The nurse placed our son in my arms before she patted my back.
“We’ve got some breast milk coming from our NICU donor bank. You can feed him. He’ll only need less than half an ounce at a time, if that. And it smells like you have your first diaper to change.”
Our son’s first diaper. A milestone I didn’t think was important now seemed like the entire world. It was a milestone Hailey was missing because of my negligence. Because of my need to protect her.
I felt tears crest my eyes as I nodded.
“Is there any word on her yet?”
“When there is, I’ll run here as fast as I can,” the nurse said.
I walked our son in my arms back to the room they told me Hailey would eventually occupy. I sat down in a chair, waiting for them to bring my son his first-ever meal. Milestone after milestone Hailey was missing because of that damn chemotherapy. Because of that fucking cancer. Because I had dropped my body weight on her to protect her.
The moments passed by like a blur. I had the nurse call my parents and update them on what was going on. Within the span of minutes, my father and my mother were barreling through the doors of the room I was sitting in, asking questions a mile a minute as I stared at the wall.
“What happened?”
“Where is she?”
“Is there any news?”
“To hell there’s no news, I’m going to get a doctor.”
“Is it a boy or a girl?”
“Oh my gosh, he’s beautiful.”
Their voices swirled around my head, but I couldn’t hear them. I was feeding my son his third meal of the day and was about to be faced with his second diaper. The sheer amount of black tar coming out of my son’s butt was astounding, and I committed every single moment to memory so I could tell Hailey about it when she got into this room.
Because her ending up anywhere else was not an option.
“Mr. McBride?”
I slowly panned my gaze up and saw the doctor standing at the door. I jumped from my seat, my son teetering in my arms. But my mother reached out to take him, and I paused. My eyes connected with hers, and I saw tears glistening in her eyes. There was a genuine smile on her face, though there was worry painted behind her stare.
“Just let me take him. He’ll be safe. I promise. Go talk with the doctor,” she said.
I relinquished my son to his grandmother before I went with the doctor.
“Is she okay?” I asked.
“She’s stable and in recovery, yes,” he said.
I fell against the wall as tears of happiness streamed down my cheeks.
“That’s the good news,” the doctor said.
“There’s bad news?” I asked.
“Her uterus didn’t tear in one large space like we thought. It had several miniscule tears. That was why the blood loss happened so slowly.”
“It didn’t look like it happened slowly,” I said.
“I know, but trust me. It did,” the doctor said. “We tried to repair all of the tiny tears, but the lining of her uterus was so weakened from the chemotherapy and the stretching of her pregnancy that any stitch we made simply created more tears.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“The only way to save Hailey’s life was to