Pregnant With His Child

by Lilian Darcy

  As soon as their taxi speed began to feel like a car on a country road instead of an out-of-control train, Christina told Grace, ‘I’ll put the pads in place.’

  ‘Your own ticker’s resumed normal operations, then?’ Grace said.

  ‘You’re not joking!’ Christina answered. ‘I was thinking just now, here we are, we’re all going to die, and it’s already been a seriously below-average day.’ An unsteady sob sneaked its way into the middle of her laugh. ‘It really isn’t fair.’

  The plane slowed…slowed…stopped. She didn’t even look up to see where they were, if the ambulance had arrived, who had come with it, although she was dimly aware of Glenn skipping through most of his final procedures and jumping out onto the tarmac.

  She had the pads on Jim’s chest, one under the right collar-bone, the other lower down on the opposite side. The hum of the life pack charging up to 200 joules hit a crescendo then it beeped its readiness.

  ‘Everybody clear?’ she called.

  Grace held onto Honey to make sure. They couldn’t touch the patient or anything around him made of metal at this point. ‘Yes, we’re clear,’ she said.

  ‘OK, shocking now.’ Christina pressed the buttons on both paddles with her thumbs to release the charge.

  Jim’s body jerked and the ECG trace disappeared. They waited and watched. It was like a jury sequestered before revealing its verdict. You didn’t yet know the outcome. You just had to wait. Christina recharged the paddles while she did so, ready for a second shock if it was needed, and when the rhythm reformed on the screen it was still horribly wrong.

  Grace handed Honey down the aircraft steps to Glenn. There’d have to be someone on the ground to take care of her. She needed it at this point. What she didn’t need was to witness any more of this.

  ‘Shocking again at 200,’ Christina said as soon as Honey had gone and the charge had built again.

  No go.

  ‘And again at 360.’

  No.

  She felt movement—a vibration and some thumps as someone entered the plane. In the warm tropical air of the coast, she hadn’t even realised the rear door had been opened.

  ‘How long since he arrested?’ Oh, lord, it was Joe! She would have known it in another second even without hearing his voice, just by the aura of his body next to hers, just by the way he smelled.

  Flooded with an impossible mix of emotion—relief…way too much of it was relief…just that physical relief she always felt at being with him, like an addict getting a drug—she answered, ‘I’ve lost track. Too long. They sent you from the ED with the ambulance?’

  ‘Yes. You’ve shocked up to 360?’ He leaned closer and she felt his solid upper arm brush hers, bare beyond the short sleeve of the surgical scrub suit he wore. The sensation was so familiar, but it didn’t belong to her any more.

  He didn’t belong to her.

  He never had.

  ‘Yes,’ she answered, after drawing in a breath. ‘I’m going with adrenaline and I’m going to intubate. CPR and bag him for a minute, just to get some air and circulation pushing through.’

  ‘Then shock him again…’

  ‘Yes.’ If his heart hadn’t produced a rhythm by then…Well, you still kept going, another cycle of three shocks followed by CPR, you tried everything for thirty or forty minutes, and you watched for the miracle, but the chance of it got less and less.

  Grace was already drawing up the adrenaline. Joe started CPR, pausing only long enough for Christina to intubate with Grace’s help.

  ‘OK, standing clear, please. Shocking now at 360 joules.’

  Jim’s body jumped again. The trace went static, then a rhythm resolved.

  ‘Sinus pattern,’ Joe said.

  ‘Thank God for that!’

  ‘Forty. It’s too slow.’

  ‘I’ll give atropine.’

  ‘Hopefully it won’t come up too far or we’ll be back where we started.’

  ‘We?’ Every muscle in her body tightened. ‘It’s not we, Joe. Don’t use that word, please.’

  Oh, hell, where had that come from? Unprofessional and stupid and just wrong. She set her face hard, willing herself to forget the rash personal reference, and willing him to ignore it.

  He did, and Christina hardened her control so that she didn’t risk letting down the barriers again.

  She drew up the dose, hoping it wouldn’t speed the heart up too fast and send it once more into the wild electrical rhythm that couldn’t translate into the right beat. Unfortunately, a patient’s reaction to the drug couldn’t be predicted.

  ‘OK,’ Joe said a few minutes later. ‘Looking better, now. He’s up to sixty.’

  ‘Gag reflex is back. I’m taking out the airway.’

  ‘Give him the high-oxygen mask and see how he goes.’

  They watched and waited. Jim stirred and groaned through his mask, his depth of unconsciousness lightening. They would be able to move him soon.

  ‘Who else do we have on the ground?’ Christina asked.

  ‘Ambulance and two officers, one is driving, one’s with the patient’s wife. That’s Nick Brady. You’d know him, he’s pretty good. She seems…’

  He stopped, tilted his head in the direction of the tarmac and listened. Christina heard voices, but didn’t take her eyes from the heart monitor. Joe leaned out the door and came back half a minute later to report quietly, ‘She’s done a bit of a dive.’

  Christina made a stricken sound. She knew Honey must be on the edge of a complete nervous collapse.

  ‘Nick doesn’t think it’s serious.’ That was partly for Jim’s benefit, Christina knew, because it was just possible that he could hear and take in what was going on. ‘Low blood sugar, exhaustion, stress. But they’re going to send for a second ambulance and check her out.’ He dropped his voice even lower. ‘What do we know about these two?’

  He’d said it again.

  We.

  Such a little word, but it hurt so much, the way it mocked their current status.

  Christina ignored it and just answered the question. ‘Patient is Jim Cooper, Megan’s father. Remember, I told you last night about—’

  ‘Right.’ He gave a short, efficient nod, which made his jaw look very strong and square, and murmured, ‘I got introduced to Megan and the bub today.’

  Grace—who must be aware of the undercurrents—leaned closer to Christina and said, ‘Speaking of which, there’s a family reunion coming up. Thought about that yet, Christina?’

  ‘Uh…’ Lord, no! She hadn’t! In the few moments when she hadn’t been focused purely on the technical demands of Jim’s care, she’d been thinking about a very different reunion. Her own, just now, with Joe. Which had been every bit as difficult as she’d known it would be.

  But Grace was right. Honey would want to see Megan as soon as she could, once she’d regained her own strength a little and satisfied herself that Jim was stable. And when Honey saw Megan, she would see her new grandson as well, unless they called ahead to the unit and got an express refusal from Megan to allow her mother through the door. Would the girl go that far? Would Honey take any notice?

  ‘Let’s take it one step at a time,’ Christina answered. ‘For now, for us, this is just about Jim.’

  ‘You think so? Tell you what, we’ll swap jobs for tonight,’ Grace murmured back, smiling wryly. ‘I’ll do the life-saving and you can clean up the family mess.’ She was a good enough friend to get away with the challenge.

  Christina said, ‘You’re saying it’s going to get dumped on you?’

  ‘I’m saying nurses have the sticky bits sometimes. I’m not looking forward to it, because if it gets stuffed up somehow and they all end up permanently estranged…’

  ‘They’d all lose out,’ Joe cut in, as if he knew something about such a prospect.

  ‘And I’ll feel to blame,’ finished Grace.

  ‘Don’t, Grace,’ Joe said. ‘Whatever’s going on, it must have started months ago, before anyone at this ho
spital was ever involved.’

  Grace nodded. ‘You’re right, of course. But feelings don’t operate on logic, do they?’

  ‘Heck of a lot easier if they did.’ He looked tired and stressed suddenly.

  The skin around his big, dark eyes was tight, and his hair stuck up at the back as if he’d run his hand through it too many times since its morning brush. Christina wondered what kind of a day he’d had, what kind of a month he’d just come from in New Zealand, what kind of a life he had there, for heaven’s sake, and how much work he’d put in to settle into his room in the doctors’ house this morning.

  She’d done most of it for him yesterday, of course. Made the bed, hunted up the books, picked those flowers. Had she tried too hard? Said too much, with all these gestures?

  Stop.

  Just stop.

  ‘Heart rate up to sixty-five, respirations are coming up, too,’ she said. ‘I think we should move him now. We’ve been hogging this runway long enough.’ She changed her tone a little and spoke directly to Jim, even though he still hovered on the edge of unconsciousness. ‘We’re going to get you into a hospital bed now, Jim, where we have some better machines for reading what’s going on with your heart. We’ll give you something more for the pain before we go.’

  He could take another dose of morphine at this point, she judged. When she’d delivered it through the port in his IV she asked him how he was doing and was rewarded with the flickering of his closed lids and the faintest nod.

  The transfer to the ambulance went well. An onlooker wouldn’t have sensed any drama, or any frantic hurry. Still, the danger wasn’t over, and possibly the journey wasn’t either, if he needed to go south for the kind of surgery they weren’t equipped for here.

  The hospital seemed quiet as they turned into the ambulance bay, a reassuring edifice with its modern design and clean lines. Glimpsing the waiting room that opened off the emergency department entrance, Christina saw two or three patients waiting, and there were lights in the windows of the main building, of course. If you looked closely, you could glimpse a couple of TV screens. Darkness had fallen while they had been working over Jim on the airport tarmac, and from somewhere she could smell hot, savoury food.

  A quick, smooth journey along a corridor brought them to a bed in the resuscitation section of the ED. Honey had been given a bed of her own in the adjacent area of the unit. She was in the care of a nurse and Christina saw she’d been hooked up to a drip. She had a cup of tea in her hands also, but hadn’t made much headway with it.

  She reacted as soon as she saw them, struggling to sit higher and breaking into rapid speech. ‘I’m sorry. This is so stupid. I don’t need this. Jim, I’m here,’ she called, ‘but they’ve got me in a bed. Can I bring this thing with me?’ She gestured, impatient and agitated, towards the drip stand.

  The nurse raised her eyebrows in a question and Christina and Joe both nodded. Honey would only fret herself into a worse state if she couldn’t get closer to her husband. Grace took over, helping her out of bed and making sure her IV line wasn’t wrapped around her. ‘This way, Mrs Cooper.’

  ‘We’re going to put him on a better ECG machine,’ Christina explained. ‘It has more leads, which might feel a bit scary, Jim, all these things stuck to you, but it’s only so we can work out what kind of heart attack you’ve had. We’ll be taking some blood as well, giving you more medication through your drip and monitoring you very closely.’

  We.

  She was doing it now, too.

  It was the way medical personnel often talked. Safety in numbers, or something. But until last night ‘we’ had meant something much more personal in a context like this. Herself and Joe, working together, understanding each other, getting the teamwork right, feeling good about what they did because they knew they did it well…

  Then planning a night out afterwards. A crazy night sometimes. Mad races along the beach, kicking up the foam with their bare feet. Lighting a campfire in the back garden and toasting kebab sticks threaded with marshmallow, banana and pineapple pieces, then dipping them in melted chocolate.

  Filling a kid’s wading pool on a hot summer night once, and setting up the television and video player on the back veranda in front of it because Joe had said, ‘Hey, feel like a naked spa movie marathon?’ They’d both been pretty inventive when it had come to making entertainment. They’d had so much fun.

  Yes.

  Fun.

  Rest and recreation, just the way Joe had wanted.

  Focus, Christina.

  She was supposed to be taking blood.

  Now.

  Because they needed to measure the cardiac enzymes to get a definitive marker of infarct size. They’d get a result within minutes and a clearer answer on whether they would need to ship him south to Brisbane for surgery, and what medication he should be given in the interim.

  Honey watched them like a hawk as they worked to set up the ECG and take the blood. Jim opened his eyes as the needle went in.

  ‘Hey, you’re back with us,’ Joe said. ‘I’m Dr Barrett—Joe, if you want—and you’re safe here in Crocodile Creek Hospital, Mr Cooper. We’re going to take good care of you.’

  ‘Are you in much pain now, Jim?’ Christina asked him. The thin plastic cannula began to fill with blood as she spoke, and it was flowing nicely. Wouldn’t take long to fill the test tubes.

  ‘Much better,’ Jim managed to reply, his voice thin.

  ‘Oh, Jim!’ Honey bowed her head and pressed his hand between hers. Her IV tubing snaked across his arm.

  ‘Tracing’s looking a lot better, too,’ Joe said quietly. He drew Christina further away from the bedside, into the adjacent and almost empty section of the department. ‘What are you thinking? I guess technically he’s my patient now, but you probably want to follow through.’

  ‘What I’m thinking? It’s definitely an inferior infarct and the pain’s settling already, so that’s good. We’ll see what the enzyme levels are like and start thrombolysis. Hopefully the ECG changes will settle and we won’t have to transfer him for more invasive treatment. We’ll get Dr Lopez to see him, discharge…’ She stopped.

  ‘Cross that bridge later.’

  ‘I’m too tired to iron out all their family and financial problems tonight, that’s for sure.’

  ‘I’m going to have a better look at his missus, but it seems best to keep her in overnight, too,’ Joe said. ‘She’s looking a wreck.’

  ‘What time do you get off?’ The question slipped out of Christina’s mouth all by itself, pure habit.

  She saw him stiffen. ‘Hamish is on tonight,’ he said. ‘He’s in here already, in Paeds, pretty busy with a couple of sick kids. Lucky spiked a fever this morning, by the way, but we couldn’t find a specific problem and he seems much better now. I’ll go when Hamish tells me things have quietened down, but I’m on call, so if things get hairy…Did you want—?’

  ‘I didn’t want anything,’ she cut in quickly. ‘I was just asking.’

  ‘Because I do want to talk,’ he told her.

  He bent his head, only moving a few inches closer with the gesture but still it had the effect of locking out the rest of the world and flooding her with all her painful awareness of him. How could she ever get used to this? To being close to him without touching, to hearing his voice when the words weren’t meant only for her, to pretending to him and herself and everyone else that this was OK, they were friends, they were fine, she wasn’t breaking apart inside.

  ‘Tonight?’ she said, wanting it and dreading it at the same time.

  He was so big. Like a wall. She had to look down, inspect her fingernails for life-threatening cuticle splits or something, because anywhere else she looked she’d only see his body, his face, his eyes.

  And even when she didn’t look, she could still feel.

  ‘I know we’re both tired,’ he said. ‘Maybe it’s a mistake. But there were a couple of things you said. A couple of things I should probably say. Not feeling
that patient about waiting.’

  ‘I’m not sure, Joe.’

  ‘Will you be home?’ he pressed.

  She nodded. There was nowhere else she wanted to be.

  Not that she wanted to be at home much either, when her place would seem so…so…

  Joe-less.

  Oh, hell!

  ‘So when I’m done here, or even if I’m only grabbing a break, I’ll be over.’ His voice rumbled in his chest and she wanted to do what she’d done so many times in the past and press her ear there—half her body, really—so she could feel the vibration. ‘It might be late.’

  ‘All right,’ she answered.

  ‘There are some things I want you to understand, even though they won’t change anything about…what you’ve said.’

  It sounded ominous, not something to look forward to.

  But she looked forward to it all the same, because as he turned to go back to their patient and she got slammed yet again with all the familiarity of his body—the way he moved, the shape of him—she knew she wouldn’t forgive herself if she didn’t give him—give herself?—just one more chance.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘CHRISTI-I-I-NA! How goes it?’ said the hospital administrator.

  ‘Hi, Brian.’

  She didn’t like the way he said her name, or his frequent jaunty mannerisms with his voice. Having left a much more stable and comfortable Jim and a resting Honey in the care of Joe and a nurse in the emergency department, she’d gone in search of Grace before leaving the hospital for the evening—and she hoped Charles Wetherby might be around, too—but maybe Grace had already gone. The two of them were both overdue to clock off, after a longer than usual day.

  Unless Grace had gone to see Megan and the baby.

  Heading that way, Christina had had to pass Brian Simmons’s office and he’d caught sight of her, unfortunately. She always felt petty in her response to him. He seemed like a perfectly decent guy, had helped her more than he’d really needed to over the business of organising the room in the doctors’ house for Joe.