Never Giving Up (Never #3)(48)
“One more push, Ella. The baby is right here!” She turned to the nurse beside her and said much quieter, “I’m not letting this baby get stuck.”
Ella took another deep breath and started all over again, pushing and groaning, working harder than I’d ever seen anyone work at anything. I watched her face as I counted, not sure I was even counting correctly. For all I knew, I could have been saying all kinds of random numbers for all it was worth. I just held her leg close to me and said words that I thought were helping and watched her do the most miraculous thing anyone had ever done.
Suddenly she collapsed back onto the bed and a whole new flurry of activity happened. People moved all over the room. I watched as Ella’s eyes slowly opened and then grew wide. I dropped her leg and saw a beautiful and spectacular look of love spread over her face. Her hands reached forward and grabbed something as tears started spilling from her eyes.
“Oh my God,” she said through her tears. “She’s beautiful.”
She’s beautiful.
She.
A girl.
My eyes moved from Ella’s face to her hands and something new and wonderful clicked inside of me. Ella held my baby. Our baby. She was small and pink and loud. She cried as if she was trying to tell us all how much the last few hours had been so horrible. I couldn’t move for watching her. Watching them. Ella. And my daughter.
My daughter.
Our daughter.
Ella looked up at me, the happiest tears I’d ever seen from anyone coming from her beautiful eyes, and softly she said to me, “Thank you.” Stunned, not having moved much or been able to say anything yet, I crashed my lips against her mouth, trying to convey every emotion I was feeling at that moment through our kiss—an impossible task. I broke away and although the kiss was short and chaste, it was the first time I’d kissed Ella as a mother and it was beautiful. She was beautiful.
“Porter,” I heard a fuzzy voice in the back of my head. “Porter, would you like to cut the cord?” I looked up to see Dr. Bronson smiling at me. After a moment to piece together what she’d said, I nodded and took the scissors she held out to me. She showed me where to snip and I did, eliminating the last physical tie the baby had to Ella. She was really, truly, here. I handed the scissors back to the doctor, still looking at the cord I’d just cut.
My gaze swept back down to my daughter as Ella positioned her against her chest, moving her hospital gown out of the way so that the baby lay against her, skin to skin. Ella’s left hand rested on the baby’s back while her right hand glided softly over the baby’s head. She closed her eyes and her head fell back to rest against the hospital bed, completely exhausted but with a look of pure, exalted joy across her face.
I watched my wife hold our daughter and felt as if I was floating above everything. This had to be a dream. Love like this didn’t exist in real life. You can’t meet a person, a baby, and love them this deeply, irrevocably, in an instant. If all parents loved like this, if every single person who had a child felt this way, how did life go on? How could there be anything after this?
We stayed like that for a few moments, then the buzz of what was happening around us brought us back to reality.
“We’re going to have to weigh and measure her now,” a nurse said with an apologetic smile towards Ella, obviously knowing giving up her baby in that moment would be painful.
“You’re not taking her away, are you?” She asked, a little panicked.
“No. I’m just going to take her over there,” she pointed to the cradle on wheels I’d noticed earlier. “She won’t leave the room, I promise. We just want to check her out. It’ll be five minutes, tops.”
Ella kissed our baby on the head and then pulled back quickly, a look of terror on her face.
“What is this?” Ella cried, looking at the baby’s head, her fingers feathering over it. I looked down and saw what had Ella worried and my heart began to pump rapidly.
On top of the baby’s head was a bump—a big bump—and what looked like a scrape. And there was blood. The nurse reached for the baby, taking her from Ella gently, bringing her over to where the rest of the medical staff stood ready to examine her. Dr. Bronson was still at the edge of Ella’s bed doing Lord knows what.
“Ella, Porter, it looks like the baby has what is called a subdural hematoma. There seems to have been some head trauma during the birth. They are fairly common and not necessarily dangerous.”
“What do you mean ‘not necessarily’?” I asked, angry at the game of verbal dodgeball we seemed to be playing. I wanted to know what was wrong with our baby, and I didn’t want it sugar coated or danced around.
“Well, what I mean is, it might not be a cause for concern. We’ll have to watch her. It literally is just a collection of blood underneath the surface of the skin. It will eventually just dissipate and be absorbed back into her body. The main concern is with jaundice. So, over the next couple days we’ll just need to watch her bilirubin levels.”
“Her what?” Ella said, sounding scared.
“Bilirubin. It’s just a fancy word for how clean the blood is. Too much bilirubin is bad, and when the blood dissipates from the hematoma it can cause a traffic jam, of sorts, for the liver, causing the baby’s skin to turn a yellow color.” The doctor said all of this while focusing between Ella’s legs. I found myself wondering what she could possibly be looking at with such concentration.