From Midwife To Mummy. Deanne Anders

way to the ER?” he asked Lana as she ended her call.

      For a second she just stared at him. Then, shaking her head, she turned down another hallway. “Come on, I’ll show you,” she said, not looking back to see if he was following her.

      “There’s a thirty-three-week antepartum coming in by ambulance,” he said when he caught up with her.

      “She’s thirty-four weeks and six days. That was her husband on the phone,” she said.

      He knew those six days could make a big difference in the outcome of the delivery.

      “Your patient?” he asked as they boarded an empty elevator to the bottom floor.

      “Her name is Taylor. Her husband Dean says that her water suddenly broke and contractions started immediately. She has a history of preterm delivery and was on bedrest.”

      “How early were her other deliveries?”

      “She’s only had one. Her son Phillip was born at thirty-six weeks.”

      Trent waited for Lana to leave the elevator, then followed her through the double doors leading into the emergency room. Multiple glass-doored rooms opened up from what looked like the hub of the department, where nurses and doctors could be seen in front of monitors and answering phones.

      “This way,” Lana said as she turned left. “The department is basically set up with the trauma rooms on this end and the less urgent patients on the other.”

      She stopped in front of a large monitor set up at the end of the hallway then preceded into a room labeled Trauma Four.

      As he entered the large room he noted the baby-warming unit set up in the corner, and the nurses around them opening up the delivery set on a stand near an empty stretcher.

      He grabbed Lana’s arm and moved her back as a couple of emergency responders pushed a stretcher into the room, holding a pregnant woman panting and gripping the hands of the female responder.

      As he gowned and gloved up he listened as the other responder gave his report to the room. “Spontaneous rupture of membranes twenty minutes ago with contractions starting immediately. Contractions now every two minutes. Vital signs with blood pressure elevated and heart-rate tachy at one-twenty.”

      He watched as Lana, also gowned and gloved, helped move the patient to the trauma bed then immediately did a vaginal exam, all the time talking to her patient in a calm voice.

      “Is there time to move her upstairs?” he asked. He knew everyone would feel better if they could do the delivery on the obstetric unit.

      “Nope,” Lana said. “This one is coming right now.”

      A young nurse he was sure he had been introduced to earlier as belonging to the NICU team laid a blanket over his arms and he moved over to where Lana stood.

      A breath later and Lana was holding out a small baby for the sobbing mother to see, then reaching for clamps and scissors as she made fast work of freeing the baby from its cord.

      Rubbing its back to stimulate a cry, she turned toward him. Pausing for a second, she gave him an assessing look, then with a hesitant nod she handed the baby girl to him.

      He took over from where Lana had stopped, and rubbed the baby’s back as he did his assessment. A small cry started as he reached the warmer, and had turned into a howl by the time he laid her down.

      The whole room broke out in cheers. He looked back to where Lana was comforting the new mom and saw big smiles on both their faces.

      “Sounds like she has a good set of lungs to me,” he said.

      He waited for the nurses to bundle her up, then brought the squalling baby to its mother and introduced himself.

      “She’s a little early, so I’d like to take her up to the nursery to observe her a little closer, but I’ll get her back to you as soon as possible.”

      “But she’s going to be okay?” the new mother asked.

      “Her color looks good...she’s going to get a seven and an eight on her Apgar. She was a bit slow starting up, but she’s got the hang of it now, I’d say.”

      “As soon as you’re ready I’ll take you up to her,” Lana told Taylor.

      Trent laid the baby in the transport crib—she had calmed down some once she had been swaddled into a striped pink blanket—and followed the assigned nurse up to the nursery.

      Considering everything that might have happened, he and Lana had managed to keep their personal issues out their jobs, thought Trent. He’d consider that a win for now.

      He had no explanation for the way he responded to this woman. Since their first meeting thoughts of her had filled his mind, along with a deep pang of guilt at being the one who would to separate her from the little girl he could see she loved very much. But his agenda was set and nothing could change it now. He’d take care of his niece, just as his brother had asked him to, and he’d find a way to work with this midwife without everything around them exploding, while at the same time using the opportunity to find out everything he might be able to use in the custody battle.

      He had to stop this adoption from going through. He wouldn’t let his father ruin his niece’s life the way he had ruined his brother’s and mother’s. He would protect her from his father no matter what it took, and once he had custody of his niece his brother’s will would make sure his old man never had the power to hurt anyone again.

      * * *

      Lana took her place at Ms. Nelson’s desk and waited for the social worker to finish her phone call. For once she had made it early for an appointment, and she planned on taking advantage of the time she had before Trent arrived.

      Why the social worker felt it necessary for the two of them to meet together with her she didn’t understand. The man rubbed her the wrong way, and she had spent the last few days doing her best to avoid him at the hospital, but there had been no way to get out of this meeting.

      She would have to keep control of her temper, no matter how hard it was to stay in control when Trent Montgomery was in the room. Making a good impression with the social worker was too important. And, while her lawyer had given her his opinion of Trent’s case for custody, she knew that a lot of the custody decision would be based on the social worker’s investigation.

      “Sorry about that, Lana,” said Karen Nelson as she hung up the phone. “It’s been a busy day today. I know this might sound cold, with your situation, but I just wish every child had two adults like you and Mr. Montgomery wanting them.”

      “That bad?” Lana asked.

      She knew that there were a lot of children in foster homes who would never be adopted. She had seen it in her practice as a midwife, when one of her patients might give birth to a child she couldn’t take care of and the child would go into the system. Then the mother wouldn’t agree to give up her rights to the child, making it impossible for the child to be adopted, so they just continued to stay in the foster system year after year.

      Thankfully Chloe had made it clear in her notarized letter, and later in her correspondence with the court, that she wanted Maggie to be adopted. If only more mothers like her could see that they wouldn’t be letting their children down but instead opening up a better option for them.

      “Yeah,” the social worker said as she finger-combed the back of her hair, took a deep breath and then seemed to reset herself back into work mode as she started going through the files on her desk.

      Not for the first time Lana wondered why someone would ever go into social work—especially in Children and Families. The pressure to ensure the safety of all the children they were responsible for must be mind-boggling.

      “While we wait for Dr. Montgomery to arrive let’s talk about how you’re doing. I know this isn’t easy for you. Are you hanging in there okay?”

      “I know