Never Again

By the time I finished telling the story that night, Bandit had been in bed for hours, and even Mikey had fallen asleep on Alicia’s shoulder – although that may have been the painkillers he was on, as well.

Even Alicia was tired, after everything that had happened that day – let alone the past week – so she didn’t make her usual hyperactive commentary; instead, she just yawned, woke Mikey up and set up my spare room to go to bed.

I couldn’t blame her, though – through all of the last week I had been trying to pretend to myself that I was just tired and mentally exhausted (which I definitely was, like all the others), but the cold I had picked up before the accident hadn’t gone away.

I went to bed as soon as Alicia and Mikey were set up, but as much as I needed the rest, I could hardly sleep; I had fended off the symptoms fairly well in the daytime, but now my head was throbbing and my pulse was racing as if I had a fever – which clashed horribly with the cold, dizzy feelings I was getting in waves.

It was so bad, in fact, that I decided to get up and walk around; to get a drink, and hope that it might make me feel better to not just lie there feeling terrible.

I managed to get back out of bed - sometime after midnight by my wall clock - and stumbled to the kitchen

It was lucky I had got up, it turned out, for I made it to the sink just in time to vomit what little I had managed to eat that day back up; and then I started shaking, partly from feeling so ill, and partly from uneasiness that this sickness that I had been able to hide for days had suddenly got so much worse.

I must have woken Alicia up with the noise I made getting out there, because soon she came into the kitchen, sleepy-eyed and worried.

“Are you alright?” she asked, casually at first, then more seriously when she realised why I was up; “What’s wrong?”

“I’m fine,” I said without opening my eyes, holding my spinning head in my hands with my eyes closed, so the dizziness couldn’t take over, “I’m just still sick, is all.”

“You really don’t look good,” Alicia commented, sounding worried, “do you want me to call Frank? Because I think you should see a doctor...”

“No, don’t call him,” I managed to get out, “he’s probably only just getting some sleep, so I don’t want to wake him up… look, if I’m still this bad in the morning I’ll go to the doctor’s then, alright?”

The effort of just pronouncing the long sentence seemed to tire me out, so that I couldn’t get enough air in with each breath I took; but thankfully Alicia couldn’t see that, for eventually she sighed and agreed.

“Okay,” she said, folding her arms on the table, “but only if you wake me up if you feel any worse, and promise to go to the doctors first thing – even if you’re feeling better in the morning.”

I nodded and managed a weak smile, glad to have got out of making a big fuss and worry; at least, until I stood up to try and get back to my bed.

As soon as I got up, the dizziness came back, and it seemed like the floor was rising up in waves around me; but now it was even worse than before, and the only thing that stopped me hitting the floor as it came up to meet me was Alicia managing to catch me by the arm and keep me upright.

“Okay, that settles it,” she stated when she had sat me back down where I wasn’t about to fall over, “I’m calling Frank and taking you to the hospital – and no,” she went on, before I could protest, “if you can’t even make it to bed without falling down, you’re dizzy, and you’ve been puking, I think it’s bad enough not to wait until the morning.”

I sighed but couldn’t deny it was true, so I helped as much as I could as she led me to the car, closing my eyes to try and block out the nausea as she drove me to the hospital – the rooms of which had become almost familiar in recent times.

The way from the car to the room I was allocated was a bit of a blur; I was hurried straight from triage as soon as Alicia told the nurses how suddenly worse my mystery illness had got, so by the time Frank turned up I was feeling much better for the healthy dose of painkillers I’d been given.

“Are you alright?” was the first thing he said as he hurried into the room, looking as bad as I felt, from both tiredness and stress.

“Better than I was,” I told him with a weak smile, referring partly to the painkillers and partly to the reassurance of having him near. “I hope Alicia didn’t make it sound like I was dying or something.”

“No,” Frank managed a smile as he sat beside my bed, probably relieved to find at least my sense of humour quite healthy, “not quite – but she did tell me they still can’t work out what it is yet. I thought it was just a virus or something?”

“I don’t know,” I shrugged – or attempted to, until the spike of pain it sent into my already aching head stopped the idea, and I winced and lay still. “But they’ve done tests and all those hospital-ey things they usually do, so we’ll see.”

Right on cue, a moustached and frowning doctor entered the room, looking both stern and ridiculous as he glared at his clipboard.

It may have been just the drugs making me light-headed, though, for as soon as he spoke, the sense of sterness and complete seriousness obliterated the humour.

“Miss Freeman,” he intoned, with the air of a principal lecturing a naughty student, “I’m sure you’re aware that your recent stressful situation, paired with the fact that you haven’t been eating or sleeping within a normal routine, would have compounded the otherwise minor virus you have,”

The odd lilt of the statement gave it the tone of a question, so I nodded dumbly.

“And,” he went on in the same tone, “that all of this is certainly not healthy for your baby,”

Silence.

I swear my heart stopped beating in those few seconds, not believing I had heard those words; looking over at Frank, though, I knew I wasn’t imagining it, for he had turned pale and was staring at me with incredulity in his wide eyes.

“…baby?” I managed to whisper finally, to answer the doctor’s questioning look at our shocked silence.

“You weren’t aware that you were pregnant, Miss Freeman?” the doctor asked, obviously dumbfounded as his moustache drooped.

“Uh, no, we had no idea…” Frank filled in, as pale as before, “…are you sure? I mean, I thought you could tell…”

“Well,” answered the doctor, less brisk now, though I was still in shock from the news, “yes, you’re definitely pregnant, Miss Freeman, but its not entirely unusual that you were unaware of the fact. With your recent stress, and the early term of the pregnancy, a missed ovulation could have gone unnoticed, and I daresay any of the symptoms – like morning sickness – would have been confused with those of the virus.”

It sounded so simple when he said it like that; symptoms, stress, the sickness – it all added up to a surprisingly neat little package.

All except the one little fact that I was pregnant – the slight complication that I had a child growing inside of me, that I never knew about – and the fine print that Frank and I were going to become parents… that tiny piece of information was such a huge thing to accept, that I couldn’t believe it, even with all the explaining.

Occupied with my thoughts and disbelief, I was completely oblivious too whatever else passed between Frank and the doctor, and when I finally looked around, only Frank was still in the room.

“I’m pregnant,” I said blankly, the first of my racing thoughts to solidify into words. “I’m going to have a baby,”

“It’s incredible, isn’t it?” Frank mused from beside me, the words drawn out with shock; then he hesitated, before turning to me with questioning eyes, “But it’s a good thing, right? I mean, its not exactly the timing we’d planned, but this is what we wanted in the end...” he trailed off, torn between grinning with joy and crying from shock.

I didn’t answer him at first, just silently mulled over what he’d said; the dreams we’d made of one day having children, a family – and it slowly started to make sense.

“I think,” I began finally, smiling nervously as happiness started to take over from the previous panic and disbelief, “that this is the best thing that’s happened to us for months… and that you are going to be the best father in the world,”

He was beaming when I finished the sentence, even with tears of joy in his eyes, and suddenly I found I was crying as well – from overexertion, happiness, baby hormones – who knows?

All I knew was that I was looking forwards to everything that was about to happen, and that it would no doubt be another huge adventure; and a challenging one, I realised, as Frank and I talked about the huge change it would mean for us.

At first it was only the same types of daydreams we had always entertained before; getting a house of our own, if it should be a boy or a girl – those kinds of things.

But soon enough, the excitement after the initial shock faded, and a whole new set of problems, with the timing especially, clouded the pleasant vision; not least of all the sad fact that we couldn’t tell all our friends, not while Gerard was still unconscious.

The painful thought damped the mood around us immediately, bringing us back into the present with all its harsh realities.

“You should get some sleep,” Frank finally said with a yawn, after a particularly long silence thinking of everything that had gone wrong so far; adding with an exhausted but still delighted smile, “there’s two of you to look after now, remember?”

“You’re right…” I mumbled in agreement, suddenly realising just how hard it had become to keep my eyes open, “but only if you promise to sleep as well, you’ve been up all day and all night,”

I managed to stay awake just long enough to hear his promise, and feel as he held my hand, propping himself up between the edge of the hard hospital bed and the armchair; as soon as I knew that the two (or, perhaps, one-and-a-half) people who were almost everything to me were safe, I let myself drift off into a world where things weren’t quite so chaotic.