Unknown

SURROGATE FATHER

Rebecca Lang

Nurse Lisa Stanton’s first meeting with Dr. Marcus Blair is less than conventional. Going into premature labor, she’s forced to ask for his help. So it’s a shock, three months later, to find Marcus in charge of the emergency department when Lisa returns to work.

They can’t ignore the attraction flaring between them, and Marcus want to be surrogate father to her baby. But what will happen when the real father appears?

'E
xcuse
me, are you a doctor?'

The man turned, his hand on the latch of the car door, a look of guarded surprise on his face.

'Please, are you a doctor?' the young woman repeated. 'I need help. I'm going to have a baby.'

There was desperation in her voice, making the man pause in his act of unlocking the car that was parked on the ground level of the hospital multi-storey parking lot.

Statistically, he found himself thinking, something like this was bound to happen sooner or later. He straightened up and took in the woman's appearance.

Her face was very pale, distraught, her hair somewhat dishevelled. Understandable. His eyes travelled over her obviously pregnant body which was wrapped in an enveloping thick coat. She clutched the coat to her with gloveless hands that were tight with tension, as well as mottled with cold. Also, she had very obviously been crying.

As his eyes travelled downwards, over her legs which were clothed in sheer, thin stockings—inadequate against the cold of an early December evening in Ontario—down over her shoes, he saw the pool of fluid that had gathered at her feet. Then, as he watched, a thin stream of blood moved slowly down her pale leg and settled in an irregular-shaped blot on the instep of her foot.

Galvanized into action, he reached for her arm. 'Yes, I am a doctor,' he said tersely. 'Come with me.'

As he led her quickly around the back of his car, aware that at any moment she might collapse, he heard her indrawn breath and sensed her pain. A wave of compassion came over him. It came as a relief—sometimes these days he thought he had lost it for ever.

When the door was open he leaned into the car, pressing down the lever that lowered the soft leather back of the passenger seat so that it was almost flat, forming a couch. Women in the last stage of pregnancy shouldn't be out alone, he thought, his irritation not directed at the waif-faced woman but at the absent man who had fathered her child. Where the hell was her husband? He ought to be with her, particularly on a night like this.

By the look of the voluminous cashmere coat she was wearing, the good leather shoes and the smart handbag that she carried, she was not from the ranks of the poor women, some of them homeless, who came into hospital emergency departments in the city's downtown core when they were in labour, having had no antenatal care whatsoever.

No, she was not one of those, he considered. Yet she had something about her.. .that same look, the same aura of aloneness. Yes, she was frightened, like they were under the bravado that they commonly displayed. She did not have that bravado, although her vulnerability was evident. Instead, there was something else about her, an underlying quiet, calm strength.

'Sit there,' he instructed her, standing back and opening the car door wide. 'Sit there, then lie back. You'll feel better with your head down. I'll get you to University Hospital Emergency Department. That's the best thing, I think. Are you from Gresham?'

'Yes... I know the hospital.'

'Good. Take it easy,' he said. He tried to make his voice gentle, reassuring, aware of the risk he was taking with this unknown woman—a risk something like the one he had taken before, with disastrous results. Once was enough—more than enough. To say that the experience had ruined his life was only a slight exaggeration.

'Thank you. I'm very grateful.' Her voice was soft, well modulated, the fear coming through. 'The.. .the baby isn't actually due for another three weeks. I thought I would be all right coming out. I.. .was just sitting in my car, over there...'

As she bent to get into the car, ungainly, awkward, he leaned forward to help her, gripping her arm firmly. That protective gentleness that he felt was the very thing that had got him into trouble. Yet he wouldn't be much of a doctor without it. There were too many doctors who acted like automatons, couldn't deal with the stress of their emotions or denied them altogether. Such individuals ought to be in laboratories torturing rats, he had always thought, doing so-called research.. .

Just be careful, the inner voice warned. Don't flatter yourself with this woman, but just be careful. 'You're bleeding,' he said, his voice more brusque than he had intended. 'How long has that been going on?'

'Not long,' she said quietly as she settled herself into the comfortable seat and lay back. 'Just a few moments. I was in my car, driving along, when the membranes ruptured. So I drove in here. I used to work here, you see... at University Hospital.'

'Before the membranes ruptured, did you have pain?'

'Yes.. .a little. For a while.'

'In what capacity did you work there?' he asked, tucking her coat around her legs quickly and glancing at her abnormally pale face as she lay back and closed her eyes.

'I'm a nurse,' she said faintly.

'How long since the membranes ruptured?' he asked urgently.

'About fifteen minutes, I think. I didn't notice any blood at first. My...my blood pressure's been up a bit lately. But I think that was due to...emotional factors. At least, I thought so at the time...' Her voice trailed away on a gasp of pain.

'Are you having contractions?'

'Yes.'

He slammed the car door, walked quickly round to the driver's side and got in beside her. Adjusting his seat belt, he looked sideways at her face. It had been a while since he had delivered a baby, but it was an art which once learned was never forgotten. Better get her to the emergency department as quickly as possible. He started the engine and put the car into reverse.

She should not be bleeding, not this bright red blood, so early in labour. Not in a normal labour. Maybe she had a placenta praevia, the placenta too low down in the uterus so that it partly covered the cervix and then started to bleed as the cervix dilated at the start of labour. If it continued the baby could be stillborn, deprived of oxygen.

On the other hand, it could be a placenta abruptio, a premature separation of the placenta, he thought, going over in his mind with lightning speed all the possibilities of an inappropriate ante-partum haemorrhage. After all, she had mentioned high blood pressure...

'Maybe I should have gone to the emergency department myself,' the woman said apologetically, 'but I just wanted to get off the street quickly. I.. .thought I might faint, you see, at the wheel.'

'Yes,' he said. 'You did the right thing. There are lots of doctors passing through here, I imagine. We'll be there in a few minutes. Hang in there!'

The powerful car made scarcely a sound as he eased it in line behind two other cars at the check-out point, where he would show his visiting MD pass and drive out without having to waste time in paying.

'I'm so grateful.' the woman whispered again. 'I don't want to lose this baby. I think I'd go mad if I lost it.'

When he glanced at her she still had her eyes closed. She might have been talking to herself.

'My name's Stanton... Lisa Stanton,' she said, looking at him. 'I'm actually booked to have the baby at the Raeburn Clinic, not University Hospital, so they won't have any of my records here.'

'Can't be helped,' he said, showing his temporary pass at the check-out and driving smoothly out to the street where the tarmac was slick with rainwater. It glistened in the glow of streetlamps which were just coming on in the early dusk. 'I don't think you have time to get to the Raeburn Clinic.'

'No...' she agreed ruefully, a wealth of meaning in that one word. He even heard a tinge of humour and admired her for it.

University Hospital, Gresham, filled a whole city block, a conglomerate of buildings, some quite old and some very recent. The emergency department was only a few hundred yards from where they were now, on a street at right angles to where they were. They just had to drive to the intersection and make a right turn. Sometimes that intersection could be busy, he reflected, now that the rush hour was on—which made him realize that he had nothing much to go home for, except to relax.

'I'm Marcus Blair,' he said, as the car accelerated smoothly into the stream of traffic on the side-street. For a moment he took his eyes off the road to look at her, and saw her watching him. It was then he noticed, by the light of the streetlamps, that her eyes were blue, a beautiful clear blue that contrasted so well with her pale skin and thick auburn hair.

'You work at University Hospital, Dr Blair?' she asked.

'No, not yet. I'm planning to in the very near future. I was just visiting.'

At the traffic lights he made a quick right turn. In a matter of seconds they were pulling into the short semicircular driveway in front of the main entrance to the emergency department, under cover of the concrete roof awning. An ambulance was parked ahead of them.

'Don't move yet,' he said, 'I'll get a stretcher organized.'

'Thank you. ..' Lisa Stanton watched his tall figure striding away from her through the automatic double doors. Thank God she had met him, that he had come along just when she so desperately needed someone. If he hadn't come she would have had to pull out again into the stream of traffic or ask the attendant at the parking garage to call her an ambulance.

She felt safe with this man, Dr Marcus Blair. Presumably he wasn't an obstetrician—he would have said. As she closed her eyes against the harsh glare of the fluorescent lights another contraction started in her uterus and she tried to relax, to go with it, as she waited. Very deliberately, since she had first noticed the blood, she had tried not to think about the possible causes of the bleeding, even though she understood the implications only too well. To prevent an upsurge of panic she had concentrated instead on trying not to faint when light-headedness had come over her as she had looked around desperately for help.

Now she found that it helped to keep Dr Blair's image in her mind—to concentrate on his face, with its dark, penetrating eyes, the firm, decisive features, the crisp, dark hair, cut short. ..

He seemed so dependable, not like Rich— Oh, damn! She had vowed not to say his name, not even to herself, while she was giving birth, not even to think about him if she could possibly help it. Because if she thought of him she would expect something of him, would be tempted to get in touch with him somehow—and that would only confirm what she already knew. It was all over with him; there would be nothing forthcoming from that direction. It didn't matter—she could manage quite well without him. This way, maybe she could think of the baby as all hers.

Steeling herself against another, sharper pain and willing herself not to tense her muscles, she realized that it would be impossible not to let thoughts of Richard sneak into her consciousness. After all, it was normal for the father of a baby to be there when that baby was born. Or was she living in some sort of dream world that she applied to herself when many other women in the real world, she knew from experience, often had something different?

There was a flurry of activity and voices. The car door was flung open. 'You don't have to do anything,' Dr Blair instructed her. 'We're going to lift you out onto the stretcher.' There were four other people with him—two were porters.

Vaguely, Lisa was aware that she was bleeding again as they lifted her onto the stretcher. All at once she felt faint and slightly nauseated. The stretcher began to move in under the bright lights as the emergency department staff continued to pile blankets on her. She lay flat, with no pillow, so that as she was moved along the ceiling was all that she could see, with its lights like bright, staring eyes. They added to her sudden sense of disorientation.

'Dr Blair?' she said, surprised at the smallness of her own voice.

'I'm still here,' he said, coming into her line of vision as he bent over her, walking beside the stretcher. 'Almost there. I've got the senior obstetrics resident lined up to see you, and there's a staff obstetrician on his way, apparently.'

'Would you stay with me...please?'

The stretcher made a sharp turn, then they were in an examination room behind curtains. Lisa found herself being lifted onto a different kind of stretcher. There seemed to be doctors and nurses everywhere.

She put up a hand to Dr Blair who stood beside her, overcome with a fear that she would be left alone. In the few minutes that she had known him he seemed to represent normality, a sane compass point in a world that was becoming unpredictable. An irrational fear was coming over her that if she lost sight of him she would somehow sink down into a vortex of spiralling circumstances over which she had no control.. .

'Sure,' he said, his warm brown eyes locking with hers for a second. 'I'm going to be right here.'