I woke up in a hospital room, hooked up to an IV drip and a few bags thrown into the mix.  I didn’t like seeing a bag of platelets up there but I knew that it was a possibility.  I looked over and found Christian sitting, hunched over, and leaning his forehead on my bed.  I reached my hand and began caressing his hair with my fingers.  He slowly lifted his face and I cradled his cheek with the back of my hand.  He looked like he had been crying and he was about to start again by the looks of things.

“Hey.”  I say almost at a whisper.  “I’m fine.”

“No you’re not.”  He says, broken and worried.  I motioned for him to come closer, grabbed his hand and pulled him in so he could sit on the edge of the bed.  When he was close enough, I grabbed his face in my hands and gave him a long hard loving stare.

“I love you.”  I tell him.  “I’m not going anywhere without you.”  I hear a throat clearing sound and look over to the door.

“Ms. Reed?  May we have a word?”  The barely-old-enough-to-drink doctor asks me.  “Alone.”  She stresses.

“I’m sorry but whatever you have to discuss with me, you can do it with my boyfriend present.”  I tell her.  She nodded and came up to the foot of my bed.

“Well, we’ve run all the battery of tests we could think of mainly because we weren’t quite sure what we were dealing with.  You’ve suffered a small amount of blood loss which we’ve now replenished and we should be able to discontinue that therapy seeing as your saturations and perfusion look spectacular.  Let me see here…”  And she pauses, giving me the time to look over at Christian and winking with an I told you so kind smirk on my face.  “Uh.  Huh.  Right.”  My head snaps back to the doctor who seemed to be processing things aloud.

“Doctor?  Can’t we just cut to the chase?”  I ask her.

“You’re pregnant.”  She tells me.

“What?!?”  Christian gets up so quickly his chair takes a backward tumble as he grabs my hand, squeezing it of all its blood.

“Ouch!  What?”  I said, looking from the doctor to Christian and back to the doctor.  “But…  How?  Well, I know how but?  How?  I’m on the pill; I had my period?”  I rationalized so everyone could hear.

“It’s not entirely uncommon for some expecting mothers to bleed from time to time during pregnancy, especially in the first month.  It’s usually implantation bleeding which resolves itself.  Rarely is it something serious.  As for the pill, there’s always that zero point one percent chance, right?”  The doctor says and I nod only just slightly; it was true.

“What about the bleeding, and the pain?”  Christian asked and I nodded with him.

“That’s what we want to know.  I could have been a multitude of things.  The ultrasound will help us know for sure.”  She looked at both of us, and then smiled sweetly.  “Cheer up folks!  You’re about to see the first picture of your unborn child!”  As soon as she had said that, she had exited the room.  None of us said anything to the other.  A nurse came in with a wheelchair to take us to another room where they could do the ultrasound.

The room was cold and smelled like it had just been disinfected.  I was always of the opinion that hospitals looked too plain, generic and sterile.  The interior designer in me was screaming to get splashes of color all over the walls in this place.  How sterile can you get?  Maybe some people would live longer if this place looked livelier; especially those with chronic illnesses.  The emergency rooms looked like a place where people went to die rather than a place they came to be healed and walk out thankful for their lives.

“Ms. Reed?”  The ultrasound technician verifies my identity and I nod.  “I’ll ask you to lift your robe as I cover your bottom half with this sheet.”  She says as she places a paper sheet over my legs.  Reality had sunken in and I desperately didn’t want to see anything because I was thinking the worse.  Christian seemed to have noticed my anxiety because he looked at me, grabbed my hand firmly and kissed the top of my knuckles.

“I’m sure everything will be fine.”  He whispered.  “I love you.”

“I love you too.”  I whisper back, keeping our gazes linked on one another.  I felt the cool gel being applied and flinched slightly at the coldness of it all and then the wand was being pushed all over my abdomen, gliding the gel and intermittently entering data here and there.  My eyes still trained on Chris’ I was beginning to feel panic.  Shouldn’t I be hearing a heartbeat by now?  My eyes began to water.  Feelings of failure and total sadness were taking over.

“Oh my!”  I hear and turn toward the technician.

“What?”  I ask both turn and say simultaneously.  “What is it?”  I add in.

“I can’t believe I did that.  I’m so sorry.”  She says as she looks at my face.  “There we go.”

The most amazing sound came from all around me.  My feelings of failure were overcome with relief.  I looked over at Christian who apparently was thinking the same thing.  I didn’t care about what had caused the pain earlier or the bleeding.  I just wanted to know that everything would be alright with the baby.  My eyes were now on the TV screen, watching something that kind of looked like a kidney bean kind of shape.  According to the ultrasound, the baby looked perfectly healthy.  As for the rest of the observations and results, I was told I had to wait until the doctor came back to brief me.

We had been taken back to my other room where the nurse provided me with a pair of scrubs so I had something to make my way home in seeing as the blood I lost soiled my clothes.  Waiting for the doctor to show up, Christian was peppering me with kisses as I sat on the edge of the hospital bed with him standing between my legs.

“Ms. Reed?”  I hugged Christian to me and turned to her.

“We have your full results.”  She pauses as she looks at both of us.  “Everything is healthy with the baby.  The cause for the bleeding seems like it was a series of ovarian cysts that had formed.  It seems like one burst and caused some bleeding in the process.  Now, with that said, I suggest you take it easy during this pregnancy.  Normally, you don’t really feel them and they traditionally go away on their own.  But, in some cases, incidents like yours do happen.  I have here a list of reputable obstetrician gynecologists for you if you need one.  Best of luck and I hope that we only see you when it’s time to deliver your little miracle roughly around March twenty-fifth, I’d say.”

“Thank you, doctor.”  Christian says and turns back to me.

“No.  Wait.”  I catch myself saying.  “What about, you know?”

“Intercourse?”  The doctor looks at me with an almost shy smirk after I nod.  “You’re fine.”

“Thank you.”  Christian says again laughing.  “Leave it up to you to bring that up.”

“A girl’s got needs.”  I say trying my best to look innocent.  “Besides, I know you’ll barely be letting me out of bed so I plan on maximizing what I do in there.”

“First thing’s first.  Let’s get you home.”  He tells me.

“I hear pregnant women can be quite randy at times.”  I keep pushing my point and laugh.

“Right.  Hurry then!”  He says, looking like he was struggling with keeping his smile from breaking out.

“Babe?”  I ask softly and he turns toward me.  I gave him a devilishly sexy grin and pulled him toward me, grabbing the back of his neck with my free hand gently.  “I’ve always fancied doing it in a car.”  I winked and kissed him hard.

“Cars are overrated.”  He tells me and I had to chuckle.  “Come home with me and I promise I’ll give you everything you want.”

“This is going to sound crazy but I really want ice cream.”  I say as he opens the car door for me.

“Like I said.”  He bends down and kisses me as he buckles me in.  “Anything you want.”

“I thought you said everything?”  I teased and kissed him again before he had the chance to back up.

Back at the house, Christian helped me to our front door and then carried me the rest of the way through the house and up to our bedroom.  He told me to sit where I was until he was done running me a bath.  He came back and pulled me into the bathroom and removed my clothes for me, helping me into the tub.

“How do you feel?”  He asked me, as he sat on the edge of the bath.

“Good.  Great actually.  Relieved it’s all over.”  I tell him.  “Better yet, why don’t I…”  And I grabbed his arm, pulling him into the tub with me, splashing water everywhere.  “Show you how I feel?”  I finish saying when he looked at me in shock.  He kicked off his shoes, pulled his legs into the tub, knelt as he took his shirt off and I helped him out of his drenched pants.

“You are so in trouble Missy.”  He tells me as he crushes his lips to mine.

“I was hoping I’d be.”  I wink.