This is a fictional story. All names, places, and viruses are used fictitiously. Resemblances to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, past or present, are intentional.
If you haven’t read from the beginning, please start at Chapter 1 here.
***
Due Date: 70 days away
Liz wasn’t ready for it either. Neither was our baby.
Contractions.
Everything, shorter. Faster.
Liz had labored extremely quickly with our first two. Five hours for Kenneth. One for Shepherd. Other than a dramatic five minutes in the elevator last time, quickly worked in our favor.
What didn’t work in our favor was the intensity of the contractions.
We got to the hospital shortly after midnight, less than half an hour after Liz’s water broke. She already couldn’t move.
Security met us at the entrance, not the nurses. They might as well have been the same men from the day before, their yellow suites and breathing apparatuses making them indistinguishable from each other. We told them Liz had the virus anyway.
The next level in, the nurses, wore the same protective gear. I’d only gone so far into the hospital before, and I was on the clear side, not showing any symptoms yet. This was all new to me.
I tried to keep everyone from touching Liz as they wheeled her through the halls. I knew they weren’t changing their suites after seeing each patient. The gear might keep them safe, but it did nothing for us.
Thankfully, the place felt fairly vacant.
Someone with a clip board started into a series of questions.
“Hang on,” I said, getting into my phone. “I’ve got all that.”
Date of birth. Social security number. OBGYN. And so on.
“How far along is she?”
“I don’t know. Thirty weeks. Almost?”
“Any preexisting conditions?”
I showed her my phone. I couldn’t pronounce the medicines.
Liz already had trouble inhaling deeply. The contractions made it worse. Images of Ken struggling to breath flickered in my mind.
“Do you have ventilators here?” I asked one of the nurses as we went. “Like are they available?”
It felt like she ignored me at first, continuing to fuss with something on Liz’s arm.
“We are going to try to get you through without one,” she said to Liz. “But if it gets to be life threatening, would you want to go on a breathing machine?”
Liz couldn’t answer, her mouth frozen open.
“I think she would,” I said. “Can we just be prepared in case we need it?”
“We will do our best to be prepared, sir,” someone else said.
It turned out she was a doctor.
We made it to a delivery room.
Liz made it to the delivery bed.
The doctor made a different decision.
She checked Liz. Too far along. But not far enough. Not the right way.
“We need to move to surgery,” she said to her team.
“What’s that mean?” Liz asked me.
“Ma’am, we’re moving to surgery for a caesarean delivery.”
There was a lot of movement. Extra nurses, maybe doctors, in the room. All wearing their protective gear.
They moved Liz. I wasn’t supposed to go.
“I left her last time,” I told them. “I’m not leaving this time. I can wait to the side? I need to be here.”
“You’re dad?” someone else said.
I nodded.
“Step this way. Put these on.” He handed me gloves as he directed me behind Liz.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen in here,” Liz said. “Keep our baby safe.”
I caught the emotion welling in her eyes.
“You hear me? Keep our baby safe.”
The first doctor stepped in. “Ma’am, this is going to be safer, for you and for your baby. Please.”
I swapped the gloves I was wearing for the ones he gave me, stuffing my old ones in my pocket, surely contaminated already.
“Liz. Liz, look at me.”
She craned her neck to see around the edge of her bed, a contraction pulling her into a tunnel further from me.
“I’m here,” I said.
I waited for the contraction to pass. They slid a Plexiglas guard between us, separating me from the operation.
“I’m here,” I repeated, mouthing it more than saying it.
Everyone else was frantically changing gear. Everything they had on, everything already exposed, had to go. They had a system set up out in the hall where everyone was disinfecting themselves. Our attendants cycled through it like it was a car wash.
By the time everyone gathered in the space and shut the door, they’d already hooked Liz up to everything. Monitors beeping all over the place. Plastic tubes everywhere, draining in, draining out. They were giving Liz oxygen through a mask.
I was the only one in the room breathing the air in the room.
Time warped to slow motion for me. The odor of alcohol thickened in my head.
I couldn’t see the other side of the screen that separated Liz’s upper and lower body. Instead, it worked like those old, horror films: sometimes, the anticipation and imagination is worse than seeing the real thing. I imagined my wife’s tender stomach sliced cleanly with a scalpel. I knew our baby waited just centimeters, maybe millimeters, beneath the incision. They peeled back the layers, trying to retrieve our baby.
They looked like they knew what they were doing. They moved like they did. They moved as a unit, as a team, one that had done this dozens of times before. But had they? How many times had they delivered a baby in full hazmat suites? How many c-sections with all this gear? How well could they really move like this?
And then I noticed Liz again. She’d stopped moving.
Her oxygen wasn’t oxygen. They’d put her to sleep.
I felt alone.
In a room crammed with doctors and nurses and, evidently, anesthesiologists, I felt like I was the only one who could make decisions. Everyone else was just acting out their part, moving as a unit, a team, methodically, mechanically. They looked like machines too. And sounded like machines.
Except for my wife. She looked dead.
The machines monitoring her made her look dead too.
“Sir? Excuse me, sir?”
Someone was addressing me. I couldn’t get myself to acknowledge her.
“Dad?” she tried.
They had a baby.
She will be quarantined. She will not get sick.
I couldn’t tell if I was talking to myself or someone in this room was telling me this.
No one makes promises in a hospital. They can’t. I’m not leaving her.
“You can come see her whenever you want. But please, sir, stay on the other side of the glass. Let us keep her safe. You want that for her, don’t you?”
That was definitely the doctor speaking to me.
But I wasn’t wrong about Liz. Or the machines beside her.
It just took everyone a few beats longer to react.
She’d stopped breathing.
I didn’t know what happened next. There was a flurry of movement. Words I didn’t understand. Orders.
Then they were asking me. Out of the corner of my eye, I witnessed the nurse disappear with our baby. My panic spiked. But they were asking me a question. I forced myself to stop trying to multitask. Focus. I had to give them an answer. For Liz.
“Yes. Yes, whatever we have to do.”
Behind me, someone pushed in another machine, the machine, to add to the mess. More tubes.
This was the oxygen.
The ventilator.
They must have taken one from a Travis somewhere.
