Whirlwind

59

[Riley]

The gentle brush back, forth and around my stomach had immediately hypnotized me into a light trance the second it began. My eyes couldn't seem to fall away from the probe gripped tightly in Dr. Jones hand that painted layers of gel over the round surface effortlessly, creating a new form of art. The room was serene and fairly quiet aside from the echoes of a strong heartbeat that I was hooked onto even more and the slight movement of Lamarr who shuffled around and stood up from his seat to capture the image drawn out on the ultrasound screen with his camera.

Well," I blinked my eyes at the sound of Dr. Jones voice and glanced up to see her pointing toward the screen. "That is why you're starting to feel that round ligament pain now. Your baby is longer and a bit larger than usual for you to only be 22 weeks. Most babies are about ten inches and weigh a pound around the beginning of the six-month mark, he or she looks bigger. They're just putting extra pressure on that area and causing discomfort," she assured.

"Is that a good thing...or bad? Referring to their size?" Lamarr quizzed as he continued to admire the set of tiny limbs kicking around in reaction to the touch of the doctor. "I would hope, good. Right?"

"Any growth of the child is good, we just don't want it to be caused my gestational diabetes or anything else for that matter. Riley's sugar tests came back normal and so did all the others we ran, so for now I'm assuming he or she is taking more after daddy than mommy." she tittered as Lamarr's head flew over his shoulder and his eyes widened. "You're a tall guy which could explain the length of the baby,"

"I'll take that over health issues," he muttered then turned completely around to walk back over to his seat beside me. Lamarr shut his camera off after capturing a frame of my stomach up close and placed it down before he spoke up one again. "Is there anything we can do to help with the pain she's feeling?"

"Not much aside from taking a mild pain reliever or even placing a heating pad over the area the pain shoots to. I would mainly just refrain from traveling so much," Dr. Jones added with a side eye as I bit my lip and shrugged innocently. "When I mentioned you'd have to eventually start slowing down, I didn't think it would be this soon, Riley."

"What can I say? I wanted to get my Beyoncé phase out of the way," I argued, making Dr. Jones chuckle and shake her head in response.

Lamarr and decided after New Year's to remain in New York for a few extra days, before we escaped to Chicago to visit my family and a list of a few other random places across the country we had accumulated on a bucket list. You would've thought we didn't have an entire year ahead of us to travel and explore, and now our choice to rebel and quite literally run away for three weeks was triggering that sharp pain Dr. Jones warned me about a month.

"Well now that it's out of the way, I need you to slow it down a bit. You see that?" My attention as well as Lamarr's trailed to the screen where her finger outlined the uterine wall. "That is the placenta that we're constantly keeping an eye on – it migrated. And not upward where we need it to be. You're no longer marginal, Riley. This is partial, alarmingly close to complete, which me--"

"Means bed rest," I interjected into her sentence, knowing it was coming next.

"Mhm, it means no more traveling back and forth across the country unless necessary and no more doing whatever you all have been doing for the last few weeks. Too much stress on your body right now, even if it's not obvious stress, can cause you to go into labor," she underlined firmly. "In your condition, we can't afford that."

"So she'll rest then," Lamarr guaranteed as he slipped his hand around mine and gave it a gentle squeeze. His need to suddenly reach out for me in any way he could made his growing anxiousness apparent. I couldn't help but rub my thumb along the part of his hand that I could reach in hopes to calm him.  "I'll make sure she's staying off her feet for a while, especially since she's getting clumsy now."