Callie had been called up to the big house with sudden visitors and Troy had walked into the clinic, clutching a disgustingly dirty handkerchief soaked in blood.
She’d told him the only things she’d stitched up were ladies’ bottoms, and he’d nearly choked laughing. Which was pretty good, as the sizable chunk he’d taken out of his finger needed a fair repair job. The skin had come together well but she’d had to listen to a host of teasing remarks about what he didn’t want it to look like when she’d finished.
She was still smiling as his ute disappeared into the distance when she heard her name.
‘Eve. Wait.’ The voice came from the post office she’d just passed. Mrs Saul, panting a little from her chase, stepped out into the street to stop her. ‘I hear June wants to start a tai chi class.’
Eve stopped. ‘Morning. You interested? We thought we could hold it at the medical centre.’
‘I am. If you’d like to make a sign I could put it up in the window and maybe we’d get enough starters. Fran wants to come too.’
Fran hadn’t said anything at work but she must have talked to her mother. That was great. Eve could feel the pleasure expanding.
‘We’ll get onto it today. I was thinking Saturday mornings. That suit you?’
‘Whenever.’ The older lady waved the problem of timing away. ‘As long as I don’t do my back in. I’ve always fancied the slow, gentle stuff. I’ll see you later then.’
‘Sure.’ If she could whistle Eve would have broken into a tune.
As she opened the clinic door she was preceded by a wild-haired cherub in a disposable nappy who tore into the room and ricocheted off the walls like a rubber squash ball.
Eve followed him around, righting the spilled paper waste and disentangling him from an electrical cord before she caught him up and sat him on her hip, where he squirmed and grumbled and waited for his mother.
Colleen, the remarkably unstressed blonde with the baby in the breech position, followed soon after with a tiny version of herself clinging like a limpet to her neck. Eve could see again where the children had acquired their looks. She’d thought last week that Mum was a stunner.
‘Johnny. You be good.’
Eve smiled. ‘Thanks for coming back, Colleen. I know it’s a big drive from the station. It’s just a check to make sure you’re still breech before we make the arrangements.’
Johnny squirmed and Eve reached down and pulled a chunky plastic truck and some blocks from her drawer. She put Johnny and the toys down on the floor beside his mother’s feet and he was instantly diverted. Colleen shook her head indulgently as Johnny proceeded to remove all the wheels.
Eve readied her blood-pressure cuff. ‘I’d better get this done quickly before he gets bored.’
Colleen smiled and put her arm out and Eve rapidly wrapped the cuff around it. ‘You’re a busy woman.’
‘You bet.’
‘I think you’re amazing. You look well.’ Eve pumped up the cuff and then let it down again before writing the result on the card Colleen had handed over.
‘Any worries, apart from the chance you might have to go in to Brisbane early?’
Colleen frowned and shook her head. ‘No. That’s enough worry.’
Eve could see she was still not happy. ‘Baby moving well?’
‘It’s kicking,’ she replied.
Something was up. Eve glanced down at the history in front of her. This was only the young woman’s fourth visit to an antenatal clinic in thirty-four weeks. ‘Was it hard for you to get here today?’
She shook her beautiful hair. ‘Easier today. Sometimes it’s hard.’
‘I see both your babies came a little early?’
‘Went to Brisbane both times even though I was supposed to go north. It wasn’t fun. I don’t like leaving my husband.’
She remembered something about Colleen’s station being one of the hardest hit with the drought. ‘No way you could take your whole family and stay with someone in Brisbane?’
‘Nope.’
‘Okay.’ Eve waved towards the couch. ‘How about I have a feel and check the position, then we’ll have a listen to your next gorgeous baby?’ She grinned at Johnny, who was getting cross with the truck. It looked like the toy was going to fly across the room any minute now.
Colleen climbed awkwardly up onto the couch. There was a lot of unspoken conversation going on here, Eve thought, as Colleen lay down with her little white-haired limpet still stuck to her side.
Johnny stopped what he was doing and glared at Eve as she palpated the smooth oval of his mother’s belly.
She smiled at him reassuringly. ‘It’s okay, mate. I’m just feeling for the baby.’ Her hands glided in a circular fashion around the mound. ‘You have any aches up here?’ She gently massaged a round baby part that shifted under her hand just above Colleen’s rib cage.
Colleen grimaced. ‘All the time.’
‘I still think your baby is breech, or bottom-first, at the moment, but there’s still a little time for him or her to turn the right way up.’
‘Yep.’
‘I’ll take blood today to check you aren’t anaemic, but as your baby is still breech you’ll have to decide if you will have a caesarean up at Longreach or if we’ll send you to Brisbane to try for a normal birth. Have you talked to your husband about it?’
Colleen’s eyes slid away. ‘I’ll go Brisbane. Don’t have much choice, do I? Rather not have a big scar with these two.’
Eve could certainly understand that. ‘That would be my choice too. I’ll turn the ultrasound on and when it’s warmed up and confirms the baby’s position, I’ll write it on the card again. You’ll need to mention that if you go into labour before you get there. Like I said last week, sometimes a bottom-first baby can be a little trickier at birth and sometimes it’s not. But it’s good to be with people who are skilled at birth in that position. Okay?’
‘Hmm.’ She looked at Eve. ‘So you’ve delivered babies that are breech?’
Uh oh. ‘Three. But I had specialists not far away so it was very different to here.’ She could just imagine Callie’s face, or Lex’s for that matter, if Colleen ended up here to birth. ‘So you’ll go next week?’
‘Guess I’ll have to.’
Eve smiled but a flicker of unease remained as she watched Colleen leave.
SIXTEEN
Early on a leisurely Sunday morning Eve watched Callie help Sylvia into the room. The older woman’s hair was bundled up in a towel, and she could hear Callie saying, ‘Well, you washed my hair enough when I was kid, it’s your turn now. And tell me, my mother – if it was me who was sick, would you mind drying my legs?’
Eve smiled as she picked up the ringing phone. ‘Hello? Wilson household.’ It still felt strange to say that.
She listened. Frowned. Looked up at Callie and held her eye. ‘Sure. Come in. About an hour is fine. I’ll be down at the clinic.’ She hung up.
Sylvia sat down and Callie began to rub her mother’s hair dry. ‘Who was that?’
‘Molly Hollis. Irish Molly. Baby seems unnaturally quiet, has been all night, and the lack of little kicks and prods has scared her. She’s wondering if maybe she had a leak in her waters that she thought was something else.’
Callie’s hands stilled. ‘That scares me too.’ She started rubbing her mother’s hair again but her hands were shaking. Callie glanced at the clock. ‘Might just be sleeping.’
Eve gulped down her tea and checked her watch. ‘I sincerely hope so. We saw her last week. She was due to go to Toowoomba in the next day or so.’
Callie rubbed more slowly. ‘Maybe she should go there now instead of driving back this way.’
‘It’s a fifteen-hour drive to Toowoomba and only an hour to here,’ Sylvia said.
Eve agreed. ‘We can check her out here and get her there quicker if need be.’
Callie still wasn’t sure. ‘Maybe she should have rung the flying doctor instead of us?’
‘She’s o
n her way now, Callie. We’ll sort out the best thing to do when she comes. It might be nothing but we can check.’
Callie nodded and fluffed up Sylvia’s damp hair with her fingers, but her eyes were focused on something else. ‘We have the baby monitor and the ultrasound.’
‘Yeah.’ Eve shrugged. ‘I might even be pleased to use the damn CTG in this case – as long as we find a heartbeat.’
Callie sighed deeply. ‘It’s moments like this when maternity care freaks me out. After I lost Bethany —’ she glanced at Eve and her mother, and Eve wondered if this was the first time she’d mentioned Bethany in a conversation ‘— I had this fear I would miss something and the mother would be as heartbroken as I was. I’ll be praying until she comes in.’
An hour later Eve found Molly Hollis’s baby’s heartbeat. But it was fast. And there was none of the spiky pattern she wanted to see on the paper recording, so quite possibly baby was conserving energy for the essentials of clinging to life. Not a good sign.
If she’d been in Brisbane Eve would have called an obstetrician, and booked the theatres for a caesarean while she waited for the doctor to come in. They didn’t have that option. There was no way for a caesarean here, and the flying obstetrician was all the way out at Roma, but they could call the flying doctor and get Molly transferred as fast as they could.
Eve’s fingers shook as she picked up the phone to call the RFDS. The doctor on the end of the phone was calm and methodical. ‘She’s stable? Observations good? No pain? No contractions? No loss of fluid?’
‘No. Everything else is negative. But no foetal movements noticed since last night and I’m not reassured by the foetal heart rate on the trace.’
‘Decelerations?’ The unspoken query was for any signs of a last-gasp effort by baby to hang on.
‘Not on this graph.’ Eve didn’t like to say, ‘Not yet’.
‘We’ll arrange the transfer to Charleville ASAP. I’ll ring you back with a landing time.’ The RFDS woman murmured something and then came back on the line. ‘Put a cannula in. Give her a stat dose of Benzylpenicillin and run some fluids. Hold on.’ Eve could hear her talking again in the background. ‘We’ll be about an hour.’
‘Great. I’ve got saline up now. I’ll give the ABs as soon as I get off the phone. Confirming with my colleague.’ She repeated the dose and type of antibiotic so Callie could check them with her in a moment.
‘Fine. See you soon.’ Then the woman on the phone added hesitantly, ‘I don’t need to tell you to keep her on her side and keep monitoring until we get there.’
‘Nope. Will do, right until I take her out to the strip. We’ll be ready to go when you get here. And thank you.’
Simon, Molly’s husband, sat white-knuckled on the arm of the couch as Eve hung up the phone. He said the words Eve didn’t want to hear. ‘I should have rung the flying doctor.’
Both of Molly’s hands slid protectively to cup her silent belly and Eve could see frightened tears as she squeezed and then let go to clutch Simon’s hand again.
‘You guys have done everything right,’ Eve said.
She watched Simon grip his wife’s fingers and couldn’t imagine how he felt. It had been a tough year with the drought, watching the condition fall off the cattle. Eventually the rain would come back, but tiny babies – tiny babies who didn’t make it – they never came back.
She shook off the horrible thought and watched the pattern of the baby’s struggling heartbeat for improvement as the antibiotics were injected into Molly’s vein.
It was Callie who reassured them. ‘We don’t know what’s wrong but the most likely reason is infection. So Molly will get the antibiotics at the same time as if she’d been in the plane now. Same time, Simon. It would have taken them more than an hour to get to you as well, and we’ll give them now. You couldn’t have done it any quicker.’
Eve agreed. ‘And the IV fluids going in now will often improve a baby’s heart rate.’ She looked at them both. ‘The big thing is that you picked up the reduced movements. All we can do now is get you ready to fly as soon as they land.’
She glanced with worry across at Callie, writing the orders down and documenting the time of the call. Eve glanced again at the CTG and tried to remain reassuring. This was not a happy baby. But at least there were still no decelerations, and maybe there had been a slight increase in beat-to-beat variation with the fluids running in. She hoped so.
Less than an hour later the RFDS sent a message to say they were fifteen minutes out and Eve and Callie began to prepare for the shift into the ambulance. By the time the RFDS landed on the airstrip beside the cemetery Eve had the ambulance backed up, waiting to pull in beside the aircraft as soon as the engines were off.
When Eve and Callie watched the plane take off with Molly and Simon on board a while later, their faces were drawn and tense. They’d all hung around the open cockpit door to hear the rapid beating of the handheld Doppler the flight nurse had used after she settled Molly into the seat. So far their baby was being a tenacious little cowboy or cowgirl, determined to survive, but no one would relax until they knew it had arrived safely.
Sunday lunch was subdued in the Wilson household as they waited for the call from Charleville.
Bennet, who was staying on the farm next door to the Hollises’, had driven in to see Callie when he’d heard, and even Sergeant McCabe, a friend of Molly’s husband, had been to see if they had any news. After he left, Callie remembered Eve’s question and Sylvia explained that the policeman’s sister had apparently died in a car accident while he was overseas. She was pregnant at the time, and he was always concerned around pregnant women.
Callie twisted her hands. ‘This is why I didn’t want to be responsible for babies.’
Eve could see the shadowed fear in Callie’s eyes but didn’t know what she could do to help. ‘There was nothing to see last week. You have to remember, most women have normal pregnancies and healthy babies. Maybe she did rupture her membranes and somehow they got infected.’
Callie’s teacup rattled as she placed it back onto the saucer. ‘I can’t even read the trace on the foetal monitoring properly to explain the situation to the receiving hospital.’
‘I can.’ Eve reached across and squeezed her sister’s hand. ‘I don’t feel as confident as I should with adult ECGs when someone with chest pain comes in. But you can read them easily. And without us nobody has any medical care until a plane arrives.’ She let go and sank back into her own chair. ‘We did a good job.’
Finally the phone rang and Eve jumped up to get it. She glanced apologetically at Callie, who waved her on with trepidation.
‘Wilson residence, Eve here. Simon! It is you. What’s happening?’ She listened and then broke into a smile. ‘She did? Congratulations. How is she?’
Eve put her hand over the phone and whispered. ‘A girl, 2 kilos. Tiffany. In NICU but stable.’ She took her hand away. ‘That’s great. And Molly?’ She put her hand over the mouthpiece again. ‘A caesarean at 11 a.m. Give her our love, Simon. No, that’s fine. We’re just glad everything is looking better.’ She glanced at Callie and smiled. ‘Sure. I’ll pass it on.’
She listened some more. ‘They’ll do swabs,’ she told him. ‘To find out which bug caused the infection, make sure they’re using the right antibiotics. Okay. Go sit with your new daughter. Thanks so much for ringing. Bye.’
Eve put the phone down and then collapsed into the chair and closed her eyes as she let out a pent-up breath. ‘Intra-uterine infection. Tiffany is septic. They put a drip in her and will give her broad-spectrum antibiotics until they get the swabs back, but the paediatrician is cautiously hopeful.’
Callie was frowning. ‘But Molly wasn’t sick, was she?’
‘She said she didn’t feel sick. And she looked well.’
Sylvia’s quiet voice drifted from her chair. ‘Whatever it was, it sounds like that was too close. I wonder what Blanche will say when she hears.’
They didn’t h
ave to wait long. Blanche had Lex fly her into Red Sand on Monday morning. She strode into the clinic, her riding boots clacking in time with the hand she was tapping against her leg.
‘I hear the Hollis baby is stable.’
‘Yes, thankfully. It’s good news, isn’t it,’ Callie said cautiously.
‘In one way it is and in another it was too close for comfort.’ She put her soft leather bag down on Eve’s desk and pointed her nose in Callie’s direction. Eve was glad she wasn’t looking at her.
‘Can you do research, Callie?’
Eve saw Callie blink at the question and shrink a little more – trying to hide.
‘The basics, but it helps if the researcher has a passion for it,’ she said dryly. Callie glanced at Eve. ‘The only time I was analytical I married Kurt, and look where that landed me.’ Nobody commented, and she sighed. ‘I guess I could try, do a refresher course.’
Blanche turned Eve’s way with a glance that said she already assumed that the likelihood of Eve being analytical was slim. ‘What about you, Eve?’
‘Lord, no. All those numbers and cross-referenced notations. That was always Sienna’s forte.’
Blanche pounced on the comment like one of those black-eyed carrion birds eating roadkill. Eve wished the words unsaid because no good would come of this. But it was too late.
‘Of course. Your sister. Where did I put that card?’
Eve felt her stomach sink. Blanche had that look on her face. But there was no help for it. ‘She won’t come. She’s an obstetrician in Melbourne.’
Blanche cocked her head. ‘Does she do research?’
Eve nodded cautiously. ‘She’s at the Greater Melbourne Research Hospital. Just finished a thesis and a paper on diabetes in pregnancy among older women. But she’s up for the director’s role, been working towards it for five years.’ Eve shook her head. ‘She wouldn’t come out here just to look at all the baby statistics, not for a million bucks.’ Eve saw the look Blanche cast Callie: triumph.
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