had a phone call from a first-timer in query early labour, but it sounded to me like a false alarm,’ Bronwyn summarised, lifting her head from the paperwork she was catching up on. ‘She’s not due for a couple of weeks. She wants to come in, but I expect we’ll be sending her home again. Pete Croft is chugging coffee in the kitchen if you want a progress report on Mrs McNichol.’
‘Oh, I do!’ Emma said. ‘And I’m hunting for the dad.’
‘I sent him off for breakfast. He was wandering around like a ghost.’
‘Dr Cassidy says Rebecca can see her baby now. Have you moved her to her room?’
‘Yes, half an hour ago,’ Bronwyn answered. ‘And her mother’s with her. I’ll take Brian McNichol round to Special Care as soon as he gets back from breakfast.’
As Bronwyn had said, Emma found Pete in the kitchen.
He’d evidently ‘chugged’ his coffee to good effect, and was holding his mug beneath the wall-mounted urn to fill it for a second time—or possibly a third—when Emma entered the room. He took a gulp of it black, then shuddered, grabbed the milk carton and splashed in a generous amount, before bringing the mug to his lips again.
Only then did he turn and see her standing there, and she had to quickly hide the awareness she suspected had been showing in her face. ‘Emma…’ he said, coming back to the present from what looked like a million miles away.
‘I was wondering…Mrs McNichol?’ she asked, before the beat of awkwardness could lengthen.
‘She lost a lot of blood,’ Pete answered. ‘Not enough to need a transfusion, but she’s on a fast drip and I’ll be watching her iron levels over the next few months. Thank goodness the baby started breathing when she did!’
‘What’s your sense about Alethea Childer?’ Emma asked.
‘I wanted to ask you that, actually, since you’ve been with her all the way through. How much did she weigh?’
‘Twelve-fifty grams.’
‘And we estimated thirty-three weeks gestation!’ He pressed his lips together, and she couldn’t help watching as they softened again when he continued to speak. ‘That’s small, even for the dates.’
‘I know.’ An average baby should have weighed several hundred grams more. ‘And Dr Cassidy doesn’t know why.’
‘Bothering her?’
‘Yes. She picked up a heart murmur as well, which she’s not sure about yet.’
‘Lucy McNichol has one, too.’
‘This time she thinks it may be more significant, but so far the heart is doing the job with no problems, so we’re hanging fire.’
‘Right.’ Pete shut his eyes for a moment, then opened them again. A tiny muscle twitched just above one cheekbone. ‘I guess I’m not all that surprised. Has the staffing been sorted?’
Emma nodded. ‘Yes, looks like it. Sue North knows what she’s doing. I’m in there, too, and they’ll juggled the roster. We’re all used to stretching when we have to.’
‘It may not be for long, if we end up sending Alethea Childer somewhere else.’
‘You don’t want to?’
‘Funny, but, no, I don’t.’ He gave an upside-down smile. His eyes had those creases around them again. ‘You’d think I might be keen to get this one off my hands. But she dropped on us out of the blue, and for some reason I don’t want to lose her again to another hospital just as quickly. Rebecca’s young. She has no confidence, and she’s not ready for this.’
‘She seems a little detached at this stage, like she might leave everything to us and just stay away.’
‘Maybe that explains why I’m feeling possessive.’
He leaned back against the kitchen countertop, with one elbow resting on it. The movement made his shirt tighten across his strong chest. The fluorescent light overhead sculpted shadows on the side of his face.
‘I feel like the baby belongs here,’ he went on. ‘And that we can do what we need to for her, with Nell on board. Unless that heart murmur turns out to be significant and she needs surgery. That, we couldn’t handle. That would mean Sydney or Melbourne.’
He took another gulp of his coffee, punctuating the heaviness of the statement. The movement firmed his mouth and stretched the planes of his cheeks a little.
‘If it’s an open ductus, the operation itself isn’t that complex any more, is it?’ Emma asked.
‘In relative terms, I guess. It’s a closed-heart procedure.’
‘They don’t have to open the heart itself.’ Emma understood this.
‘And no heart-lung machine required,’ Pete confirmed. ‘Start to finish, less than an hour. They make an opening in the left side of her chest, tie off the PDA and divide it. It’s about the width of a piece of string.’
‘Oh, huge!’ she drawled.
‘As I said, simple is relative. It would still need to be done in a major children’s hospital, by a paediatric surgeon. And what parent wants to think of a baby as small as Alethea in surgery when she’s just a few days old, no matter how skilled those guys are?’
‘I know.’ Emma leaned against the fridge and rubbed an aching calf with the side of her shoe. ‘Nell has hopes the murmur doesn’t mean anything. The baby’s oxygen saturation is up in the high nineties.’
‘That’s great! Are you heading back to Special Care now?’ He tipped out the rest of his coffee, rinsed the mug and rested it upside down on the sink.
‘Yes, I just wanted to catch up with you and make sure everything was still in hand on this side of the unit.’
‘Come on, then,’ he said.
He slipped past her and she followed in his wake at once. They walked along the U-shaped corridor together in a comfortable silence, and found Nell scribbling notes on Alethea’s chart, while Lucy slept peacefully. Both babies looked like tiny red frogs in the white expanse of their special, warmed humidicribs.
‘I’m heading off,’ Nell said, capping her pen. ‘I’ll be back in a couple of hours. Or sooner if you need me, Emma. If that oxygen sat rate drops, if the heart rate changes, you know what I’m looking for. Pete, she’s not as strong as you hoped. And there may—may—be a heart problem.’
‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘Emma told me. You’re going to wait before doing any tests?’
‘Yes, as long as her levels are this good, but I want to talk to the mother about whether to send her to a higher level unit even if she doesn’t need surgery. There may be other problems. I just have that feeling, despite what the machines are saying. And this is a stretch for us.’
‘I know, Nell, but if there’s nothing specific, and if the mother is already too detached to get properly—’
