Ketchup Popsicle - Part 4

Sandra slowly opened her eyes feeling a slight throbbing in the back of her head. She knew she fainted. She figured it had something to do with her high blood pressure. She felt fine though, just like she felt fine before going into the doctor's that morning. It didn't make sense to her, but she wasn't a doctor or a nurse or anything really. Just an administrative assistant, which was a fancy way of saying secretary.

Looking around she saw that she was in a hospital room, in a hospital bed and thankfully her belly was still enormous. She hadn’t missed her own labor. It would have been just her luck to have woken up and been handed a baby that she didn’t recall giving birth to. She noticed Mike sleeping in a rocking chair to her left, his long legs stretched out in front of him, arms crossed over his chest, head tilted to one side. He was wearing a grey track suit and white running shoes.

Beep… Beep… Beep, began a machine to her right that she quickly realized was attached to the cuff around her arm as it began to fill with air. It was reading her blood pressure. Something she had gotten very used to doctors doing to her over the last eight months. She absolutely hated the feeling of her arm being squeezed so tightly by that little plastic torture device. This machine driven cuff was a first for her though, it proceeded to happily cut off her circulation, beeping it's little beep, making her hand tingle uncomfortably. The machine stopped beeping and held the cuff tight around her arm until she almost couldn’t take it any longer. Then it finally let out the air in a long mocking hiss. There was a note on the monitor that said 'every fifteen minutes'.

"Urgh." she sighed. She gave the machine a dirty look and laid her head back down on the pillow. Mike shifted in his seat and opened his eyes. They smiled at each other briefly. His smile seemed to have some pity behind it.

'Sympathetic?', she thought. 'I must really be in a state for Mike to finally be taking pity on me'.

He went to her side and put his hand gently on her shoulder. "How are you feeling?" he asked.

"I don’t know…scared I guess." She replied honestly, and then the tears came and this time she let them. She had made it a point never to cry in front of him, but she didn’t have the strength to hold it in any longer. "I’m scared and I want my Mom." She wept.

Mike, in all his sensitive glory, sat back down in the rocking chair not saying a word; seemingly waiting for her to pull herself together. With all of the courage she could muster, Sandra forced herself to stop crying wasted tears. Tears that didn’t make a difference anyway.

Staring up at the ceiling she asked, "Did the air conditioning get installed?" The corners of her mouth pulled down tight to control her speech.

Mike lowered his head, "Yeah, the guy finished up hours ago. Then I came here. I didn’t know that you fell, nobody called me." He sighed. "I tried calling your room but nobody would let me talk to you…" He faded off as though caught up in some internal struggle. "I’m sorry Sandra."

She didn’t know what he was sorry for. It wasn’t his fault that she collapsed. She wanted to ask him what exactly he was sorry for…for getting her pregnant or for treating her like a third class citizen since then?. But she was distracted by something. The tone of his voice when he said her name, it was – nice.

Mike moved to her side again, "Sandra, how do you feel?" he asked, and then grimaced slightly probably hoping she wouldn’t start crying again. Sandra realized that the first time he had asked how she felt, he wasn’t actually talking about her feelings, but her physical state.

"I’m alright I guess. Did the doctors tell you anything? Is the baby OK? I mean, he feels OK. He’s OK right?" She looked up into Mike’s eyes for reassurance.

"You’re both fine they said. I don’t know what’s going on now though…now that you’re awake." Mike glanced at Sandra’s big belly, covered in hospital linens. "I guess we’re going to have a baby now."

It was an unusually innocent thing for him to say as though he was just given the news that day that there was a baby inside of her that was eventually going to come out. Sandra shook her head slightly, the man was an anomaly.

Mike turned to leave the room. "I’ll go tell somebody that you’re awake."

The room fell silent once he was gone. Sandra could hear the soft thudding of nurse’s shoes busying themselves with paperwork and patients, phones ringing, wheelchairs rolling, and to her amazement, a baby crying. It sounded like the first cry that a baby makes when it’s born…just like the cries she heard on every episode of The Learning Chanel’s ‘A Baby Story". Somebody nearby just gave birth to a baby….and she was next.