Ma, please let the baby be okay.
I prayed to my mother and to God, that I wouldn’t receive bad news when I arrived at the hospital. I prayed that everything would be okay for the baby’s sake. It worried me how scared I was about someone who an hour ago I didn’t know existed inside of me.
When my thoughts combined with my worry, I shook my head clear and glanced at Keela. She was still talking. I barely paid attention to her and let her do the majority of the talking during the drive to the Coombe Hospital. If I had to, I couldn’t guess what we were conversing about because my mind was elsewhere the entire time.
“Aideen, we’re here.”
I blinked my eyes and looked at my right. “We are?”
Keela nodded her head. “You were pretty out of it on the way here.”
I sighed, “Sorry, just doin’ some thinkin’.”
Keela smiled. “I understand. Are you ready?”
Was I?
“Yeah,” I mumbled. “Let’s do this.”
Keela parked the car close to the hospital entrance then we exited my vehicle and headed for the hospital.
“Hi, erm, where is the emergency room?” Keela asked the man sitting at the reception desk when we entered the hospital.
He looked bored as hell.
I couldn’t look him in the eye. I didn’t know why, but I felt like I was somehow in trouble for being pregnant even though I was far from being a teenager with parents to disappoint.
“To your right,” the man replied to Keela and gestured with his hand. “Knock on the red door, take a seat, and wait for a nurse to see to you.”
Keela and I thanked the man then followed his instructions and walked to the right. I spotted the red door he mentioned and the rows of chairs in front of it.
“Sit down,” Keela said to me and walked towards the red door.
I sat down in the third row and watched as she reached the door and knocked three times. She turned then and walked back to me, taking the vacant seat to my right. I didn’t know how long we were seated before the red door opened and out stepped an Asian nurse in black trousers, and a white hospital shirt with a pocket watch hanging from the shirt pocket.
“Which one of you ladies wants to check into the emergency room?” she asked in an accent I had never heard before.
I couldn’t reply to her so I just raised my hand like one of my students did in class when I asked them a question.
The nurse smiled at me. “Follow me, please. Your friend can come along too.”
“Like she could stop me,” Keela murmured.
I didn’t laugh, but I breathed a little harder through my noise to show I thought what she said was funny.
Keela and I walked after the nurse into the emergency room. I stood idly by the red door Keela closed until the nurse gestured me to take a seat in front of her desk. Her desk was off to the right of the room. On the left was a hospital bed, a bunch of monitors and other hospital equipment. I sat down and breathed easy when I felt Keela’s presence behind me.
“Name, please?” the nurse asked me.
I cleared my throat. “Aideen Collins.”
The nurse got out a pink folder, and clipped freshly printed out forms into the folder. She clicked her pen and began writing. She asked for my home address and wrote it down when I called it out to her.
“Date of birth?”
I licked my lips. “February 5th, 1987.”
“Is this your first pregnancy?”
I blinked. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Planned?”
Was that really a required question?
“Well, no,” I answered, honestly.
The nurse looked up at me and smiled. “Sorry, standard questions.”
Why?
“It’s fine.”
The nurse nodded her head and looked back down at the pink folder. “Any known allergies to medication or food?”
I shook my head. “Nope.”
She went on to ask a bunch of questions about the medical history of my family and myself. I froze up when she asked if there have ever been pregnancy complications with the women in my family.
“Not durin’ pregnancy, but me mother died while givin’ birth to me brother. She lost a lot of blood and didn’t receive a blood transfusion in time.”
“Sorry for your loss.”
I swallowed. “Thank you.”
After a moment, the nurse launched back into the questions she needed to ask and I was grateful because I really didn’t want to think about my mother dying during childbirth when I was in an emergency room for a pregnancy I just found out about.
“When was your last menstrual period?”
“I can’t remember,” I replied honestly. “Mine are very irregular so I was never good at keepin’ track.”
The nurse nodded her head and made note of what I said.
“Do you have a date for possible conception?”
I grunted, “Yeah, the 1st of April.”
“The 1st of April... are you sure?” the nurse asked, not sure if I was lying or not.
“Pretty sure,” I replied.
Like I could forget the day I fell into stupidity or the day I let stupidity fall into me… three times.