A Sea of Black Pain
“I knew it! I knew this was going to happen!” Amanda moaned.
Joan whirled at her daughter’s cry of horror. Her eyes assessed the situation and the flipper fell from her fingers. The metal part clattered as it hit the floor then it stopped and the kitchen was filled with silence.
Her mother reacted quickly, shoving the frying pan off to the cold side of the stove. She rushed over to Amanda and took her hand. She blinked hard, purposely banishing the fear from her eyes.
“Okay. This might still be okay. Sometimes babies can take hours…. days…”
“That doesn’t make me feel any better,” Amanda moaned. “We are stuck in this damn cabin, we have no idea when the blizzard is going to end. It might be days! Days! And after it’s over the roads will be a mess and we’d have to wait for the plows to be out. The highways are probably closed right now! Even if it takes days, which is a horrifying thought, it would still happen too fast!”
“Take a deep breath,” her mother coached. “In and out.” She demonstrated, taking a few deep, cleansing breaths for her own benefit.
Amanda tried to take a couple shaky breaths, but the more she tried, the worse it was. Her chest filled up with panic, her body flooded with adrenaline. Tears pricked her eyes and she couldn’t blink fast enough to keep them from spilling down her cheeks. She wrung her hands in front of her nervously, twisting her sweaty palms together.
“What are we going to do, mom? This is insane! If we need help it won’t even be able to get to us! I was just telling Jason this was going to happen and now look! My water just broke all over the kitchen floor!”
“It’s two weeks early…”
“I don’t care how early it is, this just happened! False labor doesn’t include your water breaking like that, last time I checked! And it’s not like the baby has a bloody calendar with the day checked off!”
“Okay, okay…” Her mom embarked in another round of deep breaths, trying to get herself under control.
Amanda was finally able to force some air into her own lungs. She breathed shakily, in and out, in and out, concentrating on the ebb and flow of her breath. The cabin was quiet, so very quiet. The wind howled violently outside, the snow lashing at the windows, little crystal shards pelting the glass.
“What are we going to do?” Amanda asked again. Her voice was tiny and lost, a plea for help she knew wasn’t coming.
Joan finally straightened her shoulders and a new resolution passed over her face. “Well, we’ve watched enough of those videos. You watched the home birth ones too, just to see what it was all about. We have all the hot water we need. You have a tub if you need to get in it. You have a bed that we can prepare. You wanted a natural birth anyway, with no drugs.”
“Not like I have a choice now,” Amanda ground out.
“No. You don’t.” Her mom took her hand and squeezed hard, grounding them both. “You don’t have a choice. You’re right. The baby is going to come and we just have to prepare ourselves.”
“What if something goes wrong?”
“At your last doctor appointment they said he was facing the right way.”
“He could have turned.”
“I doubt it. If that happens though, we’ll call. They’ll have to send an ambulance out.”
“They can’t if the highway is closed.”
“Hopefully in a couple hours the storm will let up. They might be able to open it as early as tonight, if that’s the case.”
“And you said sometimes this may take hours.” Amanda groaned. “Hours of the worst pain of my life with no reassurance that this baby will be born with a nurse or doctor within a sixty mile radius. Hours of uncertainty, hours where something could go wrong.”
“We’ll just have to do the best we can. I know what to do. You know what to do. Your body knows what to do.”
“I just wish we had a home Doppler or something so we could hear the baby’s heartbeat, in case something does go wrong.” She looked pleadingly at her mom, but for once Joan had no answers.
“The best thing to do is stay calm. We’ll get through this, honey, I promise. Together. You just have to hang in there and remember to breathe.”
Right. Breathe. Like that’s going to fix any of this.
Amanda didn’t have a chance to respond. At that moment the front door banged open and Jason, coated in snow and ice, stumbled into the cabin. The two women waited anxiously, not daring to move or speak, until he walked into the kitchen and saw for himself what they were all in for.