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Right?
Right?
Before I could say anything else, however, the door opened, and a woman with red hair and thick glasses popped in.
“Ms. Zola?” She glanced at Xavier. “And, Mister Zola?”
I shook my head. Xavier just sighed.
“I’m the only Zola,” I said. “This is Xavier Parker, my, um—the baby’s father.”
The woman nodded politely as she entered, followed by another younger man in blue scrubs. “ I’m Dr. O’Brien, the fetal cardiologist here today. This is Timothy, our tech. Thrilled to meet you both. Now, shall we take a look?”
I settled back into my chair while Xavier came to sit next to me on the other side as I drew up my hospital gown and allowed the doctor to begin her test.
It was much the same as last time, except this time, it was done with a traditional ultrasound over my belly, and the sound of the baby’s heartbeat was far louder than before. Instead of a soft whisper through the trees, the heartbeat was more like a hurricane.
Images echoed all over the screens set up across the room, and the tech and the doctor took quite a bit more time to focus on the tiny creature moving on the screens.
“You hear that?” Dr. O’Brien asked.
She turned up the volume. Xavier and I were already silent, but we focused on the heartbeat, watching the pulse read across one of the monitors.
Then I heard the skip. And thought my own heart was stuck in my chest.
I snapped my head back to Xavier, whose eyes were bright blue moons as they stared at the screen. They flickered back to mine, and I saw the same fear there that was throbbing in my chest.
He grabbed my hand before I could reach out.
“It’ll be all right,” he told me. “It will be all right.”
He didn’t sound like he could believe himself.
“That right there is the murmur your OB heard,” Dr. O’Brien said. She muttered something to the tech, and they proceeded to take several more measurements over the course of the next twenty minutes.
Xavier held my hand securely. And I squeezed just as hard.
“Okay,” Dr. O’Brien said when she was finished. “Here’s what I know. See that?”She used a laser pointer to indicate a tiny dot on one of the screens. “That’s what’s causing that little skip in your baby’s heartbeat. Now, here’s the deal. When the heart is forming, it’s actually normal for there to be some tiny holes here and there. Typically, all these holes close before the baby is born, and there is nothing to worry about. However, this one is a bit larger than we would expect, which is why we want to be sure it doesn’t develop into an atrial septal defect.”
“I—okay,” I said, unable to think of anything better. I honestly only understood about one in three words. Defect was one of them. Hole was another.
“So, the baby’s all right?” Xavier wanted to know. His deep voice soothed something at the core of me. “It’s fine?”
“It’s something to watch,” the doctor said evenly.
“And if it does turn into that atrial septum—”
“Atrial septal defect,” Dr. O’Brien corrected him.
“If it turns into that,” I put in, “what does that mean? Potentially.”
At that, she finally looked at me with some measure of sympathy. “It can cause damage to the blood vessels. Put a person at a higher risk of murmurs, high blood pressure, strokes, heart failure. Things like that.”
With every suggestion, I felt my own blood pressure rise. “Oh—oh.”
“But that’s not where we are now,” Dr. O’Brien said. “If you’ll just wait a moment, I want to have my colleagues take a look, just to be sure. I’m going to show them the imaging, and I’ll be right back.”
Without waiting, she and the tech swept out of the room, leaving Xavier and me surrounded by images of our child’s broken heart, feeling like ours were breaking with it.
