Baby & Bump (The This & That Series) (26 page)

             
Dr. Javornik opened the door and called out into the hallway. “Hey, Joni?”

             
A heavy set brunette came into the room. “Yes, doctor? Oh, hi, Dr. Haybee. I didn’t know you were—” Her words stopped as soon as she saw Fletcher’s hands covering mine. “
Oh
. I see. Hi, Miss Baump. How are you today?”
              I tilted my head upward. It was the nurse who’d helped Dr. Javornik conduct the stress test the week before. Waving awkwardly, I called, “Um, I don’t know.”

             
Dr. Javornik ignored out small talk. “She’s having some contractions.”

             
“They’re two minutes apart, and lasting for forty-five seconds, give or take,” Fletcher added, staring down at his watch.

             
“He’s just being protective, I’m okay.” I suddenly felt embarrassed. I didn’t want to be
that
patient. The one who made a big deal over nothing. Candace made Brian take her to the hospital four times before Ellie’s labor really started. What if I just had something simple, like gas? Marisol and I had made broccoli quiche the other day. What if I just needed to cut a giant fart? Oh holy crap, what if I did it while Fletcher was in the room?

             
“Protective?” Joni’s eyes flicked to Fletcher. He shook his head.

             
Dr. Javornik turned on the sonogram, and lifted up my shirt. “Let’s just take a little peek here.”

             
“I think I’m just having some tummy trouble.” My voice was starting to get high pitched as panic set in. I couldn’t be in labor. I wasn’t ready. “I had some quiche yesterday, that—”

             
Joni slipped a blood pressure cuff onto my arm. “I’m going to need you to lay back, Miss Baump. All right?”

             
Fletcher’s grip on my fingers tightened when Dr. Javornik squirted the blue goo on my skin. “Have you felt the baby move recently, Lex?”

             
“I…uh…yes.” My eyes went from Fletcher’s frowning face to Joni’s. “Just a few minutes ago.”

             
“BP is 167 over 120,” Joni called.

             
“I changed my mind.” I used my elbows to push myself back up. The thin paper underneath me crinkled. “I don’t think it’s a big deal. I—”

             
What happened next
was
definitely a big deal. There was another cramp, this one worse than all the others, and it shot straight into my spine like a bullet. I yelped, jumping off of the table an inch or two, then felt a tearing sensation deep within my core. The pain was bigger, so much bigger, than any pain I’d felt before.

Warmth soaked my pants.
Black splotches appeared in my line of sight. A shrill ring filled my ears.
Mother of God, I’m going to die right here on this table!

             
“Where’s that ultrasound, Bev?” Fletcher’s voice was loud, and it cut through the ringing in my ears like a beacon, bringing me back to reality.

             
I opened my eyes, flinching when the light hit my retinas. Sweat had piqued on my forehead and underneath my arms. I’d fallen back into a laying position on the paper, shredding it with the waist of my jeans in the process.

“What the hell is going on?”
I growled.

             
Dr. Javornik’s mouth pulled into a thin line. “She’s hemorrhaging.”

             
My head popped off of the table. “I’m what?”

             
Fletcher moved away from my side, to peer down past my belly. His eyebrows knit together, and he pulled the metal stirrups out from underneath the table with a sharp clack. “Possible abruption,” he muttered, pulling the door open all the way. “Nancy, we need ambulance transport, please. Stat.”

             
“Stat?” My head swam. I’d watched enough medical dramas on TV to know that stat was never good. “Fletcher?”

             
“You said you felt the baby move a few minutes ago?” Dr. Javornik felt my stomach, gauging the position of my baby.

             
Nodding, tears filled my eyes. “Yes. What…what’s wrong?”

             
“It’s going to be fine.” Fletcher’s hand touched my face, but his eyes stayed locked on my nether region. “You’ve got some bleeding.”

             
“
Some
bleeding?” My voice cracked. I didn’t know much, but I knew enough to know that bleeding while thirty-six weeks pregnant wasn’t good. I tried to push myself up. “Is my baby okay?”

             
Someone spoke from outside the examination room. “Ambulance is coming, doctor.”

             
“An ambulance?” I croaked.

             
Joni appeared on my other side. She used her hands to gently push me back on the table, then guided my feet to the stirrups. When I moved, I felt a gush. The paper beneath me was soaked. “It’s all right, Miss—”

             
Gasping, I gripped the edge of the table when another contraction barged through my body like a Mack truck with no brakes. I curled around myself, groaning.

             
“Her name is
Lexie
.” Fletcher said tensely, his voice cutting through the haze around me. I focused on his face and forced myself to keep my eyes open.

             
Joni touched Fletcher’s arm. “Are you okay, Dr. Haybee?”

“
Yes,” he snapped. I’d never seen this side of Fletcher before. His face was pale, and his movements were swift and concise. A far cry from the ultra casual, gentle man I’d been kissing just moments before. “We need underpads. Quickly.”

“Got
‘em,” Joni announced, pulling them from a drawer.

“Thank you.”
Dr. Javornik tugged latex gloves on with a snap. “And Joni?”

She stopped moving
. “Yes?”

“We’ll need to do an internal exam. She needs to
be undressed from the waist down.” Dr. Javornik moved the wand on my stomach. “Someone needs to alert the hospital that Lexie’s coming in.”

“Right.”
Joni nodded, returning to my side. “Lexie, we’re going to get these jeans off of you, okay?”

I opened my mouth to protest, but the pain halted every word in the back of my throat.

“Just breathe. In and out, in and…” Fletcher’s directions faded away as Joni began peeling my clothes off of my bottom half. He craned his neck to look at the screen on the sonogram machine over Dr. Javornik’s shoulder. “There’s a heartbeat, Lex.”

I whimpered, sweat rolling down my forehead into my eye.

Dr. Javornik’s lips pursed as she scowled at the fuzzy orangish screen. Muttering under her breath, she moved it from one side of my belly to the other, then down close to my pubic bone. Lower, lower, and lower it went until her movements stopped. “There it is.”

Fletcher squinted as he watched the screen. “Shit,” he whispered.

I started to ask what he was talking about, but another contraction tore through my groin like a chainsaw, ripping me in half. I cried out, and Joni shut the exam room door. Everything in the room started to blur and spin, and I reached out for Fletcher, unable to make words while my uterus hardened into marble.

Dr. Javornik dropped the wand, and did an internal examination. The pain increased so suddenly that I saw spots of light, and arched off of the table.
Everywhere I looked there were blue absorbent pads soaked and splattered with blood. Squeezing my eyes shut, I tried desperately to block out the images.

Someone
came to my side and took my hand. I didn’t know who. It didn’t matter. I couldn’t think straight anymore. It felt like I was drowning in the pain, too locked into place to do anything but sink.

“Abruption,”
Dr. Javornik’s voice cut through the mayhem. “Joni, call Valley General, tell them to prep an OR.”

Fletcher
cupped my face. It was all I could do to open my eyes and look him in the eye. “The baby’s still okay for now. But the placenta detached from the uterine wall, and you’re bleeding heavily.”

I nodded, gritting my teeth. Fletcher’s head started to waver, as my eyes unfocused again. Finally some words came to the surface. “Going to…get….sick.”

Joni showed up on my other side, placing a long plastic bag under my mouth. “Right here, dear.”

Turning to my side, I unloaded the contents of my stomach, and felt another gush between my legs. Suddenly I was
chilled to the bone and shaking, despite the sweat dampening all of my skin. I wiped at my mouth and closed my eyes again to block out the gripping dizziness that took over my body.

To say I was scared would’ve been an understatement. I was terrified. But the pain had me so gridlocked I couldn’t articulate any of that fear. I just had to lay there and wait for whatever hell I was in to be over…

“Six centimeters,” Dr. Javornik announced.

“Transport is here.” I don’t know who said it, but the voice echoed in my head.

My eyes got too heavy to hold open anymore. Blackness filled my peripheral vision. Everyone’s voices sounded like they were at the end of a telephone connection a thousand miles away. The room was cold. My arms jerked as I shivered. I wanted to go home. I wanted my mom. I wanted to sleep.

The last voice I heard was Fletcher’s. “
I’ll ride with her.”

And then the blackness swallowed me.

Chapter Twenty-five

Sleep. Blissful sleep.

“…gonna need an immediate cesarean.”

Sleep…

“One pint of O-positive.”

More sleep…

“…fetus will need
corticosteroids.”

Am I dreaming all of this?

“Lex, everything’s going to be fine. I’ll be with you the whole time.”

I want to talk back to Fletcher. But I’m jus
t so tired.

“Al
l right. Count backwards from ten…”

Ten, nin
e… what comes after nine?

I don’t remember anything about the birth. Just blips of sound in between hazy, slovenly dreams filled with muted voices and beeping machines. I was asleep, but still just aware enough of the noise in the ambulance and operating room to turn it all into a
n acid-trip type dream.

             
Fletcher rode in the ambulance with me, and I thought I’d heard the sound of my mother calling my name as they pushed my gurney through the double doors leading to the operating room. Guess I still had her listed as an emergency contact. Who knew?

I’d been prepped for surgery upon arrival. No time to stop. No time to think. No time to process what was going on around me. Just bam, bam, ba
m. And then nothing.

***

“Lexie?” I heard Fletcher’s voice. He sounded far away. “Lex, honey, can you open your eyes?”

I didn’t want to answer. I wanted to sleep. I hadn’t slept this good in so lon
g. How long had it been?

“Lex?”

I tried to open my eyes, but the lids were apparently made of lead. Once. Twice. Third time was a charm.

The light flooded my pupils and I flinched as Fletchers’ face came into focus. I could hear the
dull sound of phones ringing out in the hall, and a soft beeping sound right next to my head. Looking around, my eyes rolled shut again, and I had to force them to open back up. The room I was in was decorated in pale pinks, with vertical blinds that partially blocked a view of the night skyline.

“Wha
t?” My mouth felt like it’d been lined with carpeting. I tried to sit up, but my arms and legs felt like sandbags. Groggy did not begin to cover how I was feeling. It felt like I’d been hit and dragged by a truck, and then thrown into a lake. Where I promptly sank to the bottom.

“What time is it?”
I croaked.

Fletcher sat down on a stool next to me, and
held a straw close to my mouth. “It’s six-thirty. Stay down. You just had major surgery. It’s too early to get up yet.”

Six-thirty!
I’d missed the whole day. When I sucked on the straw and cool water filled my mouth, I nearly groaned in appreciation. I don’t think water had ever tasted so good.

“Better?” he asked.

I nodded, then looked around the room. There was an IV pole with several bags, including blood, hanging from it.

“S-surgery?” I
noticed there was an oxygen tube hanging down from my nose. “What the—”

“Shhh, relax.” Fletcher dragged his hand down the length of his face. He looked exhausted
, and was wearing light blue scrubs. “You had a placental abruption. The placenta detached from the uterine wall, so Dr. Javornik did a C-section. I sat in on the procedure. You lost a considerable amount of blood, so a transfusion was necessary. She was able to save your uterus, though.”

“A transfusion?” I tried to reach for Fletcher, my hands
heavy as they dragged across the sheet. As my fingers raked across my middle, realization settled in over me like a dark, dense cloud, pressing me into the bed like a vice grip. “W-where’s my baby?”

“Looks like someone woke up!” A cheerful nurse in baby pink scrubs strode into the room with a thermometer in hand. She
patted Fletcher’s shoulder. “You’ve been here all afternoon, doctor. Don’t you want to take a break?”

Fletcher shook his head. “No, ma’am. I’m fine.”

“Fletcher,” I said, my voice louder now. “
Where’s my baby
?”

“In the NICU.” His smile was gentle, and the crinkles around his eyes re
turned. “Lexie, you have a son.”

“A son?” Something washed over me. It wasn’t quite cold, but it left my skin peppered with goose bumps.

He nodded. “His lungs were slightly underdeveloped, so the neonatologist expects him to stay for a few days, to a week at most. But he’s as strong as an ox, and is the loudest kiddo in there.”

Suddenly—despite the fact that I was covered in tubes and wires, and my body felt buried in sand—the room seemed brighter.
I had a son
. And he was going to be okay. My face crumpled, and when I went to cover my face, I bumped my oxygen tubes. “Oh my gosh, oh my gosh.”

“Here, let’s get rid of that.” He unwound the tubing from around my ears, and set it on the table next to the bed.

“I’m sorry. I’m just… I just…” My voice sounded strangled. Tears flowed from my eyes, snot dripped from my nose, and I had no control over it. It was too much to handle, too much to process.

I was a
mother.

             
I choked on another sob. “S-sorry.”

             
Fletcher leaned in and wrapped his arms around me. Pressing a kiss into my matted hair, he whispered, “Don’t be sorry, Lex. You did such a good job. He’s perfect.” When he pulled away, I realized there were tears in his eyes, too. “Five pounds, eight ounces. Twenty-one and a half inches. And a head of red hair, just like his mom.”

             
“His apgar scores were good,” the nurse added, sticking a thermometer into my ear. When it beeped a few seconds later, she surveyed the results, then looked at Fletcher. “Temp is 101.”

             
“We just gave her
acetaminophen. It should come down within a half hour or so, so check her again in thirty minutes.” Fletcher glanced at my IVs. “And make sure to stay on top of her hydration.”
              The nurse jotted Fletcher’s instructions down on a small notebook. “Got it. Anything else? How’s her bleeding?”

             
Fletcher’s thumb stroked across my knuckles. “I checked it just before she woke up, and it looks normal. We’ll need to try to get her sitting up in the next few hours. Possibly get her into a wheelchair so that she can go see her son.”

             
“He can’t come to my room?” I slurred. I reached for the straw, and took another drink of water to alleviate my cotton mouth. “I wanted to room in, and breastfeed, and—”

             
“All in good time. He’s in the NICU for now, and it’s for the best. They’re taking good care of him.” Fletcher brought my hand to his face to kiss it. Through the corner of my eyes I noticed that the nurse was watching us with pointed interest. “You’ve had a hard day. Let’s get you up and moving, and I’ll take you to check out your son’s awesome hair.”

             
“So he’s a ginger?” I laughed groggily. “That figures.”

             
“He’s as gorgeous as you are.” He wiped away my tears with the pads of his thumbs, and pulled his phone out of his pocket. “I took pictures for you.”

             
I wept as he scrolled through the photos. There, in all of his brand-spanking-new glory, was my son. His skin, though streaked with blood and cheesy vernix, was porcelain white. In the few shots where his eyes were open, they were the same dark blue I recognized from my own baby pictures. And sure enough, there were wet, reddish curls standing up off of his head.

             
My heart swelled so much, I thought my chest would crack open. My son looked nothing like Nate. He was a Baump, through and through, with a nose like Corbin’s, lips like Darren’s, and round, dimpled cheeks like my mother’s. My joy was inexplicable.

             
After we’d been enjoying pictures for an hour, I was moved to the post-delivery floor, and I heard Candace’s voice ring out from the doorway. “Has someone woken up?”

             
Fletcher, who’d remained by my side, stood up and grinned. “Yup. She just saw pictures.”

             
“Hi.” I waved lamely. “Come on in.”

             
Candace gestured down the hall. “Come on, guys! She’s up!”

             
My family lumbered into the room like a herd of elephants. Corbin and Andrea were both carrying enough stuffed animals and balloons to welcome every baby on the entire floor. Candace and Brian closely followed, their eyes wandering to my hand, still laced together with Fletcher’s. Next came Darren and Pandi, who was once again dressed for a nightclub, in snakeskin short shorts and a tube top. Maybe it was the morphine, maybe I had the buzz of new motherhood, but I didn’t even care that she looked like a streetwalker.

Last to enter the room was my mother. She came in with Pastor Irm, and for the first time in, like,
ever
they were hand in hand. As soon as our eyes met, she started to cry, and I reached for her.

             
“Alexandria,” she sobbed, bending down to envelope me in an embrace. I drew in her scent of Jergen’s lotion and cookies. “I’m so glad you’re okay.”

             
“Dr. Javornik did an excellent job today,” Fletcher announced.

             
“I hear you never left her side,” Candace told Fletcher, coming around the bed to hug him. “Guess you must care about my cousin an awful lot.”

             
Fletcher’s cheeks reddened. “Looks like my secret’s out.”

             
Candace wiped a tear from the corner of her eye. “It’s about time.”

             
Brian punched Fletcher in the shoulder. “You could have told me.”

             
My mother sat on the edge of the hospital bed. “
This
is your special someone?”

             
Darren narrowed his eyes at Fletcher. “Dude. Are you a doctor?”

             
“Yes, sir.” Fletcher nodded. “Obstetrics and gynecology.”

“
Your gynecologist is your baby daddy?” Darren cracked up. “Damn, Lexie, you know how to score free health care, huh?”

             
Corbin whacked him on the back of his head. “Shut up.”

             
“Don’t mind us, Dr. Haybee.” Andrea explained. “We’re a motley crew, but we mean well.”

             
“Thank you.” His hand found my shoulder and squeezed. “But call me Fletcher.”

             
“Thank you, Fletcher.” My mother’s voice shook. “For saving my daughter. And my grandson.”

             
Fletcher ducked his head humbly. “It’s my pleasure, Mrs. Baump.”

             
“Oh, call me Patsy.” My mother fiddled with the lace collar on her kitten sweater. “And this is, um, my special friend.” She gestured for the pastor to join her by my bed. He obeyed, and grinned when she slid her arm under his. “Pastor Irmingham Hollbrook.”

             
The whole room went silent. Darren and Corbin’s eyes were so wide I would have laughed, had I not been in such shock myself—and still a little stoned. Andrea and Candace both slapped their hands over their mouths to suppress their giggles.

Fletcher shook Pastor Irm’s
hand. “Good to meet you, sir.”

“Thank you, son.” Pastor Irm looked down at me. “Congratulations, Lexie.”

I bit my lip. “I didn’t call Marisol. We had an event this evening. Oh, crap.”

Candace
rubbed my leg. “I called her, and she called in some help from your food rep. She’s going to come see you as soon as she’s done. I think she was little relieved she didn’t have to be your labor partner.”

I laughed. “G
uess it was her lucky day.”

“You’l
l, you know, talk to her when she gets here, right?” Candace raised an eyebrow at me.

“Yes. Of course.” I nodded, pressing my lips together tightly.
Mine and Fletcher’s feelings were public now, no use in keeping it a secret from Marisol anymore.

             
“So, like, if you and the doctor are together, then, like, are you two getting married?” Pandi asked, shuffling on her platform heels.

             
I pulled out of my mom’s embrace. “We haven’t even had our first date yet. Give us some time.”

             
“Oh, I think this constitutes a first date,” Brian pointed out. When everyone’s attention turned to him, he offered us a shrug. “I’m just sayin’.”

             
Andrea laughed. “He’s got a point. I think sitting by someone’s side while they’re cut open constitutes a date.”