The Pregnant Midwife

by Fiona McArthur

  ‘We’re off to Gladstone for a twenty-eight weeker,’ he said, and as she stood up she tilted her head at him to see if he was kidding.

  Kirsten loaded her kit into the helicopter and quizzed Hunter as she climbed into the aircraft. ‘What do you know about the case?’

  ‘First baby, minimal antenatal care, presented in second stage of labour and delivered live female infant minutes after arrival,’ he said as he loaded his own resources. ‘Therefore no pre-birth steroids could be given and baby is at high risk of respiratory problems.’

  Kirsten imagined the consternation of her brothers-in-law as they worked with the small amount of equipment they had. ‘They’ll want to get the baby shipped out before she starts to tire.’

  Hunter looked across at her. ‘Sounds reasonable to me. She was born at ten a.m. That’s twenty minutes ago. Apgars of seven and eight and she’s stable at the moment on one hundred per cent oxygen.’ He glanced at his watch and chewed his lip.

  ‘It’s a shame the other team can’t divert and pick this little one up, too. Because we’ll have to take the smaller craft, which means we won’t be able to bring mum back with us. Jim’s coming in to coordinate because both teams are out.’

  It had started raining lightly earlier in the day and the sleet was miserable as Kirsten tucked her bag under the seat.

  The larger Bell 412 was on its way back from a retrieval and the nearest air ambulance fixed-wing aircraft was out the back of Dubbo somewhere. There was always the army aircraft if necessary, but for the moment they’d decided to use the smaller helicopter, even though it would be the first to be grounded in bad weather.

  Keith looked grimmer than usual when Kirsten leaned forward to greet him. When he still didn’t smile she raised her eyebrows.

  ‘This one on your home turf? Bummer about the rain.’ Keith looked across at her. ‘Just hope the cloud isn’t too thick around Buladelah, or they’ll have to wait for the others to get back and unload.’

  Kirsten settled herself in her seat as Hunter climbed aboard, but she kept her eyes on Keith. ‘Is there much chance of that?’

  Keith shrugged. ‘I can only try.’ And started the rotor.

  ‘What was all that about?’ Hunter leaned across and raised his voice so Kirsten could hear the question.

  ‘Could be too cloudy over Buladelah for the small chopper, but Keith said he’d give it a go and wait and see.’

  Hunter nodded and handed her the drug sheet printouts then they began to prepare the drugs they’d need for the premature infant. When they’d preprepared what they could, Hunter leaned forward to look out the front windscreen.

  It didn’t look too bad here, but forty-five minutes up the coast could be a different story. The pilot would have the weather readings. If they had to turn back, they would. MIRA was very careful with its teams. The object was to arrive safely.

  ‘Bella’s husband, Scott, is good at cannulating tiny ones, but we just need to get through the weather for them.’

  Her words sent a frozen feather of foreboding cross his neck and he sat back in his seat and tried to rationalise where that feeling had come from.

  Kirsten knew that if the weather was too dangerous they wouldn’t fly. Hunter glanced at Kirsten, something he’d found himself doing with increasing frequency the more he saw of her.

  She loved this job so much she was even willing to put up with him. It was as if she couldn’t wait to pit herself against the elements for a baby who’d decided to arrive well before it should have. Typical.

  He supposed she would be keen to see her brothers-in-law again, although he’d gathered from what he’d overheard her tell Paul Netherby that she’d planned a trip home next week. He wondered what it would be like to be part of an extended family like Kirsten’s and then silently laughed at himself for being maudlin.

  He remembered a memorable afternoon in Dubai when she’d first talked about her family. They’d lain under a palm tree together, her head in the crook of his arm and her warmth and softness intoxicating next to him as they’d tried to convert cloud formations into recognisable objects—something he’d never done with anyone but Kirsten. But that was the sort of thing he’d found himself doing if he’d been with her. Simple, hard-to-forget things.

  The memory bucked in his mind as if he’d hit an internal wind pocket, greater than any sheer outside the aircraft, and he had to clamp down hard on the thought to regain his composure. He couldn’t help looking across at her. Her glorious hair was tied back in one of those scrunchie things and she stared out the window as if willing them to go faster.

  She looked to be itching to jump out of her seat and do something, and he couldn’t remember when he’d ever had that much energy. There’d been a dark time when he would have avoided someone as energetic as Kirsten but he was getting used to her again and he realised with a start that he looked forward to her enthusiasm—and had never really had a chance at being able to ignore her.

  He’d been focussed and driven for the last five years since Portia had left him, but he couldn’t remember a thirst to live life except for that brief time when he’d first met Kirsten. And she was doing it to him again. Making him look at where he was going and what his grand plan for the future had been since he’d left her. He realised he hadn’t had one except to maybe wake up one day and be too old to go to work.

  He wondered what her thoughts for the future were, but shied away from the temptation because it was too personal to ask and being personal with Kirsten was just too damn dangerous.

  He craned his neck to look out past the pilot through the windscreen. The rain had gone but the cloud looked fairly dense up ahead. The occasional updraught promised an interesting journey home later that afternoon. He noticed the township of Buladelah out the starboard side window and Keith spoke into the cabin mike.

  ‘There’s a small storm centre up ahead but the weather bureau reckons we can skirt it and come in from the western side. Might get a bit bumpy but if it gets too silly I’ll head back.’

  Hunter checked his seat belt and glanced across instinctively to check Kirsten’s safety. Her hands were resting lightly in her lap and she was watching Keith with bright-eyed interest. While she was so absorbed he couldn’t help his gaze lingering on the curve of her cheek and the pure line of her neck—both silky places he could almost feel under his fingertips. He blinked and stared implacably out the window. She might be untrustworthy, but he was still attracted to her.

  He must be some kind of masochist to want to go down that road again. To look wasn’t too bad, but when his other senses jumped into the act and he could smell the scent of her skin and hair and hear her breathing against his own face from memory, then he knew his control was shaky. He needed to concentrate on the retrieval, but it was hard when they could do nothing until they landed.

  A sudden downdraught slammed him into his seat and then up again against his seat belt, and he looked across at Kirsten. His stomach had given a sickening lurch and he saw her smile across at him. She may as well be at an amusement park, he thought sourly as another sickening sway slewed the whole aircraft sideways.

  ‘Nup. We’re outa here!’ Hunter heard Keith’s exclamation as rain suddenly lashed the windows and he felt the helicopter start to turn back the way they’d come. But it was too late.

  As if a large celestial hand was pushing then downward and through the storm centre, the helicopter was sucked into the vortex. Everything started to shake and shudder as Keith tried to fly them out of danger. New lights flashed on the aircraft’s dashboard and the beep of warning alarms beat to the increase in Hunter’s heart rate.

  Hunter looked across at Kirsten and she was fiercely concentrating on what Keith was doing, as if she could help him with her thoughts. The aircraft took a sudden dive to starboard and it felt like they were upside down for a second before it righted itself.

  She looked at him and he saw a flicker of uncertainty, and then they heard Keith’s voice shouting that he was goi
ng to try and put them down.

  Kirsten realised this wasn’t some drill she’d studied for and that there was a good chance they could die in the next few seconds.

  Her eyes filled with regret and their gazes met and held—the one stable thing in a world suddenly gone mad. He only just heard her words. ‘You should have believed in me, Hunter.’ And then they hit the trees.

  When Hunter regained consciousness he didn’t know where he was. There was a canopy of leaves above him and he was dripping wet and strapped into a seat in a tree-house. The side wall of his tree house was gone and if he shifted his left hand he could put it outside the window and wave at the ground ten feet below. Trouble was, when he did that, his tree-house wobbled and the wobbling made his head hurt.

  He turned his head carefully and stared across the room and realised it wasn’t a room at all—he was sitting in the wreck of a helicopter. As if in slow motion, the last few seconds before the crash came back to him and suddenly his mind was crystal clear and he focussed on the last place he’d seen Kirsten. She was still there but she was as white as snow and not moving. For one awful, gut-wrenching, shattering moment he thought she was dead, but then he saw the minuscule rise and fall of her shoulders as she breathed and he had to sit back and close his eyes for a moment to gain some composure. She was alive. At this moment.

  He drew a steadying breath and then forced his gaze to sweep the cockpit but he couldn’t see Keith. In fact, he couldn’t see the cockpit. The helicopter was sheared off just past the point where the cabin used to meet the back of Keith’s seat.

  Carefully, Hunter undid his seat belt and shrugged his shoulders. The top half of him worked and it didn’t hurt too much. Then he wriggled his toes. More success.

  Hunter raised his hand to his forehead and felt the source of nagging pain above his eye and ran his fingers over the sizable egg he found. His fingers came away sticky with blood and he assumed he must have hit his head on the window when they’d crashed. He shifted slowly to the edge of his seat and everything seemed to be fairly reliable so he leaned towards Kirsten, and that was when his luck ran out.

  A sudden loud snap heralded the last resistance of the branch holding them in the tree and the cabin of the chopper nose-dived the last ten feet to the ground.

  Unstrapped, Hunter was thrown against one of the struts and lost consciousness again.

  When Kirsten came to, she was cold. Then she realised she was wet and leaning at a ridiculous angle, strapped to a seat in what would never be a helicopter again. She couldn’t believe she was alive. On that thought she remembered Hunter and Keith and wiped her face shakily to clear her mind.

  Apparently the chopper wasn’t going to explode because she had the feeling she’d drifted in and out of consciousness more than once so some time must have passed since they’d crashed.

  She tried to call out but her voice croaked unconvincingly somewhere at the back of her throat without much sound leaving her mouth. She licked her lips and tried again.

  ‘Hello?’

  Nobody answered but even hearing her own voice was reassuring—she was alive. Kirsten concentrated on what would happen if she undid her seat belt. Probably not much as they were on the ground and from the very little she could see, the aircraft appeared to be in the middle of heavy undergrowth that poked through the torn gashes in the aircraft’s fuselage.

  As she scanned the wreckage inside, she caught a glimpse of pale fingers splayed towards her from behind an unmoored seat and the image of Hunter’s hand inside Kinny’s crib last week crashed through her mind like a sledgehammer.

  ‘Hunter!’ She fumbled with her seat belt, undid the clasp and landed awkwardly on her face in a pile of equipment. Crawling on her hands and knees, Kirsten dragged herself across the littered cabin and levered the seat out of the way and off Hunter’s body.

  She tried to see if he was breathing but suddenly her vision wasn’t working as well as it had been and she couldn’t tell—then she realised she was crying.

  Kirsten scrubbed at her eyes impatiently and reached for his wrist. At first she couldn’t feel a pulse because her own hand shook too much, then she drew a deep breath and steadied herself. It was there, his pulse, it was steady and strong. Hunter was alive. The tears came again, and she let her shoulders sag with relief for a moment before she regathered herself.

  She scanned his body and it was impossible to tell how badly he was hurt because he was curled like a rag doll in the corner of the cabin. His forehead oozed blood, some of which had congealed in his hair, and she wiped it away as if to do so would make him feel better. To her relief he stirred under her fingers.

  ‘Hunter?’

  He groaned and shifted slightly without opening his eyes and she leant down and spoke in his ear. ‘Hunter, can you hear me?’

  His eyes flickered open and then he was staring at her. ‘We crashed.’

  Simple words but indicative of his clarity—Kirsten bit her lip and scrubbed her eyes again. Her throat was thick with relief and she could only nod.

  ‘Are you OK?’ His voice was stronger and she felt the weight of total responsibility slide from her shoulders as she accepted he would be fine. Thank God she didn’t have to sit by and watch Hunter die.

  ‘I’m fine. Can you move?’ She watched anxiously as he wriggled his fingers and then his foot.

  ‘I could last time I tried but got a bit more than I bargained for. We had a stop-over before the final landing.’ Kirsten frowned at his words but didn’t bother with them as she watched him lever himself to his knees. He swayed for a minute and shut his eyes but then he sat up.

  He tried to smile at her and she could tell he was in some pain. ‘Do you have a headache to match mine?’

  Kirsten smiled back. ‘I think yours is worse.’ Then she sobered. ‘Keith!’

  They both looked to where the cockpit should have been, and then back at each other.

  ‘I think the cockpit sheared off earlier. We might find him outside.’ Hunter’s voice was sober and Kirsten nodded. Neither spoke of their doubts.

  It wasn’t easy to clamber out of the tangled mess of the aircraft but finally they stood beside it and stared at the wreckage.

  ‘How on earth did we walk away from that?’ Hunter shook his head.

  ‘Keith’s skill.’ Kirsten shuddered and they both glanced around the crash site at the broken branches and scattered wreckage.

  They pushed through a tangle of undergrowth and twisted vines to the other side of the wreck, and the white-painted metal stood out from the surrounding green. ‘That looks like the cockpit over there.’ Hunter and Kirsten pushed through more broken branches and they both stumbled their way through the scrubby undergrowth until they could kneel down beside the pilot. Keith lay very still on his side strapped to his seat and a large ominous stain of blood had seeped into the leaves and mulch beside him.

  Kirsten slid her fingers over the inside of Keith’s wrist and felt for his pulse. ‘There is a pulse but it’s very faint and about a hundred and forty.’

  Hunter undid Keith’s seat belt and they eased him out of the seat but kept him on his side. The older man didn’t stir. His ankle was twisted at an awkward angle and Hunter gently straightened it before he tracked the blood to a huge open gash on Keith’s thigh. Kirsten blinked when he dug a folded handkerchief out of his own pocket to staunch the flow.

  ‘I’ll get a dressing in a moment.’ There was something ludicrous about such laundered whiteness appearing in the wreckage and mud.

  For her part, Kirsten did a torchless check of Keith’s neurological signs to assess for head injury, but his pupils reacted evenly.

  Hunter glanced back at the remains of the helicopter. ‘He’s almost bled out. He needs fluids. Volume replacement probably won’t be enough but hopefully we’ll be able to salvage some equipment and get a line going at least as soon as we get some shelter. I’m going back inside the wreck to see what I can find. Can you keep an eye on him as you scout around ne
arby for something we could rig up for a shelter?’

  ‘I can do that,’ Kirsten said quietly, and it all seemed so monstrous that Keith could die here, because if they didn’t get rescued soon he would die. The chance of rescue earlier than within the next twenty-four hours was pretty slim unless the storm suddenly moved away—and it would be dark soon.

  They were on the side of a mountain and a huge fallen bloodwood tree lay beside them on the ground. It must have come down in a previous storm and the gap in the canopy had allowed them to end up nearer to the ground than they would have otherwise. A light drizzle still drifted down from the treetops and they both looked up at the black and purple stormclouds and sheet lightning overhead.

  ‘Not much hope of an aerial search for us until that lot blows over.’ Hunter drew her close to his side. ‘The emergency beacon will have pinpointed our position. They’ll send in ground searchers until the weather clears.’

  ‘It’s probably Banda Banda,’ she said. ‘I remember we flew past Middle Brother but direction got a bit skewed at the end and I’m not sure where we are now.’

  Hunter stared at her. ‘A bit skewed? That’s a diplomatic way of saying we got spat out of a storm.’ He squeezed her shoulder and moved off to see what he could salvage from the chopper.

  Kirsten scanned the area for something she could rig up to cover Keith but, barring a full-scale lean-to of wet branches, the wreckage hadn’t provided much. What they really needed was a cave.

  There were a few boulders higher up the escarpment and a couple of darker areas that promised at least a decent overhang.

  The crack of branches underfoot heralded the return of Hunter and she looked up to see what he’d brought. He carried the steel drawer with needles, syringes and emergency drug supplies, and a shoulder-bag of fluid replacement hung off his shoulder. He looked pale against the vivid purpling bruise on his forehead and the egg on his head was oozing blood.

  Kirsten hurried to take the drawer from him. ‘That little sortie took out more from you than you bargained for,’ Kirsten noted dryly. ‘I’ll do the next trip back inside.’