LITMIR.BIZ

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me that she’s thirty-eight, but I’d say she’s much closer to sixty.’

      ‘What?’ Leah gaped at her, hands suspended in mid-scrub. ‘You’re joking! She probably just looks a bit…shattered after carrying a double load around for so many months.’

      ‘You could be right,’ Sally said dubiously. ‘See what you think when you see her. Ashraf’s not too happy about any of it. We’ve got absolutely no previous notes and she’s being extremely cagey about where she had her treatment, and he’s in charge of her anaesthesia.’

      ‘Not another one!’ exclaimed David as he joined Leah at the sink. He’d obviously heard enough of the conversation as he’d come in to pick up on what was happening. ‘We had one like this at my last post. Apparently she’d had extensive cosmetic surgery so that she could use her niece’s passport for identification as she was well beyond the age limits for properly regulated IVF. We never did find out where she’d been treated and we nearly lost her to eclampsia.’

      ‘Oh, boy, am I glad I invited you to this little party,’ Leah groaned. ‘By the way, should I make the introductions? David ffrench, new head of our little domain, meet Sally Ling, midwife extraordinaire.’

      ‘I take it this is what’s called being thrown in at the deep end,’ David commented as he took his turn at having the ties fastened at the back of his gown, then held his hands out for gloves.

      ‘We wouldn’t like you to think you were going to be bored here, so we thought we’d lay on a bit of entertainment,’ Sally quipped, taking another look into the room behind her. ‘I think Ashraf’s nearly ready for you to begin, but he doesn’t look happy.’

      ‘Too right, Ashraf’s not happy!’ exclaimed the man in question, his dark eyes firmly fixed on the array of monitors grouped at his end of the table. ‘Some things are just not right.’

      ‘Is there a problem with her anaesthesia?’ Leah heard the sharp edge of concern in David’s voice.

      ‘You mean, apart from the fact that her blood pressure’s too high and her lungs aren’t the best?’ he said wryly. ‘No, what I meant was that I reckon we can add at least twenty years to the age the patient’s given us, and a woman in her fifties or sixties should be looking forward to grandchildren, the way nature intended. There are sound physiological reasons why there should be age limits for IVF. And it’s a multiple birth!’ he finished, the words almost completely incomprehensible as his accent became stronger and stronger in his passion.

      ‘You’ll get no argument from me,’ David said grimly as he painted the grossly swollen abdomen preparatory to the incision. ‘And to turn up obviously intending to leave us completely in the dark about the details of her pregnancy…!’

      He didn’t bother finishing the sentence, but Leah knew he didn’t need to when everyone in the room knew just how much that omission could affect the outcome of what they were doing.

      ‘Is everybody ready?’ he asked, and Leah threw one last look around the assembled staff. Apart from those grouped around the operating table, there were two teams waiting in the background with the high-tech Perspex incubators for the other two tiny individuals who would hopefully be joining them in the room soon. What they were going to do if both babies needed high-dependency nursing was another problem entirely. There were never enough beds or specially trained staff to cope, and they would need to do some serious juggling with the babies already in the unit to cope with just one seriously sick preemie. A second one would probably have to face a life-threatening dash to whichever NICU had the nearest free HDU bed. She’d probably have to spend several hours on the phone begging and pleading…

      But that was in the future. First they had to deliver the babies.

      ‘Ready,’ she confirmed as she turned back to the table. Those striking eyes were waiting for her, somehow all the more potent for the fact that they were all she could see of him above his disposable mask. For just a second it almost felt as if the two of them had made some sort of silent connection but then he had his hand out ready to receive the scalpel, and when he immediately applied it to their patient’s skin in an expert arc she knew she must have been mistaken.

      It was lovely to watch him work, she thought, admiring the efficient way he’d exposed the uterus. Without a word needing to be spoken, she was ready to zap the inevitable bleeders then stood poised with suction as he carefully chose the site for the second incision. The last thing they needed was to injure one of the babies with an injudicious cut.

      Amniotic fluid gushed out of the widening aperture and he had to pause for a moment before he could insert two fingers into the gap as a guide, positioning them between the wall of the uterus and the babies it contained to enable him to continue cutting.

      ‘It’s all arms and legs in here,’ he muttered as he inserted one long-fingered hand through the incision. ‘Ah! Gotcha! Leah?’ he nodded towards the exposed belly above the incision.

      She placed one hand on the strangely brown flesh and waited for his signal, but he hardly needed her assistance, the baby’s head emerging cradled in his palm and the rest of the spindly body following in a rapid slither.

      ‘It’s a girl!’ Leah announced as the cord was cut and she immediately turned to place the wriggling infant into the waiting warmed blanket held out by Sally just as she let out her first wail.

      ‘One down, one to go,’ David said as he inserted his hand again, this time emerging with a tiny foot and going back to find the other one of the pair. ‘Come on, sunshine,’ he said encouragingly. ‘There’s a lot of people out here waiting to meet you.’

      Leah smiled behind her mask, once more poised for the nod that would come if he needed help to get the baby’s head out into the world.

      ‘It’s another girl,’ she said, the sex of the baby all too obvious in such an undignified position, then it was time to cut the cord and hand her little charge over to the second waiting team.

      She turned back, expecting to find David dealing with the clean removal of two placentas, but found him scowling darkly.

      ‘I don’t believe it!’ he exclaimed. ‘There’s a third one in here!’

      ‘What!’ Leah gasped, unable to believe her ears.

      For a second nobody moved, then they all spoke at once.

      ‘You’re joking!’

      ‘We’ll need another team with an incubator. Hurry.’

      ‘Her blood pressure’s dropping.’

      It was the final voice that silenced them all, and while Leah knew that there was frantic activity behind her as extra help was summoned from the NICU, she was focusing solely on David.

      If she hadn’t been so close to him for the last half-hour she probably wouldn’t have noticed the new urgency in his movements, but, as it was, she could almost feel the tension emanating from him.

      ‘Come on, come on!’ she heard him mutter under his breath, almost growling with frustration.

      Perhaps his hands were too large for the job, even though they were relatively slender for a man. Perhaps her smaller ones would help—anything to bring the unexpected third baby out successfully.

      ‘Do you want me to—?’

      ‘Got it!’ he exclaimed, interrupting her offer before it had been made. ‘It was a transverse lie and the poor little thing had been squashed by its sisters trying to get out.’

      Even as he was speaking he was lifting the tiny scrap out of its mother’s body, and Leah’s heart clenched when she saw the state the infant was in.

      ‘He’s terribly floppy!’ she exclaimed, already reaching out to take the precious burden. ‘Is he breathing?’

      She didn’t really want to pass the tiny being over, all her protective instincts demanding she take care of it herself, but with Ashraf’s renewed warning that they needed

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