by Amy Andrews
‘Holding at eighty. She’s had two lots of colloid and just finishing her second bag of O.’
He had to stop the bleeding. ‘Bladder retractor.’
Katya handed him the instrument and he placed it, anchoring it on the pubic bone. She also handed him a self-retaining abdominal retractor and he placed that, giving him a good view. He inserted moist towels to absorb the remaining blood and pack off the bowel and omentum from the operative field.
He located the Fallopian tube and his heart sank. He swore quietly behind his mask as he placed two clamps on the destroyed Fallopian tube between the uterus and where the ectopic had erupted, instantly stemming the haemorrhage.
In a theatre where the atmosphere was so tense that no one even dared breathe, his expletive sounded quite loud.
‘What?’ asked Katya, crowding him to get a closer look.
She repeated his expletive and stepped away. She knew that Gill had no hope of repairing the mangled tube. It looked like a mini-explosion had occurred, shredding the middle of the tube completely.
Gill looked at it helplessly. He doubted whether the most skilled gynae microsurgeon could have done anything with it. He had promised Harriet he’d try, but there was no way anything could be done.
The clock ticked loudly in the silent room. Everyone waited for Gill’s next move. After a few minutes Joan said gently, ‘We know you’d repair it if you could, Gill. There’s not a surgeon in this world that could save that tube.’
‘It’s her only one,’ he said, raising anguished eyes to Joan. ‘She wants a baby. I promised her.’
‘No,’ said Katya, opening Gill’s hand and slapping a scalpel into it. ‘You promised her you’d try, and I promised her to keep you to it. And if I thought there was any chance, I would. But there’s nothing you can do. Cut it, Gill, and get on with the op.’
He’d never felt more out of depth in his life. It wasn’t something he was used to feeling in an operating theatre. Here he was in control. Always. He looked at Joan.
‘Katya is right. She’s lost a lot of blood, Gill. Don’t prolong the stress to her system. There are other ways to get pregnant.’
Gill nodded, knowing they were right but hating himself for what he was about to do. This was why there was a rule about operating on relations and he understood it much better now. He was the one who was going to have to face the music for what he was about to do, and she was going to hate him for it. Harriet hating Ben would have been much easier to cope with.
He hesitated briefly before slicing through the tubal pedicle between the two clamps he’d applied earlier. And that was it. There was no going back now. It was done. Gill pushed all thoughts of Harriet’s reaction aside. The deed may have been done but there was still more work to do.
He ligated the artery and then ligated the end of the pedicle. Before he could remove the tube completely, he had to divide the mesosalpinx, the part of the broad ligament that attached along the length of the tube. He clamped, cut and ligated along the length of the tissue until the tube was finally free.
Katya held out a kidney dish and Gill discarded the mangled flesh. It looked alien. So removed from its actual function and too damaged to do it anyway.
‘Keep it,’ he said to Katya. Maybe Harriet would need proof, justification as to why he hadn’t tried to salvage it. Maybe for her grief process she’d need to see it with her own eyes.
She looked at him for a long moment. ‘Da.’ She nodded and indicated to Siobhan to get her a specimen container.
‘Pressure rising. One hundred systolic,’ Helmut said.
Gill felt an enormous weight rising off his shoulders. They had done it. He had controlled the bleeding and Joan had replaced Harriet’s blood loss to stabilise her blood pressure. He felt a cramp in his shoulder muscles and along his jaw and realised he’d been tense the entire operation.
He lavaged the peritoneum with warmed saline, thoroughly rinsing off any blood and clots and tissue. ‘Let’s close,’ he said, satisfied at the clear fluid being sucked into the tubing.
As he sutured Harriet back together, his mind began to wander and he forced himself to push the thoughts away and concentrate. He would have time later to think about how close he’d come to losing her, about all the blood and how he’d taken from her the one thing she’d asked him not to.
And that Harriet had been pregnant with his child. A child that he hadn’t even known he’d wanted. Until tonight.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
0300 HOURS
‘NO, I CAN’T take it, Kelly. My rotation here finishes in three hours and I want to be there when Harriet wakes up. How far is Ben off finishing?’
‘Approximately thirty minutes.’
‘How stable is he?’
‘OK, for now.’ The knife, still gruesomely in situ, appeared to have missed anything major according to the X-ray. ‘It’s been well padded and supported so it can’t move around.’
‘Sedate him,’ suggested Gill. ‘He should be fine as long as the knife remains stabilised. What else is there?’
‘That’s it for now. We’ve had mainly medical and minor surgical cases from this skirmish. How’s Harry?’
‘Still sleeping.’
‘I’ll be over to see her when I can. Are you OK?’
‘No. Not really. It’s been a hell of a last day.’ And that, thought Gill, was an understatement. Divorce papers, his grandfather’s poor health, a helicopter shot out of the sky, Nimuk, seven hours of operating and Harriet.
‘New team is scheduled to land at 6 a.m. Not long now.’
Three hours away, thought Gill as he replaced the phone in Megan’s HDU/recovery area. It stretched ahead of him. He’d rather evacuate Harriet now, but he knew she was stable and their scheduled flight wasn’t really that far off, and taking the place of a critical patient wasn’t good medicine.
He wandered back over to the bed where Harriet lay, sleeping off the effects of the anaesthetic. The background battle noises that had been going all night had ceased and it was very quiet in the darkened area, only the sound of monitors and the squeaking of Megan’s shoes disturbing the peace.
She looked fragile, like she’d had the stuffing knocked out of her. She was so still and pale. He looked at the drip chamber of the IV, watching the steady drip of dark red blood. She was on her third bag and Gill knew, despite her pallor, that her haemoglobin level, which was ten, wasn’t too bad, considering the amount of blood that she’d lost.
It was the sheets, he’d decided. The white, white sheets weren’t helping her colour. Odd really because with her olive complexion that tanned so easily, she’d always looked so healthy and glowing in anything white.
He held her hand, careful not to bump the bed or her stomach, and thought back to their wedding day. She’d worn white that day and had looked like a beautiful rare flower. The ceremony had taken place on a secluded beach at an exclusive Fijian resort with just family and a few close friends.
If he thought hard enough, he could almost hear the gentle lap of the waves against the shore as she had walked the short frangipani-strewn distance between the guests. And he could almost smell again the heady fragrance of the sweet flowers. They were the two enduring memories of the day still powerful enough to be almost tangible.
She had worn an exquisite white sarong lightly embroidered with unusual milky pink and grey mother-of-pearl beads. She had been planning on wearing a bright sarong to match his bright hibiscus print silk shirt, but had seen the beautiful garment in the resort shop and hadn’t been able to resist it.
And what a bride she had made. She had been stunningly gorgeous. With white frangipani blossoms in her loose, long brown hair and a white frangipani bouquet, she had looked beyond beautiful. She had looked tanned and healthy and glowing and he hadn’t been able to wrap his head around the fact that she had actually been there to marry him.
Harriet stirred and mumbled a little, and Gill smoothed her wedding band with his thumb as the memories faded.
She’d woken only briefly after Joan had extubated her. She had asked for him then had mumbled and made no sense. She no doubt felt as wretched as she looked, and sleep was the best tonic immediately post-op so he didn’t disturb her.
He was overwhelmed though by the urge to crawl in beside her and cradle her against his body. She looked eerily lifeless, despite the steady blip, blip, blip of her heart rate on the monitor beside her, and he yearned for the reassurance that only feeling the thud of her heart against his would give him.
His ragged breath stuttered into the quiet air and he began to tremble as he set free the thoughts and feelings he hadn’t allowed himself during the operation. It was only now, after the surgery and being relieved from his duties and watching the even rise and fall of his wife’s chest, that the enormity of everything crowded in.
Harriet had been pregnant. With his baby. At least, he assumed it was his. Harriet had told him earlier that there had been no one else. He had believed her then and he believed her now. Which made the baby his. His.
The word reverberated through every cell of his body and his hand trembled as the fact sank in. He waited for the usual feelings of rejection and denial and wasn’t surprised to find the idea didn’t bother him as it once had. He remembered the moment during the operation when he’d been inside her, truly inside her, and he had panicked because her warm, sticky blood had been everywhere, but despite all that had yearned to see his child.
Gill screwed his eyes shut as a shaft of pain stabbed into his heart. Was this the yearning she had felt for the last couple of years? And why had it taken the death of his child and the near death of his wife to realise how strong these emotions could be?
The ache was too much and he forced himself to concentrate on the hows and whys. The timing fitted with an ectopic pregnancy. Not that he’d been up on her cycle, but if she’d conceived almost immediately it would have put her in the right gestational bracket for a tubal pregnancy.
He knew she was on the Pill, had seen her take it on more than one occasion on this rotation. But there had been those couple of days when she’d been ill at the beginning that could have interfered with the absorption of the contraceptive, leaving her unprotected. She could even have gone on to have a normal period under the influence of the Pill, despite being pregnant, which would explain her obvious confusion when he had told her the news.
So he didn’t believe that she’d known and had been keeping it from him, or that she had deliberately got pregnant either. Her vehement rejection of Katya’s suggestion supported this and wouldn’t she have just told Katya anyway that she was pregnant if she’d known about it? Katya had given her the perfect opening.
No, she had been walking around for weeks with a time bomb in her belly, completely oblivious. His child had lodged in her only Fallopian tube, instead of moving down to the roomy comfort of the uterus, and when it could no longer grow within the narrow confines had met an inevitable end and had almost taken Harriet with him.
Him? Gill stroked her hand and wondered about the sex of the baby. He had a strong feeling it had been a boy, or was that just the male in him? A boy or a girl—it hardly seemed to matter now anyway. Would the child have been like him, tall and lean, or like Harriet, toned and tanned? His laugh or her hip mole? His French-ness or her gypsy-ness?
These were questions he’d never have an answer to now. Questions he’d never even cared about or pondered before. What a child with their blend of genes would look like. He’d been a father ever so briefly, many would consider not at all, but the loss he felt was surprisingly heavy.
He looked at Harriet’s pale pink lips and wondered if she’d ever forgive him for what he’d had to do. His paternal instinct had only just kicked in, though her maternal instinct had been active for two years now. Her reduced fertility had caused her a lot of grief and he could only begin to imagine how devastated she was going to be.
‘I love you, Harry. I’m sorry,’ he whispered, and gently stroked his thumb in a butterfly caress across her mouth. She stirred a little, murmuring something in her sleep, and he quickly withdrew his hand.
He knew she would wake up eventually but he was relieved to see her sleeping so heavily. She’d been through so much that she needed it—her body stretched to its limits of pain and blood loss. But also while she slept it delayed the inevitable. He was going to have to tell her the bad news and he couldn’t bear to witness her distress when he told her that not only was her baby dead but her ability to have another had been severely compromised.
He felt a hand on his shoulder and looked up to see Katya standing there.
‘Did you know?’ he asked her quietly.
Katya shook her head solemnly. ‘I don’t think she even knew.’
He nodded, pleased to have confirmed what he’d already surmised. Katya pulled up a chair on the opposite side of the bed and they watched in silence for a few minutes.
‘Don’t beat yourself up,’ said Katya. ‘You did what anyone would have done.’
Gill’s gaze didn’t leave the rise and fall of Harriet’s chest. ‘But I’m not just anyone, am I?’ he asked.
‘There is more than one way to have a baby, no?’ she said. ‘She still has an ovary. She still has eggs. IVF will help. And if not, you can adopt. Or foster.’
‘I know,’ said Gill, turning anguished eyes on the Russian nurse. ‘But she’s still going to be devastated.’
‘Da. She has lost something very important to her. But as I said, Guillaume, there are other ways and don’t forget, you are important to her, too. I suspect as long as you’re the father, she’ll be OK.’
Gill felt the weight of the shrewd gaze. Too shrewd for one so young. Him, a father. Something that had horrified him a mere few hours ago suddenly appealed immensely. Two a.m. feeds and a diminished sex life didn’t seem so sacrificial. Not compared to the very real sacrifice that Harry had just made. Losing her baby and her remaining Fallopian tube.
The pain of losing the little life they had made together seemed to have kicked his fatherly instincts to life. And it had been like rousing a sleeping lion—they were well and truly tripped into overdrive.
A picture of Harriet holding Gillian rose unbidden into his mind and he had to grip the mattress as the desire to see her holding his child almost crushed him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
0400 HOURS
HARRIET roused slowly, coming out of the layers of fog gradually. Her tongue felt furry and disgusting, her breath tasted bitter in her mouth. The room was blurry and it took a few moments for it to come into focus. She couldn’t remember where she was, although it was vaguely familiar.
It certainly wasn’t her bedroom in Bondi. She couldn’t hear the familiar beat of waves against the shore but Gill was there. She looked down, his head warm against her arm, his eyes shut. She took a moment just to stare at his face, something she’d done often while he’d slept. Although his features didn’t seem quite as relaxed as usual. They seemed tense, troubled.
Megan skittered past, adding to the surrealism. Harriet watched her go about her work in a disjointed, puzzled kind of way. Where was she? Was she dreaming? What had happened? There was a dull ache in her stomach and she shut her eyes, sighing blissfully that the pain had gone at last.
And it all came back to her in horrible Technicolor detail. Her eyes flew open. She’d never felt more awake in her life. She tried to sit up, displacing Gill.
‘Harriet,’ he said, waking instantly, cursing himself for having fallen asleep.
Megan saw Harriet’s attempt to sit up and rushed to help her. Harriet desperately wanted to tell her to stop fussing, but she felt as weak as a kitten and knew she was flailing hopelessly about like a drunken octopus. Gill joined in, stuffing pillows behind her back.
‘What happened?’ she asked. She’d wanted her voice to sound stronger but her throat was sore and her voice sounded hoarse and it hurt to talk. ‘The baby…’
Megan’s eyes met Gill’s and she melted d
iscreetly away.
‘Harriet…’
She braced herself. From the time they’d first met he had shortened her name to Harry. He’d only ever called her by her proper name during their wedding vows.
‘It was an ectopic. The tube had ruptured. There was nothing I could do.’
Harriet heard the words as if they were coming from far away, but they hit her with the speed and ferocity of a cobra strike.
She couldn’t stop the gasp or the rush of tears. ‘So, I was…pregnant?’
‘Yes,’ he said quietly.
Tears streamed down her face and she clasped her hand protectively over her stomach. The unfairness of it all was crippling. The one thing she’d wanted more than anything—taken from her before she’d even had a chance to savour it.
She took a few moments to compose herself before she asked the next question. ‘What about my tube?’
Gill would have given anything to be anywhere but there right now. He wished he had a magic wand and he could put everything right for her. For them. Bring their baby back. Her tube back.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said gently. ‘I had to remove it.’
Harriet stared at Gill with tear-filled eyes as he blurred out of focus. This wasn’t happening. It just couldn’t be happening. This just wasn’t fair. What had she done to deserve this?
Her despair took hold and she wanted to lash out at him. ‘Did you even try?’ she demanded, not caring that her voice was loaded with bitterness.
Gill felt the stab of her harsh words and ignored their sting. He’d known this wouldn’t be an easy conversation to have. ‘It was a mess, Harriet.’
‘So you didn’t even try? Even though you promised me you would?’ Her voice shook and wobbled as the enormity of what he had done really hit her.
He felt her pain as he watched tears run unchecked down her cheeks. ‘There was no point,’ he said, trying to say it as quietly and gently as possible. ‘I—’
She sucked in a breath and wished she had the energy to slap him across the face. ‘No point? No point?’ she said, her voice rising sharply.