Inwardly, Lia sighed. Sexual attraction could occur at the worst times ever, or so it seemed. She hated to put an end to it, but sometimes you had to make sacrifices for a tiny baby on death’s doorstep. “I want the baby transferred to Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital.”

  Aaron blinked as if he’d been hit by an unexpected punch. “What?”

  “He’s too sick to be in this hospital,” she insisted. “And that nursery is a terrible place.”

  “Lia, you were in the nursery less than ten minutes,” he pointed out as anger flashed in his blue eyes. “I’m the medical director of that nursery, and I can assure you that it exceeds both state and federal regulations. Plus the staff is well trained and experienced.”

  “I’m not sold on that.” She held her ground. “There was no one around when one of those machines started making a weird sound, and it was a minute or so before the nurse came to see about it.”

  Aaron let out a groan. “That was a malfunction alarm. The monitors have sensors that know when a lead has detached,” he explained. “And we have cameras in the nursery. Not only surveillance cameras, but also cameras on the babies that live feed into the computer screens at the nurses station. There is always someone at the nurses station, if not making rounds. The babies are watched over every minute.”

  “I certainly don’t think you have an outstanding staff. Especially that army sergeant nurse. She even looks mean.”

  “Helen has a master’s degree in pediatric nursing. She’s an excellent nurse, and that’s why she’s John’s primary care nurse. I trust her completely.”