The Surgeon's Baby Bombshell

by Deanne Anders

  Besides her left arm he couldn’t see any other injuries, but he was concerned with the possibility of a crushing injury, and he didn’t understand why she had lost consciousness. He didn’t want to move her neck until the ambulance arrived with a collar, but he wanted to see if there was an injury to her head.

  He looked down at her lower abdomen. The box had come to rest on the left side and he was concerned about the baby.

  He assisted the ambulance crew when they arrived, carefully rolling her after they’d applied a collar to her neck, and examined the back of her head. He found a large bump.

  He would have to tell the doctors at the hospital about her pregnancy before they ordered any scans that might be dangerous to the baby. It wasn’t the way they had wanted the information to get out, but it was necessary.

  He called the hospital and notified the ER doctors that they were en route, describing the injuries he was aware of and explaining about the pregnancy. He also requested that someone at the hospital notify Frannie’s father of the accident.

  He heard a moan come from the stretcher as they unloaded her from the ambulance and rushed to her side.

  “Frannie, can you hear me?” he asked.

  As they placed the backboard onto the trauma table she moaned again, and he saw her eyes flutter open, then shut, and then open again. He watched as Frannie looked around the room. The confusion on her face was replaced with panic. She tried to sit up but he eased her back down, while other staff members began hooking her up to the monitors so they could check her vital signs.

  “It’s okay,” he said as he took her good hand. “You were hit by a heavy box, but you’re going to be fine.”

  He watched as she relaxed back onto the table and then tried to rise again as the X-ray technician positioned her arm.

  “It’s okay—the nurse has gone to get you some pain meds,” he said.

  “No, they’re not good for the baby,” she said. She gripped his hand and tried to pull herself up. “And the X-rays—they’ll be bad too.”

  “We’re not going to do anything that could harm the baby, Frannie,” the ER doctor said to her. “I don’t think we need to shoot anything right now. I’m going to get an ultrasound to make sure I don’t see any internal injuries, and we’ll hold off on doing any CT scans for now except for on your head.”

  She turned to Ian. “Don’t let them do anything that can hurt the baby. Promise me, Ian.”

  Ian watched as Frannie’s friend Lacey placed an intravenous needle in Frannie’s arm and drew a syringe of blood without Frannie even noticing.

  “I promise you,” he said. “But you lost consciousness, so they need to check your head out, Frannie. You know that.”

  He wanted to tell her that she would probably need to go to the OR, so an orthopedic doctor could fix her arm, but he knew he shouldn’t overwhelm her with information.

  The ER doctor rolled a small ultrasound machine up to the bed, then started rolling the probe over her abdomen.

  “Most of the weight of the box seems to have been on her arm,” he told the doctor, “but I was concerned about her left side.”

  He tried to see the screen as the doctor studied it.

  “I don’t see any signs of bleeding and the spleen looks good. Hold on...” The doctor moved the probe lower down her abdomen. “Does it hurt where I’m pushing?”

  “No,” Frannie said. “Is the baby okay?”

  Ian held his breath and squeezed Frannie’s hand. She would be devastated if something had happened to their baby.

  And him? How would he feel?

  He’d made all the right comments concerning the pregnancy, but still a part of him feared getting excited about it, feared putting his heart out there again. He had fought against what he felt for both Frannie and the baby. He’d been a coward, afraid he’d lose everything again, and instead of welcoming Frannie and the baby into his heart he had tried to protect himself by pushing them away.

  The ER doctor turned the volume up on the ultrasound machine and he heard their baby’s heartbeat for the first time.

  “That’s the baby?” Frannie asked. “That’s our baby, Ian.”

  He listened to the fast heartbeat. Their baby. Their son or daughter.

  Lacey came to explain to Frannie that they needed to take her over to the CT machine, and once again began reassuring her that the baby would be okay as they were just going to scan her head.

  Ian started to follow her, but found his feet unable to move as the adrenaline that had fueled him up to now suddenly dried up.

  He reached for the closest stool in the room and sat down on it.

  * * *

  Frannie woke up in a small, quiet hospital room as the sun was just starting to rise. She remembered pieces of the night before.

  The ER doctor telling her the baby was okay. Lacey pushing her to the CT scanner. Then later one of the hospital’s orthopedic doctors, coming in to explain that he needed to take her to the OR to fix both her ulna and radius bones by putting in screws.

  After that things became a little fuzzy, though she remembered waking once to find Ian beside her bed, and another time finding her father there.

  The door of her room opened now and her father stepped into the room.

  “Hi, Daddy,” she said. Her voice was coming out as a croak, which she knew came from the intubation tube they must have placed while she was in surgery.

  Her father reached over and took the glass of water that sat on a side table and offered it to her. “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  “I feel like someone hit me with a metal box,” she said, then groaned as she moved her left arm. “But I’ll be okay.”

  “I’ll get the nurse to get you something for the pain,” he said, and he turned toward the door, then turned back toward her.

  “I love you, Junior. Now, you behave for the nurses.”

  Her father hadn’t called her Junior in years, and the sound of her old childhood nickname brought tears to her eyes.

  “I’m sorry I disappointed you, Daddy,” she said.

  She didn’t know if it was the medication or the hormones that were making her so weepy.

  “You didn’t disappoint me,” her father said.

  “Are you trying to tell me you weren’t disappointed when I didn’t become a surgeon?”

  “No, I admit that I was disappointed, and I believe if things had been different that you would have made a great surgeon.”

  “But I never wanted to be a surgeon—even before I passed out in the operating room.” she said.

  “At eight you wanted to be a ballerina,” he said. “At nine you wanted to drive streetcars around the city. At ten you decided that you wanted to be a journalist and travel the world.”

  “And then I grew up and decided to become a psychiatrist,” she said.

  “And instead of supporting you I tried to get you to change your mind. My only excuse is that I’m a stubborn old man. I’m sorry.”

  She looked over at the “stubborn old man” who previously would never have apologized for trying to run her life.

  “Why the change of heart?” she asked.

  She had her suspicions, but she wanted to know if she was right.

  “I had a young doctor explain to me how lucky I was to have such a caring daughter. I think the words he used told me I was a fool, and that unless I wanted to lose you I’d better apologize and start supporting your decisions,” her father said. “He made me see I was close to losing you, Junior, and I don’t want to do that.”

  He stepped over to the bed and kissed her forehead, then walked from the room.

  Frannie wiped the tears from her eyes and then drifted back to sleep.

  * * *

  Ian shut the door to his office and locked it. He’d tried to catch a couple hours’ sleep in the doctors’ r
oom after Frannie had come out of surgery, but he’d been unable to.

  He knew he could have lost both Frannie and their baby if that box had landed a few inches differently. And he knew he’d been as big a fool as her father in not telling her that he was in love with her.

  He’d judged all relationships by what he had experienced with Lydia instead of seeing what he could have with Frannie. He had to move on with his life, and the first thing he had to do was face up to the letter he had received from Lydia and whatever she had to say to him. If it was more accusations, name-calling or threats, he’d burn the letter and move on—because if he wanted more in his life, more of Frannie in his life, he had to.

  He sat at his desk and pulled out the letter that had been there for weeks now. The edges were wrinkled from all the times he had shoved it back amongst all the other odds and ends he kept in his desk drawer, but the name of his ex-wife, now with a different surname, still stared up at him from the back of the plain white envelope.

  He’d heard from his brother that Lydia had remarried. His brother had thought to lessen the blow by telling him in person, but the fact that Ian had felt nothing at the news hadn’t surprised him at all. Anything he had felt for his high school sweetheart had died the day she’d struck him. She had severed his last ties to her that night. Seeing the hate in her eyes as she’d swung at him had been more than his love for her could handle.

  With a deep sigh he opened the envelope and pulled the one-page handwritten letter out.

  He was startled by the first words, and then he felt his whole world shift around him as he read his ex-wife apologizing and going on to tell him that in truth it was she who should have taken the blame for their son’s death, but she had denied it for years—until she had taken grief classes and returned to counseling and discovered that her blaming him had been a reflex reaction to protect herself.

  She related her actions the night that Brian had died, telling him how tired she’d been after her shift at work. She’d fed and changed Brian, but he had been fussy. She had put his fussiness down to the fact that Ian hadn’t been there to put him to bed and had put him in his crib. Brian had become fussier, but instead of checking on him she’d gone to sleep, expecting that Ian would come in soon and soothe Brian to sleep as he usually did.

  Ian read the rest of the letter, in which she told him she had remarried and that she and her husband wanted to start a family. She said she knew that she wouldn’t be able to move on with the rest of her life with the guilt of Brian’s death still hanging over her.

  She ended the letter by asking his forgiveness for the way she’d acted toward him and the problems she’d caused for him at the hospital.

  He wasn’t sure how long he sat at his desk before pulling a pad of paper out of his drawer and beginning to write.

  If Lydia needed his forgiveness to move on in her life he was only too happy to give it to her, but she needed to know that he didn’t blame her for their son’s death.

  SIDS was a terrible way to lose a child, because there weren’t always answers to why it had happened. He’d done extensive research after Brian had died, and he knew that their son hadn’t died because of anything the two of them had or hadn’t done.

  When he’d finished, he slipped the letter into an envelope, and then into his jacket pocket, and headed for Frannie’s room.

  * * *

  Frannie was pushing some food around her plate when Ian came into her room. She’d been disappointed when she’d woken up and he hadn’t been there, but she had known he had other things to do at the hospital besides sit at her bedside.

  He looked as tired and wrinkled as the faded surgical scrubs he’d changed into, and he had a day’s growth of beard on his face which made him look sexier than usual. She considered what she looked like herself, with her hair uncombed and wearing the generic hospital gown.

  “I saw Dr. Williams out at the nurses’ station. He says you’ll be able to go home in the morning,” he said.

  “I tried to tell him I was ready to go home today, but he wouldn’t listen. It’s not like I had major surgery,” she said. “It’s just a broken arm.”

  She knew she was being childish, complaining about the doctor’s orders for her to spend another night in the hospital, but she didn’t like lying in bed while people waited on her. The staff had patients who needed their care much more than she did.

  “He just wants to watch you one more night,” Ian said. “And if he says in the morning that you can go home I’ll drive you home myself.”

  “What about Sarah and my other patients? I need to make my rounds today and see them. Ashley is supposed to leave today, to go to rehab. I promised Danny I’d see her before she left. And then there’s my group session tonight. It will be Carrie’s first meeting.”

  “I’ll tell you what: if you promise to rest today, I’ll see if I can get permission to take you over to your office this evening.”

  “That’s blackmail, you know,” she said.

  “Take it or leave it. And you need to eat those eggs too,” he said.

  “I’ll get you back for this,” she said.

  He walked over to the bed and leaned down to kiss her.

  “You take care of yourself and our baby today and I’ll be back this afternoon,” he said.

  When he’d gone she opened up the overnight bag Lacey had packed for her and found a comb. She began working it through her hair.

  She’d rest today, but tomorrow she was going home—and neither Ian nor the doctor was going to be able to stop her.

  * * *

  The next day Frannie stood outside Ian’s house. He’d managed to blackmail her again, threatening to call her father if she didn’t agree to stay at his place that night. They’d stopped by her condo to get some more clothes and toiletries, and then made a quick stop at a restaurant to pick up the food Ian had ordered.

  Ian opened the door for her and stood back for her to enter. Gone were the paint buckets and the piled-up boards that had been in the living room before. She saw floors with dark wood grain shining, and walls which had been painted a soft cream. The boards on the stairs, now free of all clutter, had been stained and polished to match the floors of the entryway.

  She walked further into the living room and saw that the old chair he’d kept there had been replaced by a large black velveteen couch, and a small bistro table and two chairs had been moved into the small dining room in the front of the house.

  “It’s beautiful—I can’t believe you finished it,” she said, and then turned around to take in the interesting artwork he’d hung on the walls.

  She walked over to the mantel over the fireplace and picked up the lone framed picture of Brian that sat there.

  “He’s beautiful,” she said as she studied the child who had been taken away far too early.

  Would their little boy or girl look like their brother? Would that be a problem for Ian? Seeing another child growing up and reminding him of what Brian might have looked like if he had only lived?

  “It’s the last picture we had of him,” Ian said. “I want our children to grow up knowing about Brian.”

  “Our children?” she asked. “As far as I know I’m only carrying one baby. I think my doctor would have told me if there was more than one.”

  “You wouldn’t want Penelope to be an only child, would you?”

  “We are not going to name this child Penelope. I was thinking of Emma or Elizabeth if it’s a girl.”

  “And for a boy?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I had thought I’d let you name the baby if it’s a boy, but I think I’ve changed my mind.”

  She carefully put the picture of Brian back on the mantel, then turned toward him.

  “Why the change, Ian? What’s happened?” she asked.

  She was so afraid that she was reading into his words, into the lo
ok he was giving her now. Seeing something that didn’t really exist, something that he couldn’t give her because of all the pain he had gone through when he’d lost his son. But he seemed different now...more settled.

  “I was wrong, Frannie. I had this idea that I had to be able to put my old life and the memories of my son behind me to be able to move on, but that’s not true. I’ll never get over the loss of Brian, but I can live with the memories—the good memories I have of him. I want to share those memories with you and make new ones with you and our baby.”

  He took her good arm and walked her over to the table, then pulled out a chair for her to sit.

  Then he went down on his knees beside her.

  “We’ve discussed this, Ian. I don’t want you to marry me just because we’re having a baby.” She wiped at the tears in her eyes, not wanting him to see her how vulnerable she was.

  “I’ve told you I’m not any good at relationships and I don’t always know how to say what I feel. I’m not very good with talking about my emotions either, but I do know one thing. I love you, Frannie Wentworth. And whether we were having a baby or not I would still feel the same and I would still want you to be my wife.”

  Frannie let go of her tears as he took her left hand in his, being careful not to hurt her arm. She watched as he pulled a small box out of his pocket, then opened it and took out a simple solitaire diamond ring. He placed it on her finger.

  “I think this is where you tell me you love me, and agree to marry me, and we live happily-ever-after,” he said.

  “I love you, Ian Spencer, and I would love to marry you,” she said through a shower of tears. “I think I’ve loved you since the first time you brought me to this house—the night that we made this one,” she said as she covered her abdomen with her free hand.

  Ian laid his hand over hers and she felt a flutter underneath. Somehow their baby could feel their love—just as Frannie now felt Ian’s love for her. No longer were Frannie or Ian alone. The two of them and their child had already built a family, and for the first time since she had lost her mother she felt her life was complete.