Ch 21 Awake

My eyelids fluttered, and I was barely able to hold them open. Jasmine looked down at me, and I realized I was lying in a bed. I was still in the same bedroom that had been used as an operating room, but the bed was on the opposite side from the operating table.

"Where…," I struggled to get the words out. "…is he?"

"Right here," Jasmine assured me as I blinked my eyes slowly. Rolf came into view and reached down to take my hand.

"N…No," I slurred. "Not him." My eyelids felt heavy and I had to force them to stay open. The fog in my head was slowly clearing, but it hadn't all dissipated yet.

"Who then?" Rolf's face showed a mixture of confusion and hurt. He watched me while I mustered the strength to speak again.

"The…," I took a breath, "baby."

"The baby?" Jasmine asked from behind Rolf.

"He's still…," Rolf moved his hand, which had embraced mine, over my stomach. As he moved my hand, there was a distinguished rise in the blanket that I realized was caused by my own abdomen.

"Oh!" I said, surprised. I blinked my eyes a few times, as they were getting clearer. I had to pause for a minute to figure out that I had been in the dream. How much actually happened and how much did I imagine?

"Megan had to sedate you when the baby's heart rate became elevated. Do you remember?" Rolf explained. I had known this possibility existed. Megan had explained to me the precautions she would take, and the drugs she had on hand in case I did need to be made unconscious in the middle of the surgery. But it had been a very remote possibility, and after the actual implantation had gone so well I hadn't really even considered I might need to be sedated later in the surgery.

"Sort of," I answered. "What happened?"

"Megan is on her way back up. She wanted to see you as soon as you woke," Jasmine told me. I sat up a little and looked around the room. There were several chairs sitting around the bed, but Rolf and Jasmine were the only people in the room with me.

Why won't they just tell me what happened? They were there too.

"Here, have a sip of water," Rolf said as he brought a small cup with a straw to my lips. "Not too much yet until the anesthesia wears off."

As Rolf pulled the cup away from my lips, Megan walked through the door with Michael and Robert.

Megan explained to me that when my heart rate spiked, so did the baby's and due to what appeared to be trauma to the baby she quickly had to make the decision to sedate me. I understood the need for this, but it wasn't yet clear to me what had actually caused the incident in the first place.

As soon as she had switched the UV light on, the baby had responded. Megan's best guess was that the sudden growth spurt had just overloaded his system temporarily because as soon as I was sedated and the light was turned off both of our heart rates started to slow and within minutes returned to normal.

"Does this mean it isn't going to work?" I wanted to know desperately. This had been our only hope of having a somewhat normal pregnancy.

"No," Megan reassured me. "It did work."

Alexander had noted that a similar, yet less extreme, reaction had occurred when Jasmine's unborn body had been subjected the sunlight, but he had assumed that was from the shock of her mother being cut open.

Megan went on to tell me that after our heart rates had stabilized, they had turned the light on again. Once again the baby's heart rate had gone up, but not as dramatically and not as high. I had been on the table for nearly four hours, with the UV light on much of that time. They had started out with short intervals and increased, monitoring me and the baby throughout. Megan had decided that a second light needed to be implanted, so that I had one on each side of my stomach and the baby could get as much exposure as possible.

She pulled the blankets down and lifted my gown to show me the barely noticeable cord lines under the skin that trailed around to the back of each hip. Under the skin at end location, there was a small lump which contained a switch. I would turn the lights on periodically. This way I wouldn't need another surgery until the birth.

After this explanation, I looked at my stomach. Mostly the large addition had been bandages, but I could tell that it was larger than before the surgery.

"He has been exposed to an extreme amount of UV today so you don't want to turn them on for about a week," Megan told me. "You're at about 18 weeks now. We'll just monitor you and adjust the UV exposure time to keep the pregnancy moving at a normal rate."

And that's exactly what we did. Megan thought that after that first bit of trauma, the baby could actually handle growing at an even faster rate but I couldn't. My body was not growing from the UV light, but from the need to accommodate the baby. Therefore, we couldn't make him grow too fast or my body would not adjust.

In fact, the week hiatus was more for my body to catch up than anything.