Micro Miracle by Amy Boyes

Author:Amy Boyes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Signature Editions
Published: 2019-02-28T15:57:52+00:00

Chapter 12

Pain wakes me. Low in my abdomen, a clenching increases until it reaches some invisible ceiling, then slithers away. I lie still and wait for nothing more to happen. But more pain comes and it’s terribly sad because, despite all the labour scares of the past week, I have a panicked suspicion this could be it. This pain feels like it knows what it’s doing.

Getting up no longer feels like a crime, so I flip back the bed sheets and shuffle to the shared bathroom, holding the door open longer than necessary to illuminate both sides of the room before letting it slam shut. I want my roommates to wake. I want them to suffer as I have suffered.

In the bathroom, my suspicions are confirmed: I am bleeding profusely. Fresh ketchup blood, amniotic fluid, old bronzed clumps—it’s all there, flowing out of me. My nightgown is stained. My legs are streaked. I know I shouldn’t be walking, but since it probably doesn’t matter anymore, I inch my way out of the bathroom, out of the hospital room, into the bright hall.

“Nurse?” I call hesitantly, blinking at the blurry nurses’ station.

My nurse hops up from behind the high counter. “Amy! What are you doing out of bed?”

“I’m badly bleeding and I’m in pain,” I say without much emotion. I’m too tired to express all the fear and frustration that I feel. I just hope she’ll do more about this complaint than she did my last one.

“To bed! Right now,” she orders, leading me back. To my distracted satisfaction, she makes a lot of noise as she turns on lights, hauls in machines, and fastens a contraction monitor around my midsection. As another pain begins, I cry out louder than is necessary and am rewarded with the sound of my roommates stirring.

The night nurse crouches in front of the contraction monitor, her eyes level with the screen. “Yeah…” she says, her voice trailing off as a line descends from a spiky Everest-shape. “That’s a contraction for sure. You’re going back to Labour and Delivery.”

“Is this labour?”

“I don’t know and we’re not chancing it. You need to be next to the NICU in case the baby comes.”

She scoops up my purse and laptop and piles them on my bed beside my legs—“Someone can come back for the rest of your stuff in the morning.” She unlocks the bed’s brakes, lines the bed up with door, and shoves. Just like that, I’m out of the miserable room, away from the strangers. I’m rushed down a windowless hallway, past half-empty food carts, past two automatic doors that swing open in front of us. I’m back in the depths of the hospital now, back in Labour and Delivery. It could well be the only ward where results are either celebrated or buried. There’s no in between.

• • •

There’s a moment somewhere around seven o’clock the next morning when I realize time is skipping along and, since time has not skipped along for the rest of my hospital stay, I assume I’m slightly out of my head.

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