Название: An Honest Life
Автор: Dana Corbit
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
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The crib against the wall caught her attention. Inside its Plexiglas part referred to as a “bucket,” she imagined a tiny baby squirming under the warm lights. She could see a nurse leaning over the crib, starting to “eye and thigh” him, inserting erythromycin in his eyes to prevent infection and injecting vitamin K in his thigh for blood clotting. Though those two jobs would have been automatic for her, she was strangely certain she wasn’t the RN on duty.
Stranger still, she suspected she was the other woman in her daydream—the one resting on the bed with a man by her side. It was so close, this dream of hers, that she could almost grasp it. Could cradle the sweet baby against her heart. Could lace her fingers with those of the man who touched her hair so gently.
“Hey, Charity, quit daydreaming,” Jenny Lancaster-Porter called from the doorway, grinning at her fellow labor and delivery nurse. “The clerk just put a walk-in in Room 224, and another mom’s taking the chair ride from ER.”
Charity jumped guiltily at being caught imagining things that were becoming closer and closer to impossible. But at that moment they hadn’t seemed unattainable, not when for the first time, she’d imagined herself on the other side of the bed. The one with a family, with joy, with hope for the future.
Jenny snapped her fingers in front of Charity’s face. “Girlfriend, are you coming? These babies can’t wait.”
On command, Charity’s thoughts clicked into focus the way they always did, and she followed at Jenny’s heels. “I’ll take the walk-in. You take the chair.”
Jenny winked. “Already wrote that on the board.”
Both chuckled at Charity’s attempt to hand the precipitous case to her friend and Jenny’s hearty receipt of the gift. Jenny liked her deliveries fast and furious, and Charity didn’t mind the occasional slow and steady, so they had developed a great working rhythm from several years of working shifts together.
“You’ll be on dinner break, your patient and baby settled in for the night, and I’ll still be walking the halls with mine,” Charity said as she turned into Room 224.
Just the opposite proved true, with Charity’s patient crowning within half an hour, and Jenny’s walking the halls for two hours and eventually being sent home after a bout of false labor. Charity had barely had time to get a fetal heart rate and start an IV before the delivery, let alone to record advance directives in case something went wrong or to inquire about nursing or bottle-feeding.
The rest of the shift was equally unpredictable. It was as if every full-term mother who had avoided ruining her Labor Day barbecue had gone into labor just before dawn broke. Staying busy had prevented her from analyzing that earlier daydream. Or how familiar the man in her dream had seemed.
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