Always the Last to Know by Kristan Higgins Page 0,45

me. It was the unknown that had me worried.

And God, I was tired. I wasn’t quite forty, but I felt eighty. I’d nod off as I tried to read the paper, yawned constantly. My back hurt as if someone had hit me with a baseball bat, and my ankles were swollen. I had pregnancy-induced hypertension, and my cheeks were flushed and hot all the time. I couldn’t sleep, and I had heartburn so horrible I had to keep a huge vat of antacids with me at all times. Even at night.

I went into labor early on a Tuesday morning. It was brutal. Maybe because I was older, but I felt like I actually might die. Hours and hours of contractions, fiery knives of pain shooting down my legs, my back clenching and spasming. I vomited and had diarrhea, and my throat burned with bile. How could I survive this? All through that day into the night, into the next morning, I suffered and labored and endured. With every contraction, I felt desperate, trying to claw my way away from the wrenching, twisting pain. Was this how my own mother had felt with cancer? How could she have endured it?

After fifty-four hours of labor and no progress, only five centimeters dilated, they finally decided to take the baby via C-section because “mother failed to progress.”

As always, my fault.

“The worst of both worlds,” the nurse chuckled. I was too exhausted to answer. They took me to the operating room and stabbed my back with a needle that felt as big as a chopstick and then, when the epidural had taken effect, sliced me open.

It hurt. They say you’ll feel nothing, and they lie. As the doctors yanked and pulled, elbows-deep in my body, tears slipped into my hair. Those were my insides they were jerking around! How would the baby be healthy after such a battle? How could I love the little thing when all I felt was failure and exhaustion, literally torn apart by the savagery of childbirth?

“It’s a girl!” Dr. Haines said, holding her up for a glimpse. I saw a huge, whitish baby with dark hair before they whisked her off.

“Is she all right?” I asked.

“Looks perfect to me!” said the jolly nurse.

John was crying with joy. “Another girl!” he said. “Oh, honey, I’m so happy.”

“Nine pounds, nine ounces! She’s a bruiser! Apgars are all nines, too. Guess we know what your lucky number is, guys!”

Another daughter. I’d been so sure it was a boy. I closed my eyes, so wrung out that I started to fall asleep.

“Barb, look! Our little girl! Isn’t she beautiful?”

I forced my eyes open.

She wasn’t very pretty, her head tubular from all that time stuck in the birth canal. She seemed giant compared to how I remembered Juliet, who’d been seven pounds even. The baby’s eyelids were bruised and her face looked swollen. Her little rosebud mouth moved, and she opened her eyes.

I loved her. Oh, thank God, I loved her.

“Hello, little one,” I whispered. John kissed her forehead, and put her face against mine, and the softness of her cheek was so beautiful. “Hello, sweetheart.”

Then she started to cry. She started to scream. I had to turn my head away, because she was right against my ear.

“Sounds perfect!” said the irritatingly cheerful nurse.

It was startling that a newborn could make that much noise. “There, there, little one,” John said, holding her close, and just like that, the baby stopped crying.

“Aw. She loves her daddy,” said Dr. Haines. “Barb, I’m stitching you up, but you can snuggle her in a few minutes, okay?”

John was crooning to the baby, telling her she was beautiful, Daddy’s little angel, and I fell into a deep, black sleep, unable to wake up for her first two feedings.

Having a C-section is much worse than giving birth the other way. With every move, it felt as if my insides were going to spill out onto the floor. Flashes of white-hot pain seared through my abdomen. When they made me get out of bed, I fainted. They made me pedal my feet to avoid blood clots, but I got one anyway, which they said was because I didn’t get out of bed soon enough (ignoring the fact that unconscious people do have trouble on that front). My leg throbbed and burned. I couldn’t hold the baby by myself for the first two days, because I was too weak. All I wanted to do was sleep, but they kept waking me up