Somebody Needs You

Walking down an uncountable number of halls, each one looking as sterile and bare as the previous one, Luke’s mind was all over the place. After the doctor had left, no one else had come into the room.

At least till a nurse came in, telling him she was taking him to see his son…

He still hadn't gotten over that. He was a father…

Traveling up three floors with the elevator, he could feel the panic rising in his throat. He wasn't sure he could to this. He didn’t know anything about children.

Sure he had a younger brother, but he didn’t remember when he was a baby and then he had two younger sisters, but…but he’d been so wrapped up in hockey and his own life when they were born that he hadn’t really picked up much.

But it was too late to back out now, he realized as the nurse slowed down, showing him into a private room.

Hesitating at the threshold, he slowly walked inside the room, feeling a lump appearing in his throat as he saw the lone cot standing in there. As they’d been walking through the hospital, the nurse whose name he didn’t remember had explained to him that he boy would be lying in a bed from the NICU, that he might have a heating lamp over the bed and other things around it, it had all just been precautionary when he was delivered and he really didn’t need them any longer.

There was nothing wrong with him, so he would soon be moved in to a regular nursery cot and would have the regular blankets and things around him.

Biting his lower lip, feeling the ring digging into the palm of his hand as he tightened his fist, he forced himself to cross the room and he was unable to keep a small smile from spreading as his eyes landed on the sleeping child.

He was so tiny…

“Do you want to hold him?”

The voice came so suddenly that he literally jumped when he heard it and squeaked. “What?”

“Do you want to hold him?” the nurse repeated, a smile across her lips as she motioned towards the sleeping boy.

“I don’t…” he began; he really had no idea what to do.

“Here,” the nurse smiled as she easily picked the baby up without disturbing him too much and then moved towards Luke. “You're his dad,” she reminded I'm as he was about to take a step back and it forced him to stop, still shocked at the true meaning behind those words.

“Really, I don’t…” he grasped at the words as she easily handed the baby over to him.

“Just cradle him close to you and support his head at all time,” the nurse instructed him softly as to not wake the sleeping boy. “You’ll do fine,” she promised him. “He needs you.”

He thought he was nervous when he played his first game with Kelowna. That he’d been nervous when he was waiting to get drafted. He thought he was nervous when he first lace up to play for the Leafs. He really thought that he was nervous when he was getting ready to propose to Katie…

But in that moment he realized that he had never been so nervous before in his entire life.

He was holding his son in his arms. His son that had no one in the world but him and his mother. His son that needed him to love him unconditionally, that needed him to keep him safe, that needed him to hold him and who needed him to teach him everything there was in life…

The nurse guiding him towards a rocking chair in the opposite corner, he carefully sat down, holding the baby like his life depended on it.

And he had a feeling that it did now.

Gently running his finger over the sleeping child’s cheek, he couldn’t help but smile.

This was his son…

He’d helped create something so amazing…

“If only your mommy was here,” he whispered ad he leaned down and placed a soft kiss on the baby’s head, closing his eyes as he forced his tears away.

Leaning on his forearms that were perched on the edge of the small cot in which his son – he was still not completely used to saying that – was sleeping, Luke had realized that if he focused his whole attention to his baby, he didn’t have time imagining what was currently happening to Katie.

How she was doing…

A slight knock on the door caused him to look up just in time to see a woman in her mid forties walk thought the door and inside the room. “Mr Schenn?”

“Yeah,” he squeaked before clearing his throat, his cheeks heating up in embarrassment.

“I'm here about your girlfriend…”

“Fiancée,” he interrupted her as he sat straight up, subconsciously trying to prepare himself for whatever she was about to tell him. In difference to the previous doctor he’d seen, this one didn’t emit any kind of emotion and her facial expression was example of neutral.

“Right, fiancée,” she nodded slightly as she grabbed a chair and sat down in it, close to his side.

Was that something they taught in med-school; sit next to people when telling time that their lives were changing, it’ll somehow soften the blow?

“I'm Dr Clarkson,” she introduced herself to him and he absentmindedly shook her hand. “I was the one who operated on your fiancée,” she revealed, having his full attention.

“How is she?” he asked slowly, worried that she was going to tell him something that he really didn’t want to hear.

“She’s up in the ICU,” Dr Clarkson revealed. “She’s still in a very critical condition,” she warned him as she saw him visibly relax before her.

“What…eh, what…?” he tried to form a sentence that at least sounded somewhat educated, but he failed quite drastically at that.

“Katelyn…”

“Katie,” he corrected her, then blushed slightly. It didn’t really matter what named she used…

“Katie had something called placenta praevia,” Dr Clarkson began explaining. “It’s a condition where the placenta, which connects the mother to the baby, is covering the cervix; it’s graded from marginally to completely covering it. In simple terms, it means that the baby can’t come out.”

“But the doctor said everything was fine,” Luke frowned deeply. They’d been told everything was fine…

“Usually it’s noticed either by bleeding in the second trimester or in the beginning of the third, or it’s picked up by an ultrasound, but from what I can read in Katie’s chart, there has been no reason to even suspect that she had this condition,” the doctor slowly said, knowing that she was walking a very narrow line between telling her own opinion and critiquing a colleague. “All I can say is that it wasn't discovered and when the baby, your son here, shifted or rather descended into her pelvic; it caused the placenta to break away slightly.”

“Was that what she felt when…?”

“We can’t know that for sure, but probably,” Dr Clarkson nodded slightly. “When it’s discovered and monitored, it’s usually not a dangerous condition, but in Katie’s case, it wasn't and when we figured out what it was, she was already in a very critical condition,” she explained, a serious look across her features. “We got the baby out and she still has her uterus,” she offered a slight smile, knowing that a couple that young would want the option to have more children in the future.

“But…?” he questioned, there was something she wasn't telling him.

“You're fiancée lost a lot of blood,” she began slowly. “When something like that happens, and you get a lot of blood transfusions, the blood…it loses the ability to clot,” she explained. “It means that after an operation, like a c-section, the wound doesn’t stop bleeding and heal as it should.”

“And what’s…”

“She’s in a coma right now, and we don’t know if she’s going to wake up from it.”