Teenagers, Love and Pregnancy

Chapter 27

honda returned and hooked me up to a wide variety of machines, monitors, and IVs. She popped open a few buttons on my hospital gown and smeared ultrasound goo over my belly. After hooking up the ultrasound machine, she placed the transducer probe on my stomach. Mom and Kelly clustered behind me and watched, all of us delighted, as an image of my son appeared on the screen happily sucking his fat thumb.

"Is this what you go through every time?" Kelly asked.

"Yeah," I said with a smile as my eyes filled with tears of joy. "Yeah it is."

"I have good news for you," Rhonda said. "You know that stirring that you said you've been feeling for a while?"

I nodded.

"Well," she continued. "That was your baby moving himself into position to be born. And, luckily for you, he's positioned himself in front of the birth canal headfirst. Otherwise you would have had to have an emergency C-section."

"Awesome," I replied. "So how much longer?"

"Well," Rhonda said, powering down the machine. "There's no way to know for sure. It's going to be hard to be patient, but remember, no matter how slow the next few hours seem to drag by, they'll all be worth it when you have that beautiful boy in your arms."

After that, Rhonda swabbed my throat to make sure I didn't have strep and then left the room.

In the next hour and a half, I had forty-nine contractions, and I was pretty sure each one was going to kill me. As time drug on and I grew tired of every single app on my phone, I began looking around my room. The ceilings were paneled with fluorescent lights and speckled plastic rectangles. The floor was the same kind they had in the hallways at school, shiny grey tiles with different colored flecks on them. The walls were giant stone squares painted a sickening shade of blue, and there were two doors, one in the back left corner that led to the bathroom that I shared with the room next door and one directly across from my bed. Kel and Mom sat in stiff red chairs to the left of that door, and to the right, in the corner, was a handwashing station with a sink, cupboards, and drawers. My bed sat in the middle of the back wall. It was reasonably comfortable, and I could easily adjust the height and tilt of the bed. I was framed by various beeping and humming machines, most of which were attached to me in some form or another. Either Mom or Kelly was usually talking to me about something unimportant, but I wasn't so sure that they weren't making chit-chat to ease their nerves rather than mine.

Every fifteen or twenty minutes, I would try to call Kendall, but each time it went straight to voicemail.

"Don't worry," Kelly would say. "He's probably just keeping his phone turned off because he's on an airplane."

Each time she tried to reassure me, I only fake smiled and nodded, pretending I thought things were going to be okay when really, that was far from how I was feeling.

At 1:42, we had officially been at the hospital for two and a half hours. Kelly swore she couldn't wait any longer to eat, so she went off to the cafeteria in search of food. She returned fifteen minutes later with two trays laden with chicken pot pie, baked potatoes, peas, corn on the cob, fruit salad, meatloaf, carrot cake, and what looked like a hundred other things. While she and Mom chowed down like starving animals, I barely touched my plate of peas, the only thing I'd taken from Kel's haul. I stared nervously at the little green balls as they rolled round and round on their plate playground, and I tried not to throw up. I hadn't been so nervous in my entire life.

"Tastes like high school food!" Kel announced happily from the other side of the room as she held up a cake-coated plastic fork in triumph. I swallowed anxiously and then smiled weakly. Kelly, unlike everyone else I met in my entire high school career, had always loved cafeteria food.