Seal started to cry.
“Get control of yourself,” Doc ordered.
“My babies are dying and you tell me to get control!” She faced the air conditioner so her back was toward all of them.
“Intrauterine Growth Retardation, IUGR,” the obstetrician said. “There’s a huge discrepancy in size. Are you listening?” he called to Seal. “The little one is SGR, Small for Gestational Age, Light for Dates.”
“Why here?” was all she could say.
“Because mothers can’t be trusted to stay in bed at home. There are too many temptations, like the phone and other children.”
“These are our first.”
“You know how mothers are,” he said to Doc.
“No, I don’t,” Seal said turning to face him. “I’d have to be crazy to be running around after what you’ve just told us.”
“You say that now but it will be different when you get home.”
“You don’t give me any credit for being intelligent.”
He shrugged toward Doc. The resident looked at her watch and told Seal she’d have to move across the hall immediately (so much for remaining still) because she needed this room for another patient. The obstetrician said he had to check a woman in labor, but on his way out of the room he told Doc, “You should consider snuffing out the little one to save the bigger baby.”
“I’ll be back,” Doc said to Seal. “I have to make a few calls.”
Snuff one out—sickening words, total insanity. Seal would have both of them or she would have none. That’s how it would be. She would not consent to having her babies taken from her this early. She slid down on the new hospital bed, on top of the sheets, so she wouldn’t dirty their precious linen. They’d probably shuffle her out of here as fast as they had out of the other room anyway.
Seal forced herself to catalogue the risks of staying put: Stuck in a hospital bed. No one to talk to but nuns. At the first sign of distress, that snuff-one-out doctor would do a C-section and deliver the babies, regardless of maturity. Unbelievable. Fourteen weeks short of their delivery date. Their lungs wouldn’t work. They’d be like little rats in incubators, 26-week fetuses for doctors, probably residents, to practice on before they moved on to care for the viable babies whom they couldn’t make mistakes on. Right now there was no question. Her babies had a better chance of survival inside of her than in an incubator. If the little one was so feeble, why risk traumatizing her more? And why jeopardize the other one at the same time?
On the other hand: If she went home and she woke in the night and there was blood everywhere, then both of her babies would be dead. And if she walked to the car and something happened in traffic on the way home, her children could die. But it made no sense. Two days ago, the local obstetrician had said hers was the most closely watched, healthy twin pregnancy in history, and suddenly these two robots dragged a probe over her belly and her babies were in distress. She wanted a second opinion. She wanted to go home. At least at home, she could think. If she stayed here now, she would be a prisoner in a crisis, and she might give in and maybe that doctor should not be doing what he said he was going to do.
She sat up a little. There was something orange on the sink in her new room. A Tootsie Roll Pop. She started to sob but stopped suddenly. No one could be dying if someone was eating a lollipop.
She could hear trucks on the road below and horns and brakes near that intersection. What kind of a place was this? She would never choose to stay here. The obstetrician and his resident didn’t live around here. They went home each night to safer and friendlier places. But if she left the hospital now and something bad did happen, she would never know if it were because she got out of bed or if the same thing would have happened even if she had stayed. She could live with that ambiguity. She had to live with that ambiguity. The babies were healthy this morning and they were healthy now. Seal sank into the pillow and breathed deeply. “You’ll be fine, Sweeties. There’s plenty of blood for two and plenty of oxygen for two. I know. I’m your mother.”
Could anyone talk her into staying put? Yes, if the danger was as grave as the death monster had said it was. But his prescribed regimen didn’t make sense. Don’t move and the babies might grow or at least one of them might grow. What if he was wrong? What if he wanted her to do something that was wrong? If the babies were going to die they might as well go home and do it there where they would always be together and with her. If the hospital took them from her, they wouldn’t even be in the same room as she was and they probably wouldn’t even be in the same incubator. Separating them made absolutely no sense. But what if she was discounting the one chance her babies had for survival? Who was right and who was wrong? Someone had to be wrong.
There was Doc in the doorway. He had hardly said a word. He hadn’t even reacted when that sadist had used the word ‘snuff’. And he had yelled at her.
“Your local obstetrician is out of town,” Doc said. “So I talked to his partner. He says you can go to our hospital every few days for ultrasounds to make sure the babies are growing.”
“They sent me here because they can’t tell how the babies are doing with that old machine.”
“They don’t believe in employing heroics for unviable fetuses,’ Doc said. “That’s all I am asking.”
“We could try the Antenatal Center in the City,” Seal said.
“You decide. I’m not going to decide for you. I’ll wait in the hall.”
If something went wrong, she couldn’t blame anyone but herself. She was going home and when she got home she might pack and head to another state, or out of this universe. “Let’s go,” she said. She led Doc down the wooden floor to the cage elevator.
Just as Doc stepped in, the obstetrician came around the corner. “Wait,” he called. “If anything happens you would have to be right here. No, no, you should stay. Leaving is tantamount to killing both your babies.”
Seal slammed the metal cage door. It was a primitive instinct, maybe her first maternal instinct. Her babies were safe.