keep it and was just looking for some kind of justification. Telling work was awkward, of course—I’d been in my new job less than four months, and now here I was, announcing I’d be taking a year off—but they were grown up enough to realize that, since they had no choice in the matter, they might as well sound pleased for me and emphasize that the position would still be there when I came back.
In short, it looked like everything was working out ridiculously well. But the gods had other ideas.
I was twenty-seven weeks when Pete and I went to Andy and Keith’s wedding. If you can’t let your hair down at a gay wedding, when can you? Later, I’d torture myself about that. Was it the glass of champagne I allowed myself with the speeches? The exuberant dancing to Aretha Franklin and Madonna on the packed dance floor afterward? (I still can’t hear “Respect” without flinching.) The tumble I took on my way back from the ladies’, tripping over that marquee rope in the dark? The consultant told me it probably wasn’t any of those, but since he couldn’t say what did cause it, how could he be sure?
Next morning I had a terrible headache, which I put down to the glass of champagne now I wasn’t used to it. But I also realized I hadn’t felt the baby move for a while, and when I threw up it somehow felt different from my first-trimester morning sickness. So—since it was a Sunday, and we had a private hospital in Harley Street on tap, staffed by experienced midwives we could go and see anytime we liked—Pete suggested we get the baby checked out, then have brunch on Marylebone High Street.
As it turned out, that brunch plan saved our baby’s life.
“I’m just going to do a quick scan” turned into “I’m just going to get the doctor to take a look” and then suddenly a red cord I’d barely noticed in the corner of the room was being pulled and I was surrounded by people. Someone shouted, “Prep for theater.” I was bombarded with questions even as they were stripping me of my jewelry—I never did get my Vietnamese bracelet back—and putting in a catheter. Someone else was measuring my legs for stockings, of all things, and Pete was being told to scrub and change into a gown if he wanted to be present at the emergency C-section they were about to perform because of my sudden-onset preeclampsia. I was given an injection to help the baby’s lungs and a drip to help with something else, I never caught what. And then a surgeon appeared, took one look at the trace, and said just one word: “Now.” After that it was a blur of corridors and faces and gabbled explanations. There was no time for an epidural, another doctor told me. Seconds later, I was unconscious.
I came around in the recovery room to silence. No crying baby, no Pete, just the bleep of a machine. And a doctor looking down at me.
“Your baby’s alive,” he said. “A baby boy.”
Thank God. “Can I see him?” I managed to say.
The doctor—I think he was a doctor; he was just a pair of anonymous eyes over a surgical mask—shook his head. “He’s gone straight to the NICU in a specialist ambulance. He’s very small and very poorly.”
NICU, pronounced nick-you. It meant nothing to me at the time, but I was soon to become all too familiar with the different levels of emergency infant care. A neonatal intensive care unit was the very highest.
“Poorly? What with?”
“Babies who are that premature struggle to breathe unaided. He’ll probably be put on a ventilator to help his lungs.” He paused. “It’s possible he might have hypoxia.”
“What’s that? Is it fatal? Is he going to live?”
All I can remember about this man, who I’d never seen before and would never see again, is his kind brown eyes, even though he politely pulled down his surgical mask before he said gently, “It’s when the baby’s brain is starved of oxygen. But the NICU at St. Alexander’s is the best place for him, and it’s very close. If anyone can help him, they can.”
I stared at him, horrified. I was just realizing that, far from being a great place to have a baby, this smart hotel-like clinic was actually completely ill equipped to deal with an emergency like mine.
Everything had gone wrong. I had an overwhelming feeling of having