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By the end of summer, I can’t see my feet anymore over my round belly. I count every day until I will give birth. My breathing becomes more labored, which skyrockets Damien’s unease. I’m not feeling as well as I did at the beginning of my pregnancy. While I try to hide it, Damien senses it, regardless.
There are days where the pregnancy is a blessing, like when I feel them kick or when we see their tiny faces in 4D ultrasound pictures. But there are also days when I’m afraid because of the uncertainty if my heart can bear the pressure.
Still, I have hope, because my heart didn’t worsen, it just doesn’t recover as quickly as it should.
I pray every day for enough strength to carry on, but there are nights when Damien lies sleepless beside me, and I silently cry because there’s nothing I can do to lessen our fears.
I keep pondering if hope without physical evidence is more a curse or a blessing?
By the middle of October, the doctor examines the babies and me daily. With every passing day, I put my life at risk, but I won’t allow them to perform the C-section until the thirty-sixth week. Not the desperate pleas of Damien nor the warnings of my doctor make me any more rational. In all the uncertainty, I still believe everything will be fine. Is it more a wish than a fact? Most certainly.
Chapter Forty
DAMIEN
Love can be enduring, challenging, and at times, agonizing.
Throughout the pregnancy, my love for Bria kept me sane when her condition threatened to tear my last shred of sanity to pieces. Every night I fought with myself not to scream out my pain or my frustration.
The pregnancy situation was out of my control. I couldn’t protect her insides, so I made sure she was safe from any physical threat. One of the first things I did was empty Monica’s bank accounts. With no financial resource during the last months, she stopped trying to find ways to hurt my wife. She searched for jobs, but with me distancing myself from her, no one dared to cross me by hiring her. Seeing her beaten down and struggling to survive was just the start. She’ll pay for everything she’s done or tried to do. I won’t allow for any further risks to Bria.
My wife is already risking enough. While she may live to deliver our babies, will she see them grow up? What will I do if my worst fear becomes a reality?
I’m not strong enough to carry on a life in her absence. I blame her stubbornness, not wanting to blame my innocent babies. Her insistence and her incredible optimism have me seething in silence. Before my eyes, the woman I swore to love and protect fades away, and all I can do is love her more through this hellish uncertainty.
When the doctor said if she doesn’t deliver the babies today, there is no tomorrow, I did what I never thought I’d ever do. I made the choice for her. And now, I am beside her as she lies in an operating room surrounded by and connected to machines I don’t have a name for, circled by a team of doctors and nurses. She squirms and squeezes my hand. The number of people in the room adding even more discomfort to her than her pain. I hold her hand with the force of all the desperation crawling inside me and caress her damp hair, trying my best to calm us both.
“Damien, I love you so much. Never forget it.” I pierce her with a look, both pleading and raw.
“Don’t you dare, do you hear me? We’re here now, and we will leave together with our babies. You’re the strongest woman I know. You always come back to me. I beg you one more time to come back.” She nods, and her lips turn up in a small smile, trying to reassure me.
“I decided on the names.”
Every day she’d come up with new baby names until deciding later that night they were not good enough. If it weren’t for this dramatic situation, I would have found it funny.
“And?”
“Ava and Edan du Sky. What do you think?”
I let the names roll off my tongue and say, “They’re perfect.”
I check the machine connected to her heart every two seconds. Sweat covers and rolls from my neck down my spine, the anxiety gripping and crippling me. Everything else pales in comparison. I catch myself forgetting from time to time why we are here in an operating room.
My thoughts get interrupted when a cry pierces the room, and my heart dislodges itself from my body. Moments later, the nurse puts my baby boy in my arms, and my chest contracts to every new feeling this tiny human unleashes in me.
Bria blinks at him in fascination. I don’t see only the woman I love in her eyes, but also a mother, loving and caring, given an even greater role in life. My respect and love for her reach new levels.
Not one minute later, my screaming daughter follows. I hold her, a smile parting my lips, with the gut feeling telling me she’ll give me gray hairs prematurely. She’s the spitting image of my wife, and for the first time in what feels like months, my lips curve into a full smile.
“Thank you, Bria . . .”
I know she understands me, she always has. I’m thanking her for the biggest and most selfless gift, in the form of two angelic faces. I thank her for loving me, for forgiving me, for choosing me, for being strong, and for being the woman she is.
I can’t wait to witness—what I know will be the most beautiful sight—my wife holding our babies once she’s recovered a bit from the C-section. Just the thought of seeing my family together for the first time warms me from within and chases away the fear that’s settled in my bones.
I’m engrossed in staring from her to our babies, that I barely notice the whirlwind of activity and the beeps turning weaker. My head snaps in the noise's direction. My entire world collapses when the beeping of the machine connected to her heart draws a flat line, and her heart stops.
I never begged, I never prayed, but I do right now with my body shaking. Two nurses grab the babies as another tries to usher me from the room. But I am not going anywhere. A feral sound escapes my quivering mouth, “Save her.”
