by Ali Mercer
I was sure he’d be well enough to be discharged soon. But they did another blood test and the infection was still there.
He had a cannula inserted into his tiny hand, and a line pumping antibiotics into him, and it persisted.
People came and went, checking his temperature, administering his dosage. Mark visited with Ellie and Ava, bringing grapes and flowers. We had a short stretch of uninterrupted time together, the five of us: a birthday party, of sorts, around my hospital bed. The girls held Felix again. I could tell they were all worried, and trying more or less successfully not to show it.
In a way, it was a relief when they had gone again, and I could just concentrate on Felix.
His second night of life went by in the hospital cot, with a succession of people slipping in and out of the room in the darkness to monitor him. The next morning someone decided a urine sample was needed. Well, that was a joke. I ended up sitting round with one of the midwives, watching Felix lying in his cot with his nappy off, waiting for him to wee, then missing the moment when he did. In the end one of the midwives came up with the idea of putting cotton wool inside his nappy and using a pipette to get the sample out of it. I congratulated her as if we’d cracked it. As if everything else would be easy now the problem of how to carry out the necessary test had been solved.
Soon Felix would be in the clear, and we would be free to go home.
But within the hour the test became unnecessary, and we were overtaken by events.
A paediatrician came to carry out a full body inspection, and saw what nobody else had: the cause of the infection. A twisted testicle, red and slightly swollen. When the blood supply to part of the body is cut off, it dies. And the body of a living person cannot accommodate a part of the body that is already dead.
We had got through the birth together, both of us. We had made it home. I had thought we were safe. But we weren’t safe. Felix had emerged from my body to begin his life, and his life was confusion and disaster. Something had happened to him – maybe in the womb, or maybe during the birth – something exceptionally rare. Rare but real. We had been struck by lightning. Of all of the places misfortune could have chosen to come to earth, it had picked us.
There was a rapid escalation. A more senior paediatrician came in. His face was anxious, his voice gentle. He spoke of scans, of the possible need for surgery. I burst into tears and he looked more anxious still.
I had always prided myself on being able to stay calm in an emergency. But I was beyond being calm now. My milk had just come in, and I was still bleeding. My whole body felt as if it was awash with sadness, and there was nothing I could do to stop what was happening and make it better.
I rang Mark at home; it was first Monday of the Christmas holidays, and he was there with the girls. I cried again on the phone to him. He came as quickly as he could, leaving the girls behind, and arriving just in time to meet the new, very senior doctor who had come to review our case.
There was a frisson of respect from the staff in the room as the specialist delivered his verdict. Felix would need an operation, as soon as possible – that very day. The only way to tackle the infection was at source. The part of Felix that had died had to be removed.
We asked questions, but they didn’t make any difference to the answer. The operation had to happen, the sooner the better, and if it didn’t, Felix wouldn’t get well.
Then the specialist told us that Felix was to have nil by mouth until after the operation, and left us.
Felix was to have general anaesthetic, and I couldn’t feed him, and my breasts were bursting with milk. I wanted to feed him so much. I had never wanted anything more. And yet I couldn’t, because if I did, he might die.
And he wanted my milk – he cried for it. His crying was terrible. I gave him to Mark to hold because I couldn’t bear it – I couldn’t keep our baby in my arms and hear him and see his distress when it was so completely within my power to satisfy him and soothe him, and so essential for me to refuse him. We gave him our clean fingers to suck, we tried a dummy, but none of that was any good at all. It would satisfy him for a moment, and then he would realise it wasn’t what he wanted and begin to wail again.
Eventually he wore himself out, and slept.
A midwife showed up with a breast pump for me, and I milked myself and that was a relief, but only a physical one. It was nothing to what I would have felt if I could have fed my baby again.
He was still asleep when they came to take him away, and wheel him down to the special care baby unit where he would be prepped for surgery. We were to stay behind until we were called down to join him, and then we would be able to go with him as far as the operating theatre.
We talked about what had happened and what might happen next. Mark wanted to lay out the possibilities, to understand them, to take charge of them, as if being able to list all the eventualities would make them bearable, as if it was possible to prepare for whatever lay ahead. As if this was a challenge he couldn’t afford to fail. I let the details wash over me. I looked at the fear in Mark’s face, I heard the strain in his voice, and I was grateful that he was there with me, that I wasn’t completely alone.
And then a midwife came in and told us Felix was ready, and we went down to the special care baby unit to see him.
So many little sick babies in incubators. So many worried parents. And our baby in the middle of them, still asleep, lying in his hospital cot with its wheeled base and transparent rim with the drip running into his hand.
Mark stood by and watched me, and I sat by Felix and touched his little hand. He was awake now but drowsy, and I sang to him – very quietly, almost under my breath, just loud enough for him to hear. I sang him the same lullabies that I’d once sung to Ava and Ellie: ‘Hush, Little Baby’, ‘Lavender’s Blue’, ‘Greensleeves’. I couldn’t let him lie there in silence. I wanted to sing to him as if this was just any sleep, the ordinary kind, the kind we all wake up from.
And then the time came and they were ready for him.
It seemed a long walk to the operating theatre. They offered me a wheelchair but I said no: I was still sore from the birth, but I was determined to manage, to do this for Felix on my own two feet. After all, I wasn’t the one who was ill.
Felix was pushed along on his cot by the hospital porter, and Mark and I followed. The cot squeaked, and one of the doors of the cabinet under the mattress didn’t quite shut properly and kept banging. Mark told me later how much that sound bothered him. It was the small, persistent sound of something overlooked, something that either couldn’t or wouldn’t be fixed.
The corridor narrowed and twisted and turned, and there were fewer people around as we progressed. Eventually it was just us. We turned a corner and there, attached to the wall in front of us, was a whiteboard with a list written on it: times, names of patients, operations. All of the others were crossed off, apart from Felix, who was the very last and had been squeezed in where there was barely space.
The porter turned to us with the regretful face of someone who is about to deliver bad news for which he is not personally responsible, and explained that out of me and Mark, only one of us could go further. He was sorry. But those were the rules.
Mark didn’t hesitate.
‘You go,’ he said. ‘I’ll wait.’
I had never been as grateful to him as I was at that moment. To make that decision so calmly and quickly, without complaining, to make it easy for me to go on… Whatever might lie ahead, and whatever he might have done or not done in the past, I knew right then that he would always have my back.
There was no time to lose. I said a hurried goodbye to Mark and followed the porter and the cot with Felix on it through the silver doors into the small, windowless room reserved for patients to be prepared for surgery.
It was like the airlock of a spaceship, a space between doors to different worlds. On the other side of one door was the rest of the hospital, and Mark, waiting. And the other door led to the operating t
heatre, where I would not be able to follow. This was as far as I could go: after this I, too, would have to turn back, and wait.
The anaesthetist was already there, waiting. The porter went out, and the anaesthetist invited me to sit and showed me the consent form that had been prepared for me to sign.
He was a little younger than me, brainy-looking, wide-eyed and sincere in his surgical scrubs, and he spoke gently and slowly as he set about explaining the possible risks and side-effects of the procedure Felix was about to undergo. I could feel him willing me not to panic or give in to hysteria, to take in what he was saying as calmly as he was saying it, and then to sign the form so they could go ahead and do what was necessary to save Felix’s life.
It wasn’t reassurance he was offering, though. It was anything but reassuring. What he was doing was making clear that there was a choice, and I had to make it. And the choice was between risk and death, and there were no alternatives.
Felix was still awake, but only just. There was a mobile hanging on the wall opposite him, projecting colours on the wall behind it: something soothing for children to watch before slipping into unconsciousness.
I said, ‘I don’t care what the risks are. If this is his only chance, I’ll sign.’
And I did. Then I reached out to touch Felix’s tiny hand and his eyes flickered open and closed again. The anaesthetist put a mask over his face and I felt Felix reeling away from me, sinking into darkness.
I took one last look at him: his soft cheeks, the fluff of downy hair on the top of his head, his miraculous eyelashes. I said, ‘Goodbye, my love.’ And then I had to leave. I turned away from him and went the opposite way to the way he would be going, through the double doors back to the corridor.
Mark was still standing in the corridor exactly where I’d left him. There was nowhere to sit, and no one else around.
He looked frozen, not from cold but from time, as if ages had gone by while he was standing there and had transformed him, the way old wood turns eventually into something like stone. But for me the time had passed as if it was an instant: being with Felix, having to say goodbye. I had no idea at all how long I had actually been gone.
We made our way to the waiting room where we would stay until the operation was over. We got lost once or twice; the hospital was beginning to seem like a maze that we would never get out of.
The waiting room was bright and new, with a coffee machine and a vending machine that sold ready meals, and a microwave. There was a tired-looking woman sitting there by herself, eating warmed-up curry out of a plastic container. I assumed she must have a sick child too; she looked like she’d spent more time hanging round in waiting rooms lately than we had. She was giving off a definite vibe of not wanting to talk, so Mark and I sat quietly together and let her be.
It seemed strange to think of eating. Irrelevant. As if it was an old custom that should have fallen out of favour. I supposed I’d be hungry again eventually, but it was hard to imagine it.
Mark went off to the maternity wing to get the things I’d left up there – I’d assumed we would be going back, and hadn’t realised that Felix would be transferred to a post-surgical ward for children. There wasn’t much to collect: the bag Mark had brought for me when he’d visited, and a few bits and pieces that I’d left scattered around the room – a pack of nappies, wipes, and the little newborn babygros, yellow and white and blue, that I’d been rinsing out in the basin by hand. We hadn’t bought many clothes that size, because he was bound to grow so quickly.
Back home I had drawers full of things for him to wear when he was bigger. Nought to three months, three to six, six to nine. Soft leather shoes, the sort babies wear before they can walk. A couple of sleeping bags in different weights and sizes, a snowsuit that he wouldn’t fit into until next winter but that I’d spotted in the sale and hadn’t been able to resist. Tucked in a corner, next to the snowsuit, was the Christmas stocking I’d got ready for him, filled with little gifts already wrapped in paper decorated with snowmen and sleighs. Rattles. Chewy toys. A cuddly monkey with a cute face. And there was his present, a mobile for his cot with stars and clouds and birds.
The woman who’d been eating curry got up and went out. I was completely alone, for the first time in what felt like a very long time. I sat and leafed through a magazine and tried not to think. The celebrities with their stories seemed to belong to a previous era, as if the magazine was an ancient artefact that I’d discovered.
Mark came back with the bag and we phoned Ingrid and the girls. Mark did most of the talking and once again I was grateful to him. I didn’t want to cry, and I didn’t want to frighten anybody. I didn’t want to make anything worse. Maybe I secretly believed that if I was very good, if I behaved myself and didn’t make a fuss, everything would turn out all right.
The evening wore on. It was long since dark by then, and the only sound was the faint hum of the strip lighting. We were still the only people there, and it was like being in a tunnel but without being able to move on or free ourselves. Or perhaps it was more like being trapped in a cave and waiting for rescuers to come and find you.
I remembered how it had felt one time when I was little and Mum had been late to pick me up from school. All the other children had gone; there was nobody else around, nobody but me. The playground seemed huger than ever. I had found a little heart-shaped chip of stone set in the pebbledash walls and stood there tracing it with my finger, hoping for her, willing her to arrive. And then she had appeared, hurrying towards me, all worry and haste and love. And I had been so grateful and so relieved, and the world had righted itself and carried on.
The next person to come into the waiting room was a doctor, and he wasn’t carrying Felix in his arms.
I looked at his face and knew at once what was about to tell us. It was obvious from the pain he felt, and also the sense of duty. He didn’t want to. But he had to tell us.
It was bad news. The worst.
The world as I knew it had ended, and it would never be right again.
* * *
The doctor explained what had happened and we had no choice but to take it in.
Felix had died on the operating table. His little heart had stopped and he had slipped away from us and from the world, and we would never see him alive again.
My heart stopped too, but its machinery carried on. I was still there, able to see Mark next to me and the doctor opposite us, and my hands moving and clasping each other, as if to pray, before breaking apart and coming to rest on my knees.
I trembled and tears came out of my eyes but offered no relief. Next to me Mark argued and blustered and shook, wanting it to be someone’s fault, needing someone to blame. I put my hand on his arm and quieted him, and then he cried too. We were tiny in the face of what had happened, two small figures sitting side by side on the waiting room sofa on the edge of the whirling storm that had taken our son away.
Nobody had made a mistake. Nobody got anything wrong. It shouldn’t have happened, but it had: lightning struck twice. One fluke had followed another, and our baby was gone.
We were taken to a room with a hospital bed and a crib and a padded bench to sit on. Then the doctor brought Felix out to us, swaddled in a little white blanket. The doctor’s face was filled with regret as he passed our baby back into my arms and I sobbed and held him close.
Somewhere, in a parallel world, a Felix who had survived latched on to my breast and drank my milk till he was satisfied, and slept. And in that world, Mark and I were shaken by the storm that had come so close to taking him, and were grateful to be alive and together.
But we were trapped in a time and place in which Felix was lost.
In this world he was still and cool and the colour had gone from his delicate skin. He was there and it was him, but was no longer quite himself. That little jolly spark had vanished. Not into thin air but into thick air, air that seemed as solid as a wall between me and him. Air that I somehow went on breathing, but he could not.
I knew how sad the doctor and the surgeon and the midwives were. A sorrow like that reaches out like ripples on a pool. It spreads and widens. People struggle with it. Everybody does. New life should be the opposite of death. But sometimes it comes so close as to be interchangeable. The membrane between life and death dissolves, and you feel yourself falling and sinking, and hear the darkness lapping at the margins. And then you know that the world is as fragile as a breath, a pulse. No one is safe, no one, however beloved. Forgetting that may be comforting, but it doesn’t make it untrue.
Mark held Felix too. We said goodbye. And then they took him away. They would take care of him for a little longer, before releasing him to us for good.
When he had gone Mark sobbed in a way I’d never seen any man cry before. Or any woman. As if someone had reached into him and pulled his heart out, and he was completely broken.
I hesitated, but only for a moment. Then I put my arms around him and soothed him and rocked him like a child, and something began to come back to me, very faintly at first and then more strongly: the sense that I still had a use in this world. That I could and would carry on, because Mark was not the only person who needed me.
* * *
We decided to tell Ingrid and the girls over the phone. It felt late – it felt like a time after history, when the sun had gone – but it was still early enough for them still to be up. We didn’t want them to hear the car arrive and rush down expecting me to bring Felix in, and then realise my arms were empty.
Mark talked to Ingrid. I tried not to listen to what he said; I felt as if I was intruding. Then I spoke to Ava and Ellie in turn. They were both stunned. At a loss for words.
I said to both of them, ‘We’re coming home. We’ll be back soon.’ What I meant was, Hold on. Be there for me, and I’ll be there for you. Then I said goodbye and ended the call, and Mark looked at me and said, ‘We have to go.’
