That was the problem, she decided grimly as the pain receded. She was having a baby with an idiot. An idiot who loved his computer, thought the sun shone out of the Tipperary hurling team’s collective backsides and had no idea what women had to go through in life. Any of it.
Women understood pain. Or womenwerepain ...? Something like that. She’d read it on Pinterest.
Another pain bloomed inside her.
‘Drive faster!’ she hissed.
Ted broke all the speed limits and, at last, they slid to a halt in front of the Rotunda Hospital in the ambulance bay.
As she was put into a wheelchair at the hospital door, she was half sobbing. ‘My waters broke an hour ago and the baby’s coming,’ she said.
A nurse shooed Ted off to park properly because he wasn’t allowed to abandon the car in the ambulance bay.
‘I am going to have this baby here and now!’ went on Sam, watching with dismay as her husband left. She loved him. She’d been so horrible to him ... he couldn’t go—
‘You probably won’t give birth this quickly on your first,’ soothed the nurse. ‘Let’s see how you’re doing.’
‘No, it’s a week overdue, it’s coming very soon, I can feel it,’ said Sam, who was not feeling remotely soothed.
‘Everyone thinks that, but it’s a first baby and they take time.’
‘No, I do know,’ said Sam wildly. ‘I’m giving birth now, here and now! Get me into the delivery room!’
‘All right, pet, let’s check out how dilated you are.’
Somehow, assisted by two nurses, and a midwife with an even more soothing voice, Sam got onto a bed.
‘It’s coming!’ she shrieked as another pain hit her.
‘It’s not,’ said the midwife calmly as she emerged from between Sam’s legs. ‘You’re only three centimetres dilated.’
‘Three!’
Three centimetres would not let a Barbie doll emerge. Barbie’s insanely perky bosoms would get stuck.
‘Yes, only three, I’m sorry, Sam,’ said the midwife with the awareness of a professional who’d delivered enough babies to know that smugness in delivery rooms did not help anyone.
Three was nothing, Sam knew.Nothing. How could she be in this pain with no sign of a child appearing? What was next? Red-hot pokers of pain?
Ted came back from parking the car as another contraction ripped through Sam.
‘Darling,’ he said, taking her hand.
‘Don’t darling me!’ she yelled, fear coming out as rage. ‘If you ever think you are coming near me again with that ... thatthing,you have another thing coming!’
‘But ... but ... we want this baby,’ muttered Ted, who had read all the baby books with mentions of fury bouncing off the walls in the delivery suite. But not his Sam, surely?
After this long journey of IVF, he was going to help, hold Sam’s hand, man the phone.
Not get screamed at.
‘Relax, dear,’ whispered the midwife to Ted. ‘They all say things like that. In fact, that’s mild. No sex forever or having their bits chopped off is what some partners hear in these rooms, but afterwards, it’s OK, you wait and see.’
‘It’s her birthday,’ Ted said, desperately trying to shift the conversation on from parts of his anatomy he did not want to discuss with strange women. ‘She’s forty.’
‘We know, she’s an elderly primigravida.’
‘I am not elderly!’ said Sam, who had nothing wrong with her hearing even if it felt as if a giant wriggling emu with a bowling ball for a head was trying to emerge from her body,sideways. This could not be normal. There must be something wrong.
