Welcome to My Little Slice of Hell

Not long. Just a fraction of a second… the kind of pause that a non-medical person would never catch. But you caught it, because you’d done it yourself, in that same chair, on the other side of this exact equation.

“Let’s give it a few minutes and try again,” she said, her voice perfectly level. She’s pretending to be calm, I know that tone. You put your book face-down on your lap and didn’t pick it up again.

The second reading was worse. Your heart starts beating fast. 171 over 112. She was already reaching for the door before you’d fully processed the number. “I’m going to get Dr. Al-Hashimi.”

The room felt very small suddenly. You looked down at your stomach and at the monitor strapped across it, the steady line of her heartbeat scrolling across the screen, fast and even and completely unbothered. You caught your reflection in the window and pressed your hand flat against the side of your belly.

“Okay,” you said quietly, to both of you. “Okay. We’re okay, baby.”

Dr. Al-Hashimi came in four minutes later with the kind of calm that told you she’d already reviewed the chart on her way down the hall.

She sat across from you, which is what you did when the conversation required it, and you felt the floor shift slightly beneath you even though you were sitting perfectly still.

“Your levels have been trending up over the last ten days,” she said. “Today’s reading, combined with the labs from Thursday — the protein levels in particular — means we’ve crossed the threshold for severe range.” She held your gaze. “We’re not sending you home today.”

You nodded. You’d known, somewhere in the back of your mind, since the first reading. You know the next steps. “Induction?”

“We’re going to get you admitted and start the process this afternoon. Thirty-eight weeks is a strong position to be in. She’s essentially full term and monitoring after delivery will be routine.”

All the right facts. All the right reassurances. You’d said every single one of these sentences yourself.

“Can I call Jack?” You took a deep breath.

“Of course.” She put her hand briefly over yours. “I’ll give you a few minutes.”

Jack picked up on the second ring.

“Hey, how did it—”

“I need you to come. I’m still here and—” Your voice came out steadier than you expected. “They’re admitting me. My numbers spiked. They want to induce today.”

Silence. One beat, two.

“I’m on my way.” No questions, no reassurances, no wasted words. Just that. “Don’t move.”

“I’m literally about to be admitted to the hospital, Jack, where am I going to—”

But he’d already hung up.

He arrived two minutes later and came through the door of the room they’d moved you to and stopped for just a second when he saw you — propped up against the hospital pillows, IV already in, the fetal monitor strapped across your middle, the blood pressure cuff cycling automatically every fifteen minutes.

His eyes moved across all of it quickly and professionally and then landed on your face, and whatever the professional assessment had told him, it was your face that made something in his own briefly come undone.

Jack crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed and pulled you in without saying anything, and you felt him breathe — one long, deliberate inhale — against the top of your head. God, he smelled good.

“I’m okay,” you said into his shoulder.

“I know,” he said, in the voice that meant he was still deciding whether to believe it.

“She’s okay. Her heart rate has been perfect all morning.”

“I know.” His hand moved to your stomach, spread wide and warm. “I saw the strip on the way in.”

Of course he had.

You pulled back to look at him. The carefully maintained composure was all there. His jaw set, eyes clear, the particular stillness of a man who had spent twenty years learning to be the calm in other people’s storms and he had become yours. But you knew his face better than you knew anything, and underneath all of it he was terrified. You were too. You knew by experience how fast these situations could go sideways.

“Hey,” you said quietly.

He looked at you.

“We’re ahead of it. You said so yourself.”

Something flickered across his face. “I did say that.”

“And you’re never wrong.”

The corner of his mouth moved slightly. “Let’s not overstate it.”

You leaned your head back against his shoulder, and he kept his hand where it was, and for a few minutes you just listened to the sound of your daughter’s heartbeat on the monitor. Steady, insistent, completely indifferent to the fear in the room.

The induction began at 2:17 in the afternoon.

By evening, things were progressing slowly in the way that first inductions often did — which the nurses explained cheerfully and which you already knew and which did not make the waiting any easier. Your blood pressure was being checked every thirty minutes. The medication was doing what it was supposed to do. Everything was, technically, going according to plan.

Jack hadn’t left the room once.

He’d called his parents and yours from the chair beside your bed, keeping his voice low and steady, giving the same careful update to each: “she’s stable, baby’s doing well, we’re in good hands, we’ll call when there’s something to tell you.” He did the same with all your friends who were currently working downstairs: Robby, Trinity, Mel, Cassie, and the rest of our hospital family.

You watched him hang up the last call and sit for a moment in the quiet, his elbows on his knees and his head slightly bowed, and you thought about how much energy it took to hold yourself together for everyone else.

“Jack.” He looked up. “Come here.”

He moved back to the bed and you shifted over as much as the monitor and the IV line would allow, and he sat beside you, close enough that his arm was against yours.

“You’re allowed to be scared,” you said. “You don’t have to do the voice.”

He was quiet for a moment. “What voice?”

“The calm one. The one you use for patients. You don’t have to use it with me.”

He exhaled slowly through his nose. Outside the room, the maternity ward carried on — footsteps, a distant phone, the soft rhythm of a hospital at night.

“If I stop using the voice,” he said carefully, “I’m not sure what’s underneath it right now.”

You reached for his hand.

“I know what’s underneath it,” you said. “And it’s okay. We can be scared together.”

He turned his hand over and held yours tightly, and for the first time all day the composure slipped just slightly… not much, barely visible, just a tightening around his eyes and a single slow exhale that carried more weight than anything he’d said.

“I keep thinking about last time,” he admitted quietly. “I know this is different. I know that logically. But I keep—”

“Me too,” you said. “Every day.”

He looked at you.

“Every single day of this pregnancy,” you said. “I’ve just been living there. And I think maybe that’s okay. I think that’s just what this is and will be until she’s an adult… being terrified and doing it anyway because she’s worth it.”

“Even when she’s an adult I’m going to be worried.” Jack added and chuckled lightly. He brought your hand to his lips and held it there.

°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･

At 9:46pm, the monitor alarmed.

Not the slow, cycling alarm of a routine alert — the sharp, insistent kind that brought a nurse through the door in under thirty seconds, eyes already on the strip.

Her heart rate had dropped. Not catastrophically, not yet, but enough… a deceleration that sat at the bottom of the screen like a held breath, and didn’t come back up the way it should have.

You felt Jack go absolutely still beside you.

The nurse called for the midwife, her voice professionally calm, and within ninety seconds the room had filled in the quiet, efficient way that medical rooms fill when something requires immediate attention — another nurse, the midwife, and then our friend Dr. Al-Hashimi herself moved through the door, coming straight from the ER with her eyes already on the monitor.

“Talk to me,” she said to the nurse, and they exchanged information in the shorthand of people who had done this many times, and Jack was standing now, on the other side of your bed, his hand on your shoulder, and you were watching the strip and watching Dr. Al-Hashimi’s face and trying to remember how to breathe and all your medical training.

The heart rate came back up.

Slowly, and then all at once, the line climbed back to where it should be and the monitor settled, and the room took a collective breath.

“There she is,” the midwife said, almost to herself.

You put both hands on your belly and felt the tears come before you could stop them — not from sadness, just from the sudden release of ten seconds of pure terror, the kind that left your whole body shaking slightly in its aftermath. Your daughter was so loved and wanted. She had to be okay.

“Hey.” Jack was at your side immediately, both hands on your face. “Hey. She’s okay, sweetheart. Look at the strip — she’s okay.”

“I know,” you said, lips trembling. “I know, I’m not — I’m fine, I just—”

“I know,” he said, and his voice finally cracked, just slightly, on the second word.

You looked at each other.

Dr. Al-Hashimi was speaking and explaining the deceleration, what had likely caused it, the adjustment she was making to your positioning and the IV line, what they’d be watching for over the next hour. You heard all of it and registered all of it.

But mostly you were looking at Jack, and he was looking at you, and the fear that had been living quietly in the corner of the room since you miscarried the first time was still right there between you now, out in the open, and somehow that was better than pretending it wasn’t.

“One more night,” Dr. Al-Hashimi said, from somewhere nearby. “And then tomorrow we meet her.”

Jack pressed his forehead against yours.

“Tomorrow,” he said softly.

You closed your eyes and nodded and held on to him. Tomorrow you’ll meet your daughter.

—

I promise the angst will be ending soon. Not just yet, but soon. Thanks for reading and for all your support. I’m touched that this story resonates with you. I love Jack so much. See you next chapter! (if you want to be added to the taglist let me know). <3