There was so much blood, the most I’ve ever seen. My heart plummeted. The baby.
“Derrick, she’s arrested, you need to step on it. She’s in cardiac arrest”
The ambulance picked up speed as the paramedic working on Scarlett began to do CPR. He looked up at me before he breathed for her.
Cardiac arrest. Scarlett was dying.
I squeezed her hand as hard as I could willing her to wake up, but she didn’t. Her hand went limp in mine. “Baby please.” I only just managed to say. My throat had dried up, this wasn’t happening.
It seemed like forever passed before we stopped at the hospital. Each moment like a hundred. The doors flung open and there were doctors waiting. The pulled Scarlett out on the stretch and began to wheel her inside. The paramedics were talking to them as they ran, I ran with them.
A junior doctor stopped me from entering the ICU. “Sir, she is in the best hands now.” She offered, leading me to the waiting room in the ER.
“She’s going to be okay right?” I croaked, my words were little more than a whisper, it couldn’t end this way, and it just couldn’t.
“They will do everything they can sir. I promise. If you wait here I will have answers for you as soon as possible.” I frowned at the vague answer. She couldn’t tell me it was going to be okay, so maybe it wasn’t.
The doctor left me standing there alone to go and help. I stood in the middle of the emergency room in my wedding suit on my wedding day without my bride. Why us?
Oxygen left my lungs, which caused me to feel light headed. A horrible and deafening voice shouted inside my head, No one lives through that much blood loss. No one!
Minutes passed but they felt like hours, I stood frozen on the spot, unable to take a seat or relax in anyway.
“Xavier.” Nick called from behind me. I couldn’t tell them.
My parents and her parents engulfed me. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t breathe I needed air. I needed to escape. I wanted to run. Like I had after the miscarriage. I couldn’t do this, I couldn’t lose her. I couldn’t lose our baby.
I broke out of the embrace and ran down a corridor. I punched the wall hard until I could feel the skin break and bleed, and then I shouted because it was all I could do.
It hurt, I could feel the blood running down my knuckles on to the ground, but what did my pain matter. What about her? I slid down to the ground and gave into the tears fighting to the surface. A hand rest down on my back, it gripped my suit jacket and yanked me up. I looked up, haphazardly, Nick was crying he pulled me in and hugged me. “Please tell me she’s alive.” He sobbed.
“I don’t know.” I replied. I couldn’t say the words, I couldn’t tell him about the blood, or the moment she had looked at me and smiled as her eyes went dull and closed. I couldn’t tell him.
“What happened?” He asked.
I had to tell him.
“She had some kind of bleed. Nick I’ve never seen so much.” I choked it out and closed my eyes to stem the flow of tears. “She stopped breathing.”
I heard Scarlett’s Mom Sarah cry out. She’d heard me. Shit. I pulled myself out of Nick’s hug and turned to face Sarah. “I’m so sorry.” I should have protected her. Sarah shook her head and yanked me into her arms. “”You have nothing to be sorry for.”
“Uh, Mr. Smith.” The junior doctor’s voice called out, I turned around. “Your baby has been born. You can come through.”
The baby.
I ran towards the doctor. She led me toward the ICU and handed me a set of scrubs as we walked. “You can change in there.” She said with a soft smile pointing toward a bathroom.
I nodded, but everything felt numb. I was a father, but it didn’t seem real. I didn’t even know if he was a he, if he was alive, if Scarlett was alive. I ran into the bathroom and put the scrubs on over my suit in auto pilot.
Once I was changed I followed the doctor through to a room with an incubator humidcrib and an empty bed. Scarlett wasn’t in here. She had to be okay.
“Where’s my wife.” I whispered, scared of all the possible answers.
“A senior doctor will be through as soon as they know anything.” She said, not willing to give anything away. “Come meet your son.”
Son. I have a son.
I walked closed to the crib, and then something amazing happened. The moment I saw him my heart filled with a different kind of love. One I hadn’t even known I was capable of. He was tiny, and fragile. He had an oxygen tube and wires connected all over, but he was alive. I sat down on a chair beside the crib and stared in wonder at the little boy who had my DNA in pure awe.
“He’s very healthy for his gestation Mr. Smith. The wires are for observation. Once he was out and we had cleared his airways he began breathing on his own. He’s very strong.”
I smiled down at him wishing I could hold him, and draw in his strength.
“You can put your hand through.”
“I won’t hurt him?”
“On the contrary, it’ll do him good.” She assured me
I nodded and nervously slid my hand through the hole in the side of the crib. His hand was tiny and smooth, but strong. The moment his hand touched my finger he wrapped his fingers around it and squeezed tight.
He was okay.
I pressed my other hand to the outside of the crib and cried. How was it possible to feel both complete anguish and complete joy in one moment?
The junior doctor left. Leaving my tiny son and I all alone in the hospital room. All alone to worry about Scarlett.
When a nurse came in to check on him I had her call the new grandparents in. Waiting to hear about Scarlett was pure torture, but he took some of that pain away. I couldn’t hold this moment to myself knowing they were out there living in torment.
They raced in and over to the crib like the proud grandparents the four of them were, even if his birth was tinged with such worry and concern. “He reminds me of you.” Mom gulped placing her hand on my shoulder. It was hard to believe I’d ever been this small. I went to move my hand so the others could touch him, but he clamped down and wouldn’t let go.
“He’s so strong.” Sarah noted. “What a little fighter.”
The door opened behind us, I turned around. It was a senior doctor and he held a patient file.
Please be okay.
He walked across the room and nodded. “You’re the family of Scarlett Smith?”
“Yes.” Replied Nick, his voice sounded how I my entire body felt. Nervous and sick.
“She suffered and Amniotic Fluid Embolism. The amniotic fluid made its way into her blood stream and caused her to hemorrhage when the placenta began to detach. When she was brought into the ER she wasn’t breathing. We ventilated her and transfused a lot of blood. Many women who get this far in an AFE do not survive. Scarlett skirted around the edge and came close, but she’s in a stable condition and we are positive she will make a complete recovery.”
She was okay.
I looked down at our son. “She gets her strength from you then” I managed to murmur before I took a deep breath and looked back up at the doctor.
“She’s in a room up in ICU and we’ll take baby through as well once Scarlett is settled. She’s sedated at the moment and we will bring her round once her body has had time to take on the transfusions. We should be able to move her and baby to maternity once we’ve checked on her heart and other organs.”
Nick walked to the doctor and shook his hand. “Thank you so much.”
“It’s my job sir.”
“And she’s my daughter. I guess that makes you my new best friend.” He replied, a smile crossed his face and he looked over at me. “It’ll get easier.”
“I sure hope so.”
Around fifteen minutes later two nurses took us and the humidcrib through to Scarlett’s room. I knew she was alive, I knew she was okay, but she was still connected to the intubation, she had more wires connected to her than our son. Her bridal makeup was gone and so were her rings. I took her hand and kissed the spot where her rings were meant to be. The shock of seeing her like that surprised me. I had to push passed it
“Baby, you scared me.” I whispered. “I thought I’d lost you. I thought…” The raw emotion shook me and I had to rest my head against her hand. “I thought I was going to have to live without you again, but this time without a chance of winning you back.”
“Oh honey she’s okay. She’ll be okay.” Mom said rubbing my back. She repeated the words I kept telling myself, but it was just to placate the nagging feeling she wouldn’t be. They hadn’t seen the blood, they hadn’t been there, and they hadn’t seen the life leave her eyes.
“I know Mom.” I replied nodding.
Mom was right though, I had to believe it, what other option did I have? They would wake her up and everything would be fine.
“Our son is so beautiful babe. He’s so small and so strong. He is just like you.”
“Although he has Xavier’s giant feet.” Marc noted.
“He must get that from you though Marc.” Nick joked. “You’re shorter than me with bigger feet.”
I smiled and looked up at my father and Scarlett’s father mocking each other.
“See, nothing has changed. Just rest up, and we’ll all be here when they wake you up.”
The next two days passed and they kept her sedated. Her heart was weak from the embolism and they wanted to give her time to heal before bringing her out.
I refused to go home, to the home we had bought together when we returned from the short tour. I couldn’t walk through the doors alone, without her, without our baby.
People came and went from the hospital room, but I sat and let them pass in a blur. Ignoring my surroundings and paying all my attention on my son and my wife.
“Xavier. The doctor said they’re going to bring her out tomorrow. Go home and sleep.” Sarah urged. “We’ll be here, we’ll call if you need to come back down.”
My eyes burned like fire, the tiredness was overwhelming. A sleep and a shower sounded great, but I didn’t want to go home. I shook my head.
I couldn’t leave her. Not anymore.
“I’ll take him back to ours.” Jace said leaning against the edge of the bed. He looked at me and smiled. “Come one man, I know it’s hard… but she’s going to be okay.”
I nodded. She was going to be okay everyone kept saying it, even though they weren’t sure, but it gave me enough hope to go have a shower and a sleep. I needed it.
Sarah bent down and hugged me. “Thank you for sitting with her.”
“Call me if anything happens.”
I said looking over at Nick who smiled. I stood up and followed Jace from the room. We were walking down the corridor when he put his hand on my shoulder. “I’m glad you were with her.”
“Me too.”
When we made it back to Scarlett’s parents place I went upstairs to Scarlett’s room. I guess I should have been prepared for the emotional breakdown, every small reminder of my wife was like another accelerant to my fear that she was not okay. The doctors had said she would be fine, but how were they to know. What if she didn’t wake up? What if she wasn’t Okay.
I fell to my knees in front of her bed, gripping the blankets between my fingers. I was sick of the drama that plagued us. I just wanted to hold her in my arms for the rest of our lives and raise our baby together. No more crazy psychopaths, no more running away from each other, no more medical emergencies.
“Xav, I found some clothes for you.” Jace said walking in to the room. I didn’t move, I couldn’t. “Oh man. Hey, she’s okay. She’s a fighter.”
Jace dropped down beside me. “She’s always been a fighter.” He said his voice soft.
“I know” I croaked turning around, until I sat on the floor beside Jace.
“If anyone can come through this unscathed it’s Scarlett.”
“She almost died.” Speaking the words aloud made me realize just how close it had been. The paramedic had been breathing for her. Tears rolled down my eyes like torrential rain.
“I would have cursed the world for being so cruel to us.” Jace whispered through a sob. “We’ve lost so much already.”
He’d lost Cris 6 months ago, how the fuck had he survived? Scarlett was still hanging on by a thread, and I felt like an empty shell. Losing Cris had been hard all round, but Cris was the love of Jace’s life. You don’t just wake up and bounce back from that.
“How do you do it?” I said slowly. “How do you go on living Jace?”
“I keep telling myself it’ll get better.” He replied softly. “One day it will, and until then I’ll just keep telling myself.”
“When I thought I’d lost her my world stopped, everything stopped. I wanted to stop too.”
I turned to look at Jace, his eyes widened and he nodded.
“I know what that’s like. But we have to keep on going, keep on living because we’ve got to, and because the ones we’ve lost would want us too. You’ve still got Scarlett… we’ve still got Scarlett and now you’ve got your son too. You have to live for them, and be positive for them, care for them and love them”
I put my hands behind my neck and rest my head back on the bed. I remembered the time Cris told me Jace was wise beyond his years. He hadn’t been lying.
“Part of all this mean you need to take care of yourself too. So shower, sleep and when you wake up we’ll grab some dinner on the way back to the hospital okay?”
“Yeah.” I replied. “Thanks Jace.”
“No problem.” He nudged me with his shoulder and stood up.
My eyes closed because of the profound tiredness, and I stayed on the floor for another minute. I woke with a jolt as I began to slide down. I forced myself to stand up, I walked over to Scarlett’s drawers and let my fingers trace over the picture of us at 8.
I couldn’t imagine my life without her in it, but I didn’t need to worry about that now. She was going to be okay.
I showered and then fell in to Scarlett’s bed.
When I woke it was dark out and for a moment I forgot what had happened. I spread my arms out in the bed to pull Scarlett’s warmth toward me. She wasn’t there though and all too soon I remembered.
Jace was on the phone in the kitchen when I walked downstairs. I opened the fridge and took out a juice. A quick glance at the clock showed me it was 9pm.
“Yeah Mom, he actually just came down. He looks much better, less mummified zombie, more rock star.” Jace smiled and nodded. “Yeah okay, dad wants the heart attack on a bun. I get it.”
Jace grinned and wrote something down. “Okay Mom. Yeah we’ll be there in about an hour.”
He put his phone down and picked the piece of paper up. “Good timing, Dad’s got the munchies. The hospital café only had fruit salad and he says he needs a burger.”
“I’m pretty hungry too.” I admitted. “Should we go?”
“Yeah, sounds good, we’re going to pick Toni up on the way okay?”
“Yeah.”
By the time we got back to the hospital it was just after 10pm. Scarlett still lay in the same place, with all the same tubes connected. I looked at our son who mirrored his mom tube wise and frowned. My appetite faded before I could even sit down.
“Bro.” Jace called out. “Remember what I said okay. You need to eat… They’re okay.”
“He’s right… besides, if you don’t eat it… me and dad will fight over who gets it and well neither of us need it.” Toni joked as she sipped on her strawberry shake.
I ate the burger, after the third bite my appetite returned full force. I hadn’t eaten in days and my body was sucking in the sustenance. The energy boosted my spirits and I smiled for the first time since I’d been about to marry my soon to be wife.
Everyone left around 11pm. The doctors were planning to bring her round at 9am, they’d be back in the morning.
I fell asleep in the chair between my wife and son. He held my finger with his vice grip and I held hers with mine. When I woke I had a blanket over me and the sun shine through the window. I looked at Scarlett and sighed. “Please be okay Babe. Wake up and live. We’ve got a beautiful son who needs his Mommy. Please be okay.”
I kissed her hand.
Nick, Sarah, Jace and Toni arrive just before 9am. The atmosphere in the room was tense. Far more so than the almost jovial behavior last night. The doctor arrived and set down his notes. “All tests have come back with great results, her heart was weak, but we expected that. She’s been un-medicated blood pressure wise since yesterday and it’s healthy and normal. We’re going to remove the intubation and slowly bring her out of sedation.”
I looked at the doctor. “She’ll breathe on her own.”
“Yes Xavier. She will.”
I nodded and closed my eyes. I couldn’t watch them remove the tube from her mouth, but the sound of her soft breath began to fill my ears. My eyes flew open and I looked at her. She was still asleep, peaceful, but asleep.
“Talk to her, it often helps with this stage of the process.” The doctor suggested. “It might take a while and as I mention yesterday their might be some memory loss, but this should only be temporary, if it even occurs at all.”
“Babe. You can wake up now, you can come back to us okay.” I whispered, squeezing her hand, waiting for her to squeeze back. But she didn’t. The doctor left us too it and advised us to call when she started showing signs of waking.
One hour passed, two passed. Yet she still looked like she was just sleeping peacefully. I rest my head against the bed and squeezed hard. Wake up, please just wake up.
“You trying to break my hand Xavier Smith...” Her soft sweet voice croaked. She sounded like she smoked an entire pack of smokes, but it was the best thing that I had heard in three days.
“Babe.” Tears were streaming down my face as I leapt up. I looked at her, caressing her cheek with my fingertips. She smiled at me and lifted her hand to do the same.
“What happened?” She murmured looking around the room. Everyone surrounded the bed.
“You lived.” I said, my voice was shaking, I was holding it together by a shred as was everyone else in the room. Her hand left mine and frantically ran over her stomach. A look of panic washed over her. “Our baby? Xavier... Please... tell me.”
I wheeled the humidcrib closer, Scarlett turned her head and smiled at the tiny baby. “He’s ours?”
“Yes.”
A tear rolled down her cheek and I caught it with my thumb. “Babe, I’m going to go get the doctor.”
I leant forward and kissed her on the head, so thankful I could.
I left her family to welcome her back and found the doctor. I don’t think he anticipated my reaction. Hell, I didn’t.
“You’re amazing Doc.” I said. “She’s awake and she’s fine.” I shook his hand and pulled him in for a hug. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome Mr. Smith.” He smiled. “Although most of it was in her hands. She had to fight to survive, and she did. She had something to fight for, which says a lot about you as well. You’re going to make a fine little family.”
The doctor walked down the corridor and into Scarlett’s room. I smiled at his words and pulled my phone from my pocket. Little family was something we never had been, and never could be. One by one I called all the extended members of the patchwork family and gave them the good news and every time I got to say it over again a rush of happiness was through me.
She was okay and I didn’t have to say goodbye.
**Oh come on guys, like she or the baby were ever going to die. I'm mean, but I'm not evil :)
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Love yas