“Okay, I’m going to need to do an internal check. It’s going to be a little uncomfortable. I’ll try to wait until you’re between a contraction, okay?”
I gritted my teeth while he did what he had to.
“I’m afraid you’re already several centimeters dilated.”
“What does that mean?” asked X.
“That the labor is progressing. We’re going to get you hooked up to some monitors so we can keep an eye on the baby’s heartrate, and give you a couple of injections to see if we can slow things down, okay? When you’re this early, even keeping baby inside for a few more days can make all the difference.”
All the difference. He meant the difference between life and death.
I was given injections, one of steroids to help mature the baby’s lungs, and another to try to stop the contractions. The medical team told me to try to relax, but it was easier said than done. X and Nicole flitted around me, unsure of what to do or how to help.
The nurse came back to check on me. “How are you feeling?”
“The contractions don’t seem so bad,” I told her.
“That’s good. Maybe we’ll be able to keep baby inside for a little longer, then. We’ve had women come in here with premature labor and they’ve ended up going home and carrying to full term. I know it’s scary, but you’re in the best place.”
She had reassured me. “Thank you.”
I pushed myself higher on the bed, trying to get into a more comfortable position. A sudden rush of hot fluid spilled between my thighs. Panic and fear filled me and I pulled back the sheet to show the bed beneath me soaking wet. “What’s happening?”
The nurse bit her lip. “Your water just broke. I’ll be back in a couple of minutes.”
I sat, numb, and terrified, with X holding my hand, until the nurse returned with the doctor.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but it’s unlikely we’re going to be able to stop the labor now. Your baby will be at risk of infection if we do.”
“But it’s too soon. The baby isn’t ready.”
“Babies born at this many weeks preterm have a high survival rate. I’m not going to say it will be an easy road, and you will feel like you’re on a rollercoaster, but this doesn’t mean the worst, okay? I need you to try to think positive.”
I barely heard what he was saying. A buzzing had filled my ears, and I felt distant and surreal. How was this happening?
“Did I do something to cause this?” I exchanged a worried glanced with X. He squeezed my hand. I knew he was thinking exactly the same as I was—that us having sex the previous night had caused the preterm labor.
“It’s nothing you’ve done,” the doctor reassured me. “These things just happen. They can be a hormone imbalance, or the placenta stops working, but at least forty percent of the time, we have no idea why it happens.”
I nodded, trying to convince myself that what he said was true.
The injection they’d given me had slowed down the contractions. When they did come, they weren’t as strong, and no longer stole my breath.
“Verity,” the doctor said, “normally, we’d try to keep the baby inside you for as long as possible. At this many weeks pregnant, every extra day can help, but because your water has broken, it means your baby is no longer protected from infections from the outside world. So now we’re doing a balancing act of trying to keep the baby inside you for long enough for the steroids to start working, while not leaving it so long that the baby contracts an infection. Does that make sense?”
I nodded. “You’re saying that you want the baby to stay inside me, but he or she has to be born soon, regardless.”
He gave a sympathetic smile. “Yes, that’s exactly right. We’re going to start you on a course of IV antibiotics as well, which will help reduce any chance of infection.”
“Okay.”
What more could I say? I couldn’t argue this, or fight it. It was going to happen, no matter what I did. For once in my life, I simply had to go along with things. I had no choice.
The next few hours passed in a blur. Both X and Nicole stayed with me, trying to get me to eat and drink to keep up my strength. I had no appetite, but I wasn’t thinking about myself anymore. I had to do what was right for the little life inside of me, who was about to have the biggest fight anyone could ever dream of, and he or she hadn’t even been born yet. It was the least I could do to force down some toast and sweet tea. Guilt and disbelief filled me, and I tried not to pay attention to the other mothers brought in to give birth naturally and take home their full-term, healthy babies. Just seeing them made me blind with bitterness and jealousy. This wasn’t how this was supposed to go. I’d had plans, and none of them had included wondering if my baby was developed enough to be able to breathe after they were born.
“It’s going to be all right,” X kept telling me, holding my hand or stroking my hair. I wanted to take comfort from his words, but I couldn’t. He knew even less than I did. He was in no authority to tell me how this was going to work out.
At least he was here, though. The idea of going through this without him would have destroyed me.
The injection they’d given me to slow the labor began to wear off, and gradually the contractions returned. I was strapped up to more monitors, a large band around my belly which read both the contractions and the baby’s heartbeat. All around me, everything beeped, wires everywhere.
I was checked internally again. “Your baby’s head is already through the cervix,” the midwife told me. “We’re going to be having a baby soon.”
I thought I’d look forward to this moment, the first time of seeing our child, but instead I was terrified. Would he or she even look like a normal baby? I had no idea what to expect. I’d never been so scared in my life, and I’d been through some terrifying experiences. I looked to X who was standing beside me, holding my hand. He squeezed my fingers in reassurance, but he looked as worried as I felt. We were used to taking life, not bringing life into the world, especially not one as precarious as this.
Was this our punishment for everything we’d done?
“I’m here for you, Vee,” he said, his blue eyes intense. “I’m here for both of you.”
I didn’t have time to answer as another contraction took over and I bit down, squeezing his hand hard and trying not to scream. The pain faded, leaving me sweaty and panting. Wrung out.
“Heartrate has dropped,” said the midwife.
We exchanged another worried glance, and Nicole was ushered from the room with promises that she’d be kept updated.
“I love you, Vee,” she called to me, and I saw the tears streaming down her face. Tears I hadn’t spilled myself for many years.
I was checked internally again.
The midwife looked up at me. “Verity, I need you to push really hard now, even if you’re not feeling a contraction. You’ve had a cord prolapsed which means your baby won’t be getting any oxygen. This baby needs to be born right now. Understand?”
I didn’t, not really, but suddenly the room filled with what felt like a hundred panicked people. They wheeled in trolleys and more equipment, shouting instructions to one another.
“Oh, God.”
“Push, Verity. Push, as hard as you can.”
“I can’t!”
“Yes, you can. You have to.”
I gritted my teeth and bore down, breath held, pushing with everything I had. I felt so useless, knowing this baby would be tiny compared to the full-term babies other women were giving birth to.
The pain was excruciating. There hadn’t been time for an epidural, and even if there had been, I would have refused it. I wouldn’t have done anything that would have risked this baby’s life any further.
I pushed and strained and clutched X’s hand so tightly I thought his fingers might break. Nickie waited in the hallway outside, no doubt worrying herself to death.
It felt like it had been too long, but finally the baby slid out from between my leg
s in a gush of hot fluid. Immediately, everyone sprang into action. I only caught a glimpse of terrifyingly blue skin, before the cord was cut. Then my baby was whisked away and placed on an open warming bed to assess and work on him or her. There were no cries of a newborn filling the air. No one congratulating us, or telling us what sex the baby was. It was all frantic movement around the tiny body of my child, wires and machines, and oxygen given.
Blood continued to flow from between my thighs, hot and sticky. The room spun around me, nausea sweeping over, and my vision began to tunnel.
“X,” I managed to say, reaching for him, though I was no longer aware of what direction he was in. “Help—”
I was barely aware of one of the doctors shouting, “She’s hemorrhaging!”
And then I was gone.
Chapter Twenty-nine
V
I blinked open my eyes from a dreamless sleep, unsure of what had happened or where I was. X’s handsome, worried face swam into view.
What had happened hit me. “The baby,” I croaked.
“Hey, you’re awake.”
“Please, the baby.”
I struggled to sit up, but X’s hand on my shoulder kept me pinned to the bed. “It’s okay, she’s alive.”
“She?” Emotions tore through me.
He nodded. “Yes, we have a little baby girl. A daughter.”
“Oh, God. How is she?”
“She was struggling to breathe, so the doctors have put her on a machine to help her. She’s in an incubator now in the NICU. She’s a fighter, like her mom.”
I managed a weak smile. “I want to see her.”
“You can as soon as the doctors say it’s okay. You lost a lot of blood and were given a blood transfusion. You both gave me a scare for a while there.”
“I’m so sorry you had to go through that alone.”
“Don’t be crazy. Nicole was here, too. She hasn’t left the hospital since you were admitted.”
Oh, Nickie. I’d forgotten all about her.
“Is she still here?”
“Yeah, she went to get coffee. She’ll be relieved you’re awake. She’s been worried sick.”
“Sorry,” I said, feeling helpless.
“You don’t have anything to be sorry for. You did great. You were amazing.”
“I really want to see her, X. I want to see our baby.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Nicole appeared in the doorway. “Oh, thank God.” She burst into tears. I put my arms out to her, and she stumbled over. X whipped the two cups of coffee out of her hands, and she hugged me hard. “I thought I was going to lose you.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
She wiped tears from her face. “You have a daughter, Vee.”
I nodded. “I know. I want to see her.”
Nicole looked to X, who nodded. “I’ll go and try to find a doctor,” he said.
Twenty minutes later, I was being wheeled through the hospital corridors toward the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Nerves churned inside me at the thought of seeing her. How sick would she look? Would I be able to touch her? Would I want to? My hands trembled, but I didn’t know if that was the result of the trauma of what I’d gone through, or my fear of seeing my child for the first time. This wasn’t how things were supposed to go, how I’d imagined my first contact with my baby. I’d thought she’d be delivered and handed to me, this little chubby newborn, and we’d look at each other and immediately fall in love. Instead, this was all alien.
We reached the NICU.
“X, wait.”
He stopped pushing my wheelchair.
“What does she look like?”
He thought for a moment then said, “She’s very small, and pink, and there are lots of wires.”
I nodded. “Does she look like you or me?”
“I’m not sure, Vee. How about we go in and try to decide?”
I knew what his words meant—that we couldn’t stay out here. I needed to face up to my new reality.
X pushed open the doors and wheeled me inside.
There were several babies in what looked like plastic boxes in the NICU, but X seemed to know exactly which one was ours. He wheeled me over and came to a stop.
I took a breath.
Just as he’d warned, she was covered in wires, a tube going into her mouth to help her to breathe. Her skin looked too red—though it was far better than the terrible blue it had been on my first glimpse of her after she’d been born. She did look like a baby, though, which I was relieved about. I didn’t know what I’d been expecting, but the thought of her being hideous had haunted me.
She wasn’t. She was beautiful. Tiny, fragile, but beautiful.
‘Baby Guerra’ was written on the clear box she was in. I suddenly realized she didn’t have a name.
X must have thought the same thing. “What are we going to call her?”
I thought for a moment. “My mom’s name was Eleanor. Eleanor May. But that seems like too big a name for such a tiny person.”
“What about Ellie?” he suggested. “Ellie-May?”
I smiled. “I like it. Mom would have liked it, too.”
“Good. Ellie-May, it is.”
We smiled at each other and he leaned in and kissed me. “I love you, Vee. We’ve got a long road ahead of us, and I don’t want you to forget that.”
“I love you, too.”
***
Two days later, I was fit enough to leave the hospital. I was discharged, and we had to go home without Ellie-May.
It was the hardest thing I’d ever done, sitting in the passenger seat while X drove away from the hospital. I sat, dry-eyed and empty, staring out of the window, feeling like everything was wrong with the world.
Back at the house, X and Nickie flapped around me, trying to make me comfortable and distract me from my thoughts. Nothing worked. How could it?
I’d never felt so alone. Isolated. No one around me could understand how I was feeling. Yes, Ellie-May was X’s baby, too, but it wasn’t the same. He didn’t have a body which needed to take care of her, all the physical and emotional changes I was going through, when I should have had a baby to nurse and hold, but didn’t. I wanted to see her, see her properly, without all the tubes and wires. Even her diaper was so large, it covered most of her tiny body. I felt like I didn’t even know what my own child really looked like. I set my alarm and pumped my milk, bringing it to the hospital to feed her, feeling like it was the only thing I could do that connected me to her as her mother. Every time I saw another mom with a healthy child, it was as though someone had stabbed me in the chest.
All my other worries faded into the background. I’d left the business to be run by Dylan, with X making decisions when needed. Dylan was probably happy to have free rein on the business, and had stopped asking when my father was coming home. Perhaps he was happy to have Mickey Five Fingers gone as well. I never did hear anything about what had happened to him from the hospital, and I no longer cared. All my attention was on the tiny baby fighting for life in a plastic box.
Days and weeks went by, with the same thing happening over and over again. I pumped my milk, and then went to the hospital. Sometimes, things would be looking good for Ellie-May, but just as quickly she would take a turn for the worse, and we were left panic-stricken and preparing ourselves. For the first time, X was unable to comfort me. I knew I was pushing him away, but I couldn’t seem to help myself. I’d always felt as though I walked around with a protective shield around my emotions, but now I’d gone into shutdown. I resented everyone around me. In my darkest moments, I wondered if X would be better with Nicole, and that I should push the two of them together, but I knew I was only doing it to punish myself. Did I blame my own body for not keeping Ellie-May safe? I had failed her, even before she’d been born. I’d always failed people during my life, and it seemed I’d started with my daughter before I’d had the chance to hold her.
I no longer gave any thought to my f
ather, or what had happened with my mom. It was as though the birth of my daughter had shut down my connection with the past. I was stuck in the moment, living day by day, unable to envision a future, too frightened to in case it was wrong. I couldn’t allow myself to hope about bringing Ellie-May home in case the phone rang in the middle of the night and I was told there was nothing more that could be done for her.
Maybe this was the time when I should have cried, allowed my emotions to finally overwhelm me, but I felt hollow inside. I could feel the other mothers and the nurses, too, looking at me strangely, probably thinking me a terrible mother, a terrible woman, for not being more emotional over her tiny, sick child. I’d always felt this way, as though I was somehow removed from the rest of womanhood. As though I was missing something that had been gifted to others, some kind of empathy or natural maternal instinct. This situation now only heightened that feeling inside me. I’d gone through pregnancy feeling warm and connected to the child growing inside me, but now she was here, I struggled to feel anything at all.
Chapter Thirty
X
I worried about Vee. She was going through the routines, being as strong as she always was, but she’d shut down her emotions. I understood why. She was terrified we’d lose Ellie-May and felt like she wasn’t doing enough.
In truth, she was doing everything she could—we all were. But in her mind, she wasn’t mothering her child.
But Ellie-May was doing well. She was putting on weight and had been taken off intubation so she could breathe on her own. She still suffered from sleep apnea, but that was getting better, and just tickling her feet was enough to get her breathing again. We were able to hold her, the doctors and nurses encouraging skin to skin contact. I felt their glances as I held Ellie-May against my bare chest for the first time, their eyes skating across the numerous scars littering my skin, but no one commented. After that first time, it got easier.
As Ellie-May grew stronger, a fresh fear arose—the thought of her coming home. At least with the doctors and machines around her, we could feel some relief that she was taken care of. How would we cope when she was home and it was just us? What would we do then?
Judged (The Mercenary Series Book 4) Page 17