Janey and Christina hadn’t met yet. Luke made the introductions, kicking himself inside for minding that the extravagant drinks had lost their wow factor, with Christina as a distraction. He hadn’t been rewarded with Janey’s really full-on gorgeous smile at what he’d done, and he was disappointed.
What’s this about? I’d go that far for a smile?
‘So you’re in general practice, yourself?’ Christina said to Janey. She sat on the end of the pool lounger.
‘That’s right,’ Janey answered. ‘Darwin. Pretty challenging sometimes. The way it would be here, I expect.’
‘Um, and are your obstetric skills up to scratch?’
Janey looked a bit blank.
Christina added quickly, ‘I mean, not to get too personal on very slight acquaintance or anything, but I was really hoping Georgie would be here and she’s not, and I’m probably making a fuss about nothing, but would you mind having a feel of this baby and telling me what you think? Second opinion, because I don’t trust my own skills right now.’
Janey got serious and put down her drink. ‘You’re not feeling movement?’
‘It’s not that. There’s lovely movement. I just think it’s the wrong way around.’
‘It’s got time to turn,’ Luke pointed out. She wasn’t due for another three weeks.
‘Um, maybe …’
‘Christina?’
‘I’ve been having regular contractions for the past three hours.’ In a suitably dramatic punctuation to her statement, her waters broke at that moment and gushed onto the ground.
And the baby was breech.
Janey never even had time to give her second opinion because Christina bent over and shoved a hand between her legs and cried out, ‘There’s a foot! Ouch, oh, crumbs! I can feel a foot pushing straight down! I’m sure it’s a foot. Oh, this isn’t supposed to happen! I thought I had hours to go! It’s a first baby! First babies don’t come fast! And I don’t want it feet first! I’m going to have my footling breech baby on the pool lounger and I can’t find Joe.’
‘You’re not having your baby on the pool lounger,’ Janey said, squeezing Christina’s shoulders. ‘Absolutely not! Luke’s bringing a car, I’m putting on this sarong Georgie lent me, we’re getting you across to the hospital right now, and Joe will be there to see his baby born.’ She gave Luke a prompting glance, as if to say, So where’s that car? Why are you still here? And he departed, impressed.
Although not surprised. All of that borderline-pedantic intellect and frowning at men eight years ago had somehow transformed over the years into just the right brisk, tender, confidence-inspiring bedside manner, and Christina already sounded calmer. ‘Right, right,’ she said, breathless. ‘And Luke can get the car within yards, can’t he, as half the pool fence blew away …? And I probably have hours to go.’
‘Now, about this alleged foot,’ was the last thing Luke heard.
Joe met them in A and E, looking nervous and strained. ‘Is it really a footling breech?’
‘I did a quick check in the car,’ Janey said.
It was a hospital vehicle, and Luke had thrown her a box of surgical gloves and a stethoscope from the bag of equipment in the front seat. They’d both told Christina the exam could wait until she was settled in the maternity unit, but she’d remained fairly panicky despite Janey’s best attempts to sound soothing, and she’d wanted that examination now!
‘She’s fully effaced,’ Janey continued, ‘four centimetres dilated, nice strong foetal heartbeat, but there’s a foot right there ready to pop out as soon as it can fit, which will be any minute. I don’t think there’s much chance we could get the baby turned at this point.’
‘And it really hurts!’ Christina gasped, in the building grip of a contraction. She couldn’t stay in the wheelchair they’d found for her. She dragged herself out of it and leaned on its arm, waiting out the pain with deep, steady breaths. When it had faded, she asked, ‘Where’s Georgie?’
‘Still at the school,’ Luke reported. ‘I just got her on her mobile. They’re having an impromptu working bee, so they can get a third classroom open tomorrow. Georgie chipped in to help, and I think she’s got Alistair practically rebuilding the playground.’
‘Typical!’ Joe groaned.
His big hands worked nervously together. He looked about eighty per cent imminent new father and twenty per cent seasoned medical professional, and the twenty per cent was busy remembering all the horror birth stories he’d ever heard, and adding a few bells and whistles just for fun.
You couldn’t help it in a situation like this when you were a doctor. Janey did the same thing when anyone she cared about was ill.
‘She’s on her way, but she’s pretty filthy,’ Luke said, about Georgie, ‘so she’s stopping in at the house for a thirty-second shower. Christina, she wants you prepped for a Caesar, she doesn’t want to take any chances on this. She’d deliver vaginally for a frank breech, she says, if you were keen on the idea and everything looked good, but not for this.’
Christina nodded, clearly relieved. ‘A friend told me about the footling breech she had to deliver vaginally once. If I’d known I’d be in this situation, I would have blocked my ears and refused to listen. No, I want the Caesar! I’m not risking our baby’s health or my pelvic floor!’
Joe squeezed her hands, then looked at Luke. ‘You’ll do the anaesthesia?’
‘Sounds like a plan,’ Luke answered. Janey looked a question at him—anaesthesia?—and he explained, ‘I did some training in it when I got back from London, when I decided to work in rural medicine.’
‘There’s such a shortage of those specialties outside of the capital cities,’ she agreed, inwardly impressed. His extra training showed a commitment to spending a serious amount of time away from the career-building centres of city medicine—not what she would have expected of the golden boy he’d been eight years ago.
‘General or epidural, Luke?’ Christina asked.
‘Your call. We’ve got time to think about it.’
‘Epidural. I want to be there, awake and alert, and I want Joe.’ She gripped his arm and they exchanged an emotional look. He helped her back into the wheelchair and turned it in the direction of the operating theatres.
Luke nodded, then turned to Janey. ‘Looks like I’m going to be busy for a while. Why don’t you go back to your umbrella drink?’ He glanced down at the borrowed red swimsuit and blue-and-white patterned sarong—glanced appreciatively?—and for the first time she felt self-conscious and distinctly underdressed. ‘And drink mine for me, too, while you’re at it.’
‘I’m fine, don’t worry about me, but isn’t there anything I can do?’
‘Janey, be sensible,’ he said gently, and brushed the back of his hand across her shoulder and up to her cheek.
The contact felt so tender. He kept surprising her this way.
No, she kept surprising herself. Where was all that bristling irritation and cynicism she’d always felt about him? She missed it, for some reason. Had she enjoyed disliking him, then?
Hmm, she soon decided that she had. There was something safe and liberating in letting her negative feelings show, not trying to pretend. They’d both been pretty blunt with each other in the past. Now she wasn’t quite sure where they stood, or how to deal with him.
‘You’re half a day out of hospital yourself,’ he said. ‘Someone can run you across to the house. You probably shouldn’t try walking that far in this heat.’
But she didn’t want to go back to the pool at the doctors’ house, she wanted to see Rowdy. ‘I’m going to sit with him,’ she told Luke. ‘Just sit, and see if …’ If he might speak. She didn’t say it out loud, but they both knew. ‘Drop in and get me when you’re finished.’
‘Only if you promise you’ll come quietly.’
She smiled and held up her hand. ‘Promise.’ Then she watched him effortlessly slip into the role of doctor as he strode rapidly away from her along the corridor, radiating confidence w
ith every step. He used to do that eight years ago, she recalled. She’d found it absolutely infuriating back then—acting so macho, like he was God.
What had changed? Why didn’t it get under her skin any more?
She didn’t know.
‘Looks great on you, Janey,’ said a female voice beside her.
‘You startled me!’ Janey clapped a hand to her chest.
It was Georgie, fresh from the shower with the ends of her short dark hair still damp and her surgical gear rather baggy on her petite frame. She stepped back and tilted her head, examining her own swimsuit and sarong on someone else. ‘Seriously … Although it looks a bit tight in places.’
‘You mean I’m practically falling out of it?’
‘Nah, it’s fine. Is there anything else I can lend you?’
‘I’ve borrowed a couple of things from Emily. I’m doing very well.’
‘Well, let me know, because I love seeing how my clothes look on other people! Must go. I hear Christina’s baby hasn’t read the right childbirth books.’
‘No, definitely taking an individual approach to the process.’
Janey found Rowdy out of bed and playing with blocks on a bright square of carpet in the paediatric playroom. There was a little girl with him, about three years old, with a broken arm, a bandaged head and several dressings dotted around her body. They both had IV lines in their arms, tangled lengths of tubing getting in the way of their play, and drip stands like sentinels behind them.
They played in silence, occasionally nudging each other for a block or laughing when a tower fell down. The stands and tubing and silence both children treated as completely normal, but Rowdy looked scared about the laughing.
So peculiar, kids, the way they took things in their stride. They lived so much in the present, it had to be a protection for them against troubles that would overwhelm an adult. It was so hard to read what was troubling them underneath. Why was Rowdy scared to laugh?
Janey gave him a quick kiss and a hello and sat down in a nearby chair. She didn’t want to spoil this, because it had to be good for him. He looked so much better. If she were his doctor she would OK his discharge tomorrow.
But suddenly that idea was daunting.
Tomorrow meant the future, and a whole lot of questions she and Luke hadn’t even tried to answer yet.
Tonight, they had to talk, she knew.
‘Wriggle your toes, Christina,’ Luke instructed.
‘Can’t.’
‘Good. And can you feel this?’
‘Nothing.’
‘This?’
‘No, lovely and numb, no sense of the contractions at all.’
There was quite a crowd in the operating theatre. Joe held Christina’s hand and stroked the hair back from her face, muttering words of encouragement every now and then. Marcia and theatre nurse Jill did their bit with instruments and drapes. Georgie stood there with her hands deft and serious but her mouth acting as if they were all at a cocktail party. Luke kept an eye on various monitors and on Christina herself.
‘So we’re good to go?’ Georgie said. ‘Isn’t this lovely? Crocodile Creek medics having a party. Want me to tell you what I’m doing, Christina?’
‘You mean each layer of incision? Now I’m slicing into your uterine wall. Oddly, no!’
‘You are such a wimp!’ Georgie was, in fact, slicing into Christina’s uterine wall at that very moment, but Luke didn’t think the jittery patient had even realised she’d started the procedure.
‘I know I’m a wimp,’ Christina said. ‘It’s embarrassing. I should have a healthy clinical curiosity and switch to obstetrics the moment I’m back on my feet because the sight of my own innards has been so inspirational. I don’t think so!’
‘See, there’s a reason why we drape you all across the middle so you can’t see. Joe, how’s that hand she’s holding? Numb yet?’
‘Just get the baby out, woman!’ he said.
‘We’re getting the baby out. We’re almost there.’
‘You mean, you’ve been …?’ Christina couldn’t believe it.
‘As we speak.’
‘I can’t feel it!’
‘I think that’s what we want, dearie, in this situation. Or that’s what the instruction manual says … unless I’m on the wrong page.’
‘Georgie, stop!’
‘Ooh, yes, this is fun, I’ve found some knees. Might feel like you’ve got a bag full of fighting puppies on your stomach for a moment or two … Here we go!’
As usual, it happened very fast in the end. Georgie already had the baby in her hands, a dusky pink, slippery little bundle with a crumpled face and a fine fuzz of silky black hair, getting ready to howl at the top of its lungs after a fast and deft bit of suctioning from its nose and mouth by Marcia.
‘Oh! Oh!’ Christina said. She’d felt the pull.
‘It’s a girl, Christina, Joe, and she’s beautiful,’ Georgie said. ‘Oh, listen to her!’
Yep, nothing wrong with those lungs.
Luke grinned, and then felt his throat tighten. He’d been present at Rowdy’s birth, which Alice had chosen to have at home in their London flat. The home birth had made him nervous. He wasn’t a big fan of the concept. He liked the philosophy behind it—of course birth should be the most positive experience possible, for both mother and child, and the father, too—but he didn’t like the absence of a medical safety net if something went wrong. He preferred hospital-based birthing centres, where ideally you got the best of both worlds. But he’d swallowed his doubts, and in the event everything had gone fine.
It had been very different to this. Low lighting and music and scented oils, instead of the glare of the operating theatre, the rattle of the metal instruments and the chemical smells. And yet … did it really matter, underneath?
Georgie had clamped and cut the cord and laid the baby on Christina’s chest. ‘Oh!’ Christina said again. ‘Oh!’
She smiled and cried, her face rapt. She could have been in a primitive cave or an incense-scented room or almost anywhere, and her joy would have been just the same as this. Joe was grinning, his eyes shining with tears, too. The healthy-sized girl had stopped crying and looked quietly alert, with those muddy dark newborn eyes staring at the contrasts of light and dark and her little hands splayed out like pink starfish.
‘Oh, isn’t she fabulous? Oh, she’s so beautiful!’
Luke checked his monitors and equipment, and thought that, really, in essence, this was no different to what he and Alice had had with their baby boy. The sense of love and wonder and enormous change. The instant perfection in those tiny toes, that silky head, those movements. Christina and Joe were captivated, bowled over, oblivious to everything else, and this healthy baby was already very deeply loved, and that was all that really counted.
This was Day One, just the beginning, and this little family was off to a good start.
‘You might feel another bit of a pull,’ Georgie warned. She delivered the afterbirth, checked that everything was intact, and Jill took the placenta away to be weighed. Shortly, they’d weigh the baby and check her for any problems. Luke doubted there’d be anything wrong. Her left foot was a little crooked because of her odd position in the uterus, but that shouldn’t last, and could be corrected if it did.
‘Congratulations, Christina,’ he said. ‘And Joe. Does she have a name?’
‘Isabella Jane,’ they chorused together.
‘Just because we both like it,’ Christina said. She dropped her voice and spoke to her little daughter. ‘Don’t we, sweetheart? Hope you do, too. Oh, I love you, I’m sorry I complained about your foot. It’s a precious foot.’
‘We’d better take her for a while,’ Marcia said, after another few moments. ‘She has a busy schedule this afternoon, don’t you, sweetheart? She has to be weighed and measured and bathed.’
‘And her mummy needs a bit of needlework,’ Georgie said. ‘Her seams have split.’
Christina laughed. ‘Georgi
e, you are awful!’
‘Careful about insulting your specialist while she has you flat on a table. I might use staples instead of soluble sutures, and then you’ll be sorry.’
Luke shook his head and chuckled to himself. Then he thought about Janey and Rowdy, and realised that this was Day One for the three of them, too. His breath caught in his throat suddenly. There was so much to work out.
‘Mr Connolly says you saw him on Tuesday at the emergency clinic in Bellambour and there was nothing wrong with him,’ said Nurse Sarah Crisp in a tone that said, This is your fault, but I’m the one copping an unreasonable patient.
Her reaction made Luke officially sorry that he’d detoured through A and E on the way up to coax Janey away from Rowdy in the paediatric unit. He didn’t unburden himself to Sarah regarding his failure to check Mr Connolly out properly on Tuesday. He’d tried to contact the Connolly family by phone three times now, but with the cyclone damage they didn’t have coverage and he hadn’t been able to reach them.
Still, it was his fault that the man was here now, apparently running a significant fever, with aches and chills.
He knew it was his fault, but Sarah didn’t need a huge confession on the issue, not when Charles had told him categorically that he wasn’t supposed to be working today.
So he attempted an approach that he rarely resorted to these days—a killer combination of arrogance and charm. Flashed the smile first then spoke, confident and breezy. ‘Sarah, thanks for that. You’re right. He’s going to be a difficult patient. You know the type. Let me take a look at him, and I’m sure we can work out what’s going on.’
But he couldn’t do it any more.
It sounded tinny and wrong to his own ears, and Sarah didn’t look impressed. He resisted the temptation to try harder and just let the subject go. He listened to Mr Connolly’s chest and ordered an X-ray, told the man’s daughter-in-law that he suspected pneumonia and then found Charles bearing down upon him. ‘Luke—’
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