‘The one on call is in theatre with an emergency caesarean,’ said the midwife.
Sam stopped grabbing the bed bars long enough to grab Ted.
‘Find him,’ she hissed, in a voice uncannily like that of the little girl from The Exorcist, ‘and bring him to me.’
‘I can’t,’ said Ted, shocked at seeing his wife behaving like someone possessed.
‘Dr Lennox will be along soon.’
‘I need him now.’
‘Dr Lennox is a she.’
‘Does she have kids?’ growled Sam.
‘Yes.’
‘Then beg her, she knows what this is like.’
‘She had twins first time.’
‘I don’t care if she gave birth to two fully grown hippos without medical intervention, I need her and her bag of drugs. Please.’
‘But your birth plan,’ went on Ted, thinking that perhaps it was his job to make Sam stick with the plan she’d wanted for so long. ‘You know we don’t want drugs for this delivery and I have your music ready to go—’
He ignored the warning looks on the midwife’s and nurses’ faces who had seen all of this played out many times before.
‘Babies don’t read the birth plan,’ began the younger nurse, who was used to shattered husbands, men who came in all gung-ho and went home, bruised and traumatised wrecks. ‘You never really know how a delivery is going to progress.’
Sam launched into Ted: ‘If you are having this baby, you can do it without drugs, but I am having it, I am trying to pass a bowling ball from an orifice that has never had a bowling ball emerge from it before, and I want everything! ALL the drugs! Everything in the hospital.’
There was nothing close for Sam to throw but Ted ducked just in case.
This was nothing like the Sam he knew and loved.
Two more hours elapsed with just pain and the anticipation of it in Sam’s landscape.
‘I love you,’ Ted kept saying.
‘I know,’ she said when she wasn’t in actual pain.
She was tearful and sweaty, and in her saner moments, wondered how people appeared in celebrity magazines at the hospital door a day after giving birth, all groomed and perfect.
She had seen herself in the bathroom mirror when she’d been trying the ‘keep walking and let gravity help’ method. She was puce in the face, sweating and her hair was a greaseball. A month left alone in Sephora with a crack team of beauticians would not make her look good ever again.
‘I keep thinking the baby’s going to come, but it doesn’t,’ she said weepily to Ted, who was half hugging her, half holding her up. ‘I know they say long first labours are normal, but this can’t be normal? They’re not telling us something.’
She began to cry again.
‘We don’t know what normal is here,’ Ted said manfully. He was being ultra-careful in case he upset the balance between possessed wife and crying wife, the latter being upsetting but easier to handle.
The young nurse arrived back in the room to check the foetal heart rate and Sam’s cervix.
‘You’re fully dilated!’ she said, peeping up from between Sam’s legs.
‘You see, nobody knows when a baby wants to make an entrance.’
‘My baby’s coming?’ said Sam, almost shocked.
‘Your baby is coming,’ smiled the nurse.
Within minutes, it was all action and still no anaesthetist.
Ted was, to his delight, up the head end of the bed because he wasn’t sure he could cope with the whole baby emerging from the birth canal end, no matter how much he and Sam had discussed how this was important for both of them.
Instead, he remembered his friend, Lorcan, who’d said: ‘It does something to you, mate, seeing her producing a baby out of down there. Can take a while to get over it, uh, sexually.’
Sam screamed, pushed, and nearly ripped a hole in Ted’s hand as she pushed their baby into the world.
‘Push,’ said the midwife at the right times.
Sam pushed, feeling every tendon straining, every bit of her body ripping.
Despite the noise of machines and other women giving birth, screaming too, there were moments when she felt suspended in time – lost between pain, joy and anxiety and, above all, that wild primal desire to birth her baby safely.
Women had been doing it since the beginning of time, she had to do this. Couldn’t fail.
Now, now, now, please let it be now . . .
And then, the last push—
The baby let out a little bleat and Ted began to cry too.
‘A little girl,’ said the midwife with pride and Sam began to cry, tears of joy and exhaustion.
‘Good breath sounds, pinking up,’ said the paediatrician, swooping in.
When she was finally put in Sam’s arms, Baby Bean – seven pounds exactly and scoring a perfect Apgar score – was the most infinitely precious creature her parents had ever seen.
Almost afraid to touch this little person, astonished that she had grown this child inside her body, Sam touched the tiny fingers with awe. The baby’s little nails were translucent, her fingers tiny but perfect. Even with some of the film of childbirth over her, she was exquisite.
Her lovely eyelids were so delicate, like petals draped over blue eyes that stared up at Sam as if she could see her perfectly.
‘She’s ours,’ said Sam, staring at her baby.
‘She’s beautiful,’ said Ted, and Sam looked up to see his eyes brimming with tears and the trails of more tears down his face. ‘Just beautiful. I never thought this would happen,’ he said, choking the words out, ‘and look at her: perfect and ours and we get to bring her home, bring her up. We are a family . . .’
At that moment, something strange happened to Sam.
Something that made her feel fiercely protective, deeply in love and terrified all at the same time.
This tiny little being was hers to take care of.
She would kill for her baby.
‘Mummy loves you with all her heart and will injure anyone who tries to hurt you,’ she murmured into the baby’s fragile skull with its covering of downy dark hair.
Suddenly, she understood all those nature programmes where lonely leopard mothers risked taking down bigger animals all for their cubs, where birds flew across dangerous deserts to sip water at deadly waterholes surrounded by predators so they could regurgitate the water later to keep their tiny baby birds alive.