The Dark Side - Danielle Steel Page 0,17
lifetime of vigilance and dedication to keep her safe. His heart was fully in it, and he was badly shaken by knowing they could have lost her the night before when she’d stopped breathing.
Zoe called her mother, mother-in-law, and sisters-in-law to tell them how close they came. If she hadn’t been holding her and seen it when she stopped breathing, Jaime would have been dead by then, like the thousands of babies who died of SIDS every year. Austin readily admitted that Zoe was the hero in the story, since she had seen it when Jaime stopped breathing, otherwise they would never have known until too late, which was a horrifying thought. The fact that he had shaken the baby back to consciousness went unmentioned as a minor detail. Zoe had seen the baby stop breathing and turn gray and had screamed. She had won her first gold star as a mother and saved her baby’s life. How many mothers had a chance to do that?
Her own mother had tried and been unable to turn the tides for Rose. Amelia, Austin’s oldest brother’s wife, had done it when one of their twins choked on a piece of hot dog at a birthday party, and she’d done the Heimlich maneuver on him, and saved him. And now Zoe had joined the elite. She hadn’t worked the nursing out yet, but she had saved Jaime when she stopped breathing. It was a great feeling as she lay in Austin’s arms that night and drifted off to sleep. The best feeling ever. From this moment on, Jaime was alive because of her, she had saved them from tragedy, and the whole family knew it, and so did Austin. Her instincts had finally kicked in. She was a mother after all. It was the best feeling in the world. Better than any she had ever known. Suddenly all the pain and confusion she had experienced for the past few weeks were worth it.
Chapter 3
Nursing remained complicated for Zoe, more so after Austin went back to work and she had no one to help with the baby. And the apnea episode made it all much scarier. Zoe never took her eyes off Jaime for an instant, and diligently held her upright after she ate, night or day. The breathing monitor she’d bought added a constant note of panic when the alarm went off. As the ER doctor had warned her, it sounded false alarms constantly, and drove them insane, waking them up during the brief times they were asleep, as they leapt to the Moses basket to grab her and would find her gurgling happily, or pink and peacefully sleeping. Austin objected to the monitor and thought it was worthless, but Zoe used it religiously. Their pediatrician, Cathy Clark, had suggested a night nurse again, to no avail, and finally gave up. Zoe was determined to be a full-time hands-on mom until she went back to work. She hadn’t started looking for a childcare person yet, and Austin knew it wouldn’t be an easy process to find someone to satisfy Zoe’s diligence about their baby, but it was too soon to worry about it. Zoe still insisted that Jaime was colicky. Zoe had become an anxious person and worried ever since Jaime was born. It had changed the nature and tone of their relationship from peaceful, happy, and easygoing to frantic, tense, and argumentative. He blamed it on lack of sleep and hoped that he was right.
Despite the pediatrician’s reassurance that it wasn’t necessary, two weeks after the apnea episode, after doing research on the Internet, Zoe took Jaime to a pediatric gastroenterologist to have him check the baby out for a possible gastric obstruction. She reported to him that the baby didn’t nurse well, usually fell asleep before she got to the second breast, and vomited most of what she ate. But after a conversation with Cathy Clark, and from his own examination of the baby, he deemed further testing unnecessary, unless she had a second episode of apnea after she nursed, or developed chronic projectile vomiting, which was not the case. Zoe had even gone so far as to ask him if he thought a gastric feeding tube might be necessary to nourish her if she continued vomiting, and he looked stunned by the suggestion. He explained that was only for extreme cases where infants were getting inadequate or no nourishment and losing weight steadily. Her baby was thriving and gaining