by Ace Collins
“No problem,” Meyers told the newest member of his team. “Will you take over for me, doctor, while I scrub.”
“Can you sign this?” Jan asked Meg. Despite the pain, Meg reached out and scribbled her name on the release form. Taking the form and laying it aside, Jan took a cloth and wiped Meg’s face. “We’re going to make it, kid, don’t worry.”
Meanwhile, Molli was scrubbing Meg down and prepping her for the delivery. All was proceeding as it had to.
Dr. Meyer rushed back into the room, now ready to go in. “Where’s the anesthesia?” he demanded.
“I ordered it!” Jan shot back.
Moving up to where Meg could see him face-to-face, the doctor leaned over and softly informed her, “If I don’t get something for you in the next thirty seconds, I’m going to have to use a local. It’ll still probably hurt really bad.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Meg replied. “Don’t lose my baby. You go for it! Do it now!”
“She’s here,” Molli cried.
Standing over her head, anesthetist Jenny Cheek began to frantically rattle off all the standard questions. “Are you allergic to anything? What is your height and weight? When did you last eat?”
“We’ve got to have it,” the doctor urgently pleaded.
“I know, I know,” Jenny said. “It’s just taking a while to work on her. She’s too pumped up. Give me just a little more time.”
“We don’t have more time,” Dr. Meyer answered, his voice still calm but now showing the urgency of the moment.
“I think it’s beginning to take effect,” Jenny assured him.
Meg grew dizzy, but she could still focus enough to see the doctor raise his hand, a scalpel in it, and plunge it toward her stomach. Then, just before the blade touched her, the lights went out and she drifted off to an empty, black void.
62
OH, MY STOMACH, MY STOMACH.” MEG MOANED.
“Hey, how are you doing?” The man’s voice sounded as if it were twenty feet away. Meg wondered why in the world he was talking to someone else rather than her. After all, she was the one who was hurt so badly.
“My baby, my baby?” Meg mumbled. Her eyes were now open but unable to focus, yet she was beginning to remember what she had been through.
“My baby, my baby?” she pleaded.
“Seven pounds, ten ounces.” The man’s voice now sounded much closer. “She’s a girl.”
“Oh, thank God,” Meg sighed and almost drifted back into the black void she had just left.
A few minutes later, she came out of it again. This time her mind was clear and she recognized the hospital’s newest doctor standing over her. He was smiling. Judging from the fact that he didn’t look like he’d shaved recently, she must have been out of it for a while.
“I’ll tell you what,” the doctor said, grinning broadly. “When we put you under, we really put you under.”
“What time is it?” Meg asked.
“About nine,” Meyer answered and then added, “at night!”
The presence of the doctor scared Meg a little. They usually hung around and waited for patients to come out from under anesthesia only when they had bad news. A chill ran down her spine as she realized that her baby might not be perfectly healthy. Scared to know the truth but afraid to wait, Meg blurted out, “Is she okay?”
“Well, considering what she put us through to get here, she’s probably in better shape than anyone who was in that room this morning.”
He paused to make sure Meg was following all he was saying. “We’ve got her in the special care unit as a precaution and also because Nurse Greer didn’t want to let her out of her sight, but her Apgar was five over eight. So, you can see that she’ll be fine. As a matter of fact, I’m sure that she feels a whole lot better than you do.
“You know,” the doctor rambled on, “I was reading the paper after we got you out of trouble and realized that your baby was born at the exact moment of sunrise. I was wondering what the odds were of that?”
“I don’t care, just so he’s healthy,” Meg answered.
“Watch yourself, nurse,” he warned. “The baby is a girl.”
“Oh, yeah,” Meg sighed. “I was so sure that it was going to be a boy. I was going to name it Steven after his father. I guess I’ll have to come up with something else now.”
“Meg, I heard about your husband.” Dr. Meyer’s tone was now soft and sincere. “Jan—I mean, Nurse Greer—told me. I’m very sorry.”
“Well, I’ve kind of worked through it,” Meg explained. “That is, if you ever work through something like that.”
“I’m not sure that you ever do.”
His words and the manner in which he said them made Meg believe that he had been through something similar. Carefully choosing her own words, she said, “I’m guessing that you lost someone once.”
Getting up from his chair, the doctor stuck his hands in his coat pocket and walked to the window. Opening the blind and looking outside, he grimly stated, “My wife and our child . . .”
Waiting a moment, he turned back toward Meg. “Lisa and I had been married for only three years, and Missy wasn’t planned. I guess the best and worst things in life aren’t. She was a year old. I was in my last year of med school and the two of them were on the way home from her mother’s one day. They hit a wet spot in the road.” He paused a moment to compose himself, then continued. “They didn’t even live long enough to get to the hospital. It was nobody’s fault. I still wish that there were something or someone I could blame. But there isn’t. It just happened.
“You know,” his blue eyes were fixed on Meg’s brown ones, “For six years I was so mad, I couldn’t even pray. This morning when we were fighting for your baby’s life, you broke through all of that anger. I didn’t want to have someone else lose a wife or a child and so I turned back to God. I prayed for the first time in six years. I did it because I didn’t want your husband to have to go through what I went through. Later, I found out about the accident. Kind of ironic, I was praying for someone who had already died. You were the one who showed me a thing or two in there today!”
Neither of them spoke for a few moments. Finally, Meg broke the silence.
“Sometimes when we hurt, we forget that others hurt, too. It sounds like you buried yourself in your work. Well, I buried myself in my hate and I almost killed someone with that hate. I certainly hurt a lot of folks. You, at least, devoted your life to helping people. Yet, at a moment when a life hung in the balance, I broke down the wall I had constructed between myself and God. Who knows, maybe now, you have, too.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” he said quietly. “I think that deep down inside, I’m still bitter and angry. But maybe I’m ready to start working through it. Maybe I tore a brick out of the wall anyway.”
“If I can help . . .” Meg smiled.
“Don’t worry. I’ve got a great deal of my energy invested in you. I’ll check in on you—and often. Now, I’m going home and getting some sleep. You take advantage of this opportunity to rest, too. You may not have another one for a long while!” With that warning, he walked through the door and disappeared.
Grabbing the pager on the side of the bed, she called the nurse’s station. “Nurse?”
“Yes?” Meg immediately recognized Jan’s voice.
“When can I see my baby?”
“I’ve scheduled a visit right after her college graduation,” Jan explained. “She’s mine ’til then.” Waiting a moment, she continued. “How about an hour or so? Less, if you’re good. But I guarantee you, she’s still going to like me better!”
Meg pushed the button and called back, “Hey, Greer!”
“Yeah,” the nurse finally answered.
“You’re still not funny.” Meg then dropped the intercom back on the bed. As she moved in an attempt to find a more comfortable position, she felt the stabbing of pain caused by the C-section. “I didn’t realize that it would hurt this much,” she moaned.
Just when she finally got comfortable, she detected the sounds of footsteps—the squishy kind that only nurses’ shoes made, and seconds later, Molli and Jan robustly knocked her door wide open.
Meg grinned as Jan said, “It’s about time that you were awake. You’ve been lazy for too long!”
“We’ve got some questions for you,” Molli added.
The two nurses pulled chairs up to the side of Meg’s bed, and Molli, taking the top off of her pen, readied herself to record the answers.
“This morning,” Jan began, “you fogged out on us before we had a chance to ask a very important question. This case cannot be closed without the answer.” Glancing across the bed she asked, “Nurse Cassle, are you getting all of this?”
“Oh, yes, inspector,” Molli answered.
“Oh, don’t make me laugh,” Meg begged. “It hurts too much.”
Taking no pity, Jan continued. “Nurse Cassle, I told you she was a wimp, didn’t I? Next, she’ll be begging off and asking for pain meds. Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes. So, before you find some other reason to wimp out and go to sleep for another ten hours, we thought we’d better get this down on paper. Otherwise, the way you make decisions and answer questions, your child might end up suffering from some kind of long-lasting trauma.”
“Are you ready for a visitor?” Meg heard the door open again, and this time it was Heather asking the question. As Meg looked up, Heather continued. “I think she’s ready for you.”
Heather held a tiny, wrapped bundle in her arms. It seemed to take her a lifetime just to walk the five steps from the door to the new mother’s bed. Meg automatically reached out for her child. She was ready for a mother’s most magical moment.
“Not yet,” Molli said. “Let’s get you sitting up first.”
Grabbing the control, Jan warned, “Meg, this is going to pull on those stitches. So be ready for some pain.”
Meg didn’t feel a thing as the bed rolled upward. Oblivious to the pain that must have been there, Meg once again held her hands out and this time, Heather carefully handed the slightly squirming form to her. After peaking at the round face, the red nose, the hairless head, and the blue eyes, tears began to flow, not only from Meg’s eyes but from the three other nurses, too.
“My baby, she’s perfect,” Meg cooed, gently touching the little girl’s face. “Thank you, Lord,” she silently breathed, kissing the child on the forehead.
“Meg,” Jan interjected, “we need a name.”
“A name,” Meg thought. She’d been so convinced it would be a boy she had never considered a girl’s name. As she stared at the tiny beautiful face, a small hand curled around her own finger. Meg marveled at the child’s innocent beauty and slowly shook her head.
“Tell you what, girls,” she sighed. “If I had known just how bright this day would be, I might have not struggled for so long in the darkness.”
“Meg,” it was Molli’s voice this time. “We need a name. She can’t go through life being called Female Richards.”
Suddenly remembering the time of her daughter’s birth as well as a friend who had brought another kind of light, Meg smiled and whispered, “Her name is Dawn. Yes, that’s it. This is Nancy Dawn Richards!”
Discussion Questions
1. Would you have advised Meg to view or not to view her husband’s body? What do you think you would have done in her shoes?
2. Why did Steve’s death cause Meg to walk away from her faith?
3. If Steve had died in a different way do you believe that Meg would have responded differently?
4. Why do you feel Meg didn’t want to keep her baby? If you had been her friend what would you have said to make her change her mind?
5. Nancy knew she was dying. Do you think it would be easier or harder for a person in her position to embrace faith and feel the Lord’s hand? Why?
6. District Attorney Web Jones put his own ambitions ahead of his responsibilities. Do you think most people in his position would have done the same thing?
7. Do you believe that our court system favors those with money and influence? Why or why not?
8. Do you think the punishment Jim Thomas received from the courts was the right one? If you were the judge, what penalty would you have assessed and why?
9. Meg sought her own kind of justice. What would you have advised her to do if you were her friend?
10. Meg’s mother tried to connect with her daughter but just couldn’t do it. Why do you suppose this was the case? Whose fault was it?
11. Meg’s prayers were answered. She had Jim Thomas right where she wanted him. Why do you believe she didn’t walk away and claim victory? What drove her to save him?
12. Who was the wisest person in Meg’s life and why?
13. Jim came to help Meg when she was in trouble at the meeting. What drove the young man to challenge the audience to listen?
14. Meg named her baby Dawn. Discuss the symbolism of this choice as it relates to Meg’s life.
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