The Children's Doctor and the Single Mom

by Lilian Darcy

  ‘Chris, it’s better if you stay here until Fran’s in Recovery,’ Laird said. ‘Then you should be able to come and see both babies and let her know how they are.’

  It would be an enormously stressful time for her, he knew. This first hour. The first day. The first week. No guarantees, yet, as to if or when she’d be taking her babies home—her own process of recovery from the stressful pregnancy, the surgery and blood loss almost an afterthought.

  The journey to the NICU was short, and there was an incubator already set up for Max at thirty-six degrees Celsius and eighty-five percent humidity. Little Adam had a nurse working over him, checking his temperature, setting up more lines and monitors, applying a pre-warmed soothing and moisturising ointment to his skin.

  They moved Max from the resuscitaire into a second incubator, weighed him in at 830 grams, took his temperature and began to set up and secure his lines. The Tammy nurse with the beautiful voice went looking for a bili light and Laird put in an order for blood for Adam, who weighed just 580 grams. Sam was called to the other end of the room to assess one of his patients whose oxygen saturation levels had fallen.

  ‘Just need to tell you, Tammy, I’m going home, taking a break,’ announced a mother some minutes later, coming over to her after she’d returned with the phototherapy equipment. The woman spoke too loudly and seemed not to notice tiny Max in his humidicrib or that Tammy was now busy making notes in the baby’s brand-new chart. Again, Laird had lost track of time, except as it related to observing Max.

  Tammy looked up from her notes. ‘That’s sensible, Mrs Shergold.’ She took the woman’s arm and led her gently away from Max. She spoke quietly. ‘You were only discharged this morning, weren’t you?’

  ‘I know. I wanted to stay another couple of days, but no go. It’s just wrong, isn’t it? It’s the insurance companies, and the government. Do they have any idea?’ She still spoke too loudly, hadn’t picked up on the soft cue given by Tammy’s lowered voice.

  Laird caught an angry glance in the woman’s direction from an exhausted-looking blonde mother in a nightgown and slippers, who was bending over her own baby’s humidicrib.

  One of her own babies’ humidicribs, he corrected mentally as he took in who she was. She’d had IVF triplets. Twenty-nine-weekers. Another Caesarean delivery. Five days old. All three babies were very, very fragile and ill. The mother moved gingerly, her incision still fresh and sore, making way for a nurse who was due to give another session of clustered observations and medication.

  ‘How’s your baby doing?’ Tammy asked the loud woman, still pitching her voice low.

  Again the woman ignored the cue regarding her own volume. ‘Oh, she’s great, she’s so beautiful! It’s so hard to see her like this!’ She burst into noisy tears. ‘But she’s coming off the ventilator tomorrow!’

  Tammy led her farther away towards the corridor. The mother of triplets checked her babies’ oxygen saturation levels on the monitor. ‘Look, they’ve dropped,’ she said, low and angry, to the babies’ nurse. Clearly she blamed the disruptive and self-absorbed presence of the other mother, and quite possibly she was right.

  When Tammy came back, she patted the triplet mum— Alison Vitelli—on the shoulder and asked, ‘How’s Riley?’

  ‘Oh…the same, Dr Lutze says.’ She didn’t look as if she’d brushed her hair that day, and even her skin looked tired. ‘Tammy, can you, please, please, keep that horrible woman away from here?’

  ‘Well, she has a sick baby of her own.’

  ‘A thirty-two-weeker!’ Mrs Vitelli said angrily. ‘She keeps crowing about Rachelle’s progress, and how she’ll be graduating out of here in a day or two to the special care unit, as if we all care. As if any of us care! We would care, if she was nicer. But hasn’t she noticed how ill the rest of our babies are? I hope Rachelle does get better fast, because if her horrible mother is around here much longer…’ She trailed off into silent, desperate sobs, and Tammy hugged her and soothed her, stroking her back below the unbrushed tangle of blonde hair.

  ‘I know, I know,’ she murmured. ‘Try to tune her out, if you can. She’s not important. People can be insensitive sometimes.’

  ‘Just her,’ Mrs Vitelli sobbed. ‘I hate her! I really hate her! She’s appalling. And I’m going home tomorrow, and I don’t want to leave my babies…’

  Tammy looked over Mrs Vitelli’s shoulder and caught Laird’s eye. She was still patting the woman’s back and making low, soothing sounds of agreement, caring—he thought—more than she really should. He read the questions in her face. Is this OK? Do you need me? How is Max?

  He made a gesture that said, Stay with her till she’s feeling better, and Tammy nodded. ‘How about you go back to your room and get some sleep now, before morning, Alison?’ she said gently. ‘Your babies don’t need you to get this tired…’

  It took Tammy several minutes to soothe Mrs Vitelli’s sobs away and persuade her that sleep was the sensible thing, then she came back to Max and noted the next set of figures in his chart. ‘Oxygen saturation is up,’ she said.

  ‘Hovering at 93 per cent,’ Laird answered. ‘CO2 is within range. I changed the settings a little, as you can see. So far he’s handling the sedation. And he peed.’

  ‘Wonderful! Adam hasn’t…?’

  ‘No, not yet.’

  ‘Let’s hope.’ She cast a practised eye over the monitors, checking the relationship between the various settings. Any time she came near the babies, something changed in the way she moved. She became even gentler, even calmer—but it was more than that. Laird couldn’t put his finger on it.

  ‘You must have managed a fair bit of practice with some of this stuff over at Royal Victoria,’ he said, curious to know just how lucky he might come to consider himself, professionally, that she belonged to Yarra Hospital now instead.

  Beneath the blue halo of her cap, she grinned. ‘They even let us loose on real babies sometimes.’

  Laird still hadn’t seen her hair. He had a horrible feeling he might not recognise her if he saw her in another part of the hospital, garbed in street clothes. Her colouring and features were average—Scottish skin, those amazing blue eyes, pretty-ish, from what he could tell, in a nursy kind of way. In his experience, women didn’t go into nursing if they looked like they could be models—which was probably to the benefit of both professions.

  Keeping his voice low, he asked, ‘Why did you make the move?’ He waited almost smugly for some line about the fantastic reputation of the NICU at Yarra. He’d felt fortunate to win a position here himself, and intended to bring the profile of the place even higher as he worked his way into a more senior role.

  ‘It cuts seventeen minutes off my commute,’ she answered at once, without smiling.

  He smiled in response, though, and conceded, ‘Question too personal for this time of night? OK. That’s fine.’

  ‘No, I’m serious.’

  ‘You changed hospitals to cut seventeen minutes off your commute?’

  ‘Seventeen minutes each way, four or five days a week, that’s more than two hours. You can get a lot done in two hours.’

  ‘I suppose you can. A couple of routine Caesareans, a good session at the gym, a DVD with a glass of wine.’

  ‘The vacuuming,’ she retorted. ‘Two casseroles ready to freeze. Three parent-teacher conferences and a stock-up at the supermarket. Nuclear disarmament, that could be doable in two hours, I reckon, if I really pushed. At least, it sounds easier to my ears than getting the garden in shape. And then there’s…sleep.’ She uttered the word with longing.

  He laughed. ‘Those things, too.’ He belatedly registered the fact that she seemed to have three children and realised he was in the presence of a genuine dynamo—one of those women who’d explored the wild island of parenthood and survived intact.

  Then one of Max’s monitor alarms went off, they both took it as a signal to get back to work, and he didn’t think anything more about her for the rest of the night.

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nbsp; ‘Mum-mmee-ee!’ All three triplets cannoned into Tammy within three seconds of her arrival in the kitchen via the back door. Having braced herself for the onslaught, she withstood it, bent down, hugged three four-year-old bodies—two sturdy, one still a little smaller than his sisters, as he probably would be until puberty.

  ‘Leave Mummy alone, guys,’ said Tammy’s mother, who wasn’t yet dressed, just wrapped in a towelling robe over a floaty nightgown and boat-like slippers. What time had the kids woken her up? The crack of dawn, as usual?

  ‘It’s fine,’ Tammy told her. ‘I have seventeen extra minutes now, remember? Nineteen, if I get a really good run and hit all the green lights.’ She’d resisted leaving Royal Victoria for a long time, reluctant to lose the familiarity and the friendships, but the shorter commute had won out in the end.

  ‘Well, spend eight of them with the kids and the other nine on extra sleep,’ her mother drawled, as if she shared Dr Laird Burchell’s opinion of the value of seventeen minutes. She should know better! ‘You’re back there at three, aren’t you?’

  ‘And an eight-till-eight on Saturday. But then I’m off until Tuesday night.’ Tammy had been very firm with the hospital about not working daytime shifts on weekends.

  Mum could come in from her garden flat at the back of the house and handle the kids when they were at school and pre-school during the day, or when they were asleep at night, but it wasn’t fair to ask her to babysit regularly on weekends in daylight hours when they were all home or shuttling around to soccer and swimming.

  Not when there were five of them.

  Not when the army had transferred Tom to Darwin two years ago, giving him the excuse he’d been looking for, for the past five years, to cut himself off from their lives. He hadn’t seen the kids since the Christmas before last.

  The money he sent as part of their divorce settlement was just regular enough and just generous enough to keep Tammy from taking him to court, but was nowhere near enough to cover what five children and a hefty mortgage really cost. With a generous gift from Mum, she’d managed to buy out his share of the house, but had nothing in savings now. They lived from pay cheque to pay cheque.

  So, yes, physically, Tom had been gone from their day-to-day lives for two years. Emotionally, he had been absent since the day he and Tammy had found out that her planned third pregnancy was going to deliver three babies instead of one, following the births of Sarah and Lachlan who had then been aged four and two.

  She and Tom had been formally divorced for three years.

  Sometimes she still found it hard to understand how he could have done it, how his panic at the prospect of triplets could have brought such an ugly, self-absorbed side of him to the surface. How much had he simply been looking for a good excuse to bail out? How long would their marriage have survived even without the triplets?

  Don’t go there, Tammy, she told herself. Not when you’re this tired.

  She’d been angry and deeply wounded by his betrayal for a long time. Mostly, she was over it now. Sometimes, though, on a bad day—on the way home from work at close to midnight or when the money was stretched so tight she expected something to snap—yes, she took a backward step and got angry again. It was like what parents said about the NICU. A roller-coaster ride. Three steps forward, two steps back.

  ‘How was work, anyway? An easy night, I hope,’ Mum asked.

  ‘I wouldn’t recognise an easy night in the NICU if it jumped up and bit me. But we managed to get two fragile little twins through their first six hours. I’ll have my fingers crossed for them all day.’

  ‘You won’t,’ Mum retorted. ‘Because you’ll be asleep.’

  ‘True.’ She yawned, aching for her bed the way some women ached for a lover.

  Her mother decreed, ‘Someone else can cross their fingers.’

  ‘Sounds good.’ She thought about Dr Burchell again. He might cross his. He seemed to care. Well, neonatology wasn’t a field you went into if you didn’t.

  She had a sudden flashback to the time he and she had spent getting Max stable in the delivery room, bending their heads over the little boy, reaching past each other. He’d looked at the baby with a kind of intensity that had almost generated heat, and there hadn’t been a moment where she could have doubted his skill or his attitude.

  ‘Going to eat something before you sleep?’ Mum asked.

  ‘Nah. Not hungry.’

  ‘You’ll fade away to a shadow.’

  ‘Yeah, right!’ She patted her backside, principal storage facility for the extra kilos she’d packed on over the past few years. They were her best friends, those kilos. They wouldn’t let her down. They would be there for her through life’s ups and downs, solid and real, keeping her very, very safe. After all, what man would even think of getting close to a woman with five kids, no money and this much padding on her frame?

  I am not on the market, the extra kilos said on her behalf, which meant she could focus on what really counted.

  Making ends meet.

  Being a good mother.

  Getting enough sleep.

  ‘I’ll just make their lunches, then head upstairs.’ She yawned, wondering what was still in stock on a Friday, the day before shopping day. Any biscuits left? Any fruit? Her stomach rebelled. She was way too tired to think about food.

  ‘I’ve already done their lunches.’

  That brought her close to tears. ‘Oh, lord, Mum, what would I do without you?’ They hugged each other, and Tammy could almost feel through Mum’s body heat all the things she wasn’t letting herself say about Tom.

  Ten minutes later, with the alarm set for two-twenty that afternoon when a couple of weeks ago she’d had to set it for two o’clock, she sank into sleep.

  CHAPTER TWO

  LAIRD WAS late getting to Tarsha’s elegant townhouse in Kew to pick her up for their Friday night date.

  Little Adam Parry had given them a scare this evening. Alarms going off. The wrong numbers rising or dropping on his monitors. Laird had had to spend an extra twenty minutes at the hospital on his way to his evening out, adjusting medication doses and ventilator settings, and answering several anguished questions from the parents.

  Chris and Fran Parry had wanted the kind of certainty that he couldn’t truthfully give them, and yet it would be disastrous if they sank into hopelessness. There were some parents who detached themselves from their baby emotionally if they thought it wasn’t going to live, in a desperate kind of defence mechanism that they didn’t consciously choose. But premature babies needed their parents. The sound of a mother’s soothing voice could raise their oxygen saturation when it dropped in the presence of medical staff. Even when they were so tiny, they seemed to know when they were loved, and to respond.

  He’d found himself looking for the Tammy nurse several times during his visit to the unit, as if she might have been able to bail him out with the Parrys, phrase things better than he could himself, help the couple find the right balance between love and hope and realism. Someone had mentioned her name, but apparently she was on her break and he’d left again before she returned.

  Tarsha greeted him at her townhouse door in a cloud of expensive perfume, her model’s figure immaculately clad and her flawless face beautifully made up as always, to make the most of her dark hair and brown eyes, but when he leaned forward to kiss her—cheek or mouth, he hadn’t made up his mind—she pulled back and he saw that she was tense.

  ‘What’s up?’ he asked her.

  ‘Nothing…’

  ‘Come on, Tarsh.’

  ‘We’ll talk about it at the restaurant.’

  ‘We’ll talk about it now.’

  ‘Must we?’

  ‘Yes. Have some pity for a weary man with fraying patience and don’t play games.’

  ‘All right…all right.’ She sighed, and tucked in the corners of her mouth. ‘You win.’

  They’d known each other for a long time as their parents moved in the same well-heeled social circles and
were friends. They had first gone out together more than twelve years ago while Laird had been a medical student, but then Tarsha had chosen the lure of modelling in Europe and they’d called it quits, with no hard feelings on either side. There’d always been something missing at heart.

  ‘What is it, Laird?’ Tarsha had said once, back then. ‘It’s like a hundred-dollar bill that you know is a forgery. It looks right, but something still tells you it’s not.’

  Maybe they just hadn’t been ready at that point. Too young. Too ambitious. Not enough time for each other.

  A few months ago, after a successful modelling career, followed by several years spent working in the field of public relations in Paris, Tarsha had come home without the intended notch of a fabulous marriage on her belt. She was now in the process of starting her own modelling agency in Melbourne, which involved a lot of networking and schmoozing, as well as getting the right faces and bodies in her stable.

  Laird had the vague idea that something had turned sour for Tarsha in Europe—that she was running away from a professional or personal disaster—but so far she hadn’t shared the details with him.

  Some conniving between their two mothers several weeks ago had led to a choreographed cocktail party encounter —‘You remember Laird, don’t you, darling?’—and Laird had understood at once that he was supposed to pick up again with Tarsha…no, not quite where they’d left off. People changed in twelve years.

  Close, though.

  The prospect had appealed on some levels. There was something out there that he hadn’t found yet—a core of happiness and stability that he saw in the best couples and that he wanted in his own life. Maybe this time with Tarsha, the timing would be right. It was hard to question a relationship that was so perfect on paper, especially when it had been so neatly deposited in his lap, gift-wrapped.

  Before Tarsha’s timely return to southern shores, and after a long and carefully selected series of suitable girlfriends, his mother had asked him in exasperation a couple of times, ‘What are you looking for in a woman, Laird, that you haven’t managed to find yet?’