Hotel Vendome

The doctor was waiting for them at the hospital, and they got Natalie to Labor and Delivery just as the first serious pains started, and she was surprised by how strong they were. But once her water broke, the doctor had told her that she might go into hard labor very quickly, which seemed to be what was happening now. And she was clinging tightly to Hugues’s hand. He was quietly reassuring her and helped her into the bed, where they examined her and she immediately cried out in pain.

“You’re already dilated to eight centimeters,” the doctor explained to her. “You must have been having contractions all night.” They wanted her to have some contractions before the C-section, to get the babies ready to breathe when they were born.

“I’ve had so many lately, and they kick so much, it’s hard to tell,” Natalie said as another pain hit, and the doctor checked her again, and this time she screamed, as Hugues winced, watching her. It looked excruciating to him. Miriam hadn’t let him be there when Heloise was born, so this was the first delivery he’d seen.

“We’re not going to be able to stop it now,” the doctor said to Hugues and Natalie. “With the water broken, there’s a risk of infection, and she dilated too quickly. I’d like to see if we could slow it down a little, so we can get some medicine into you.” They wanted to give her an IV, to protect the babies’ lungs, as they weren’t fully mature. “Let’s see if we can buy a little time.” They wanted to get two bags of IV fluid into her, and the medication for the babies’ lungs. And the doctor explained to Hugues and Natalie that the best way to slow her labor a little bit would be to give her an epidural, if it wasn’t already too late. They would need it for the C-section anyway, since they weren’t going to let her deliver naturally. And if it was too late for the epidural, they’d have to put her out completely, which they didn’t want to do.

They got an anesthesiologist into the room and had him administer the epidural, through a needle in her spine. It was painful for Natalie, but once it was in place, she stopped feeling the contractions, and eventually they slowed down. It was giving them the time they needed to get the babies ready to enter the world.

Natalie was lying on her side, looking exhausted and worried. She had been poked and prodded and examined, and she was worried for their babies. A fetal monitor was reporting all three heartbeats, and Natalie lay quietly, holding Hugues’s hand, as tears slid down her cheeks.

“I’m scared,” she whispered to him, “for them, not for me.”

“It’s going to be fine.” She wanted to believe him, but she didn’t. There was so much that could still go wrong. And by eight in the morning they had gotten everything into her that she and the babies needed, and they lightened up on the epidural, and as soon as they did, Natalie was immediately in pain. There seemed to be no way to get through this easily, and Hugues hated that for her. But the doctor still wanted her to have some more contractions to get the babies’ lungs ready to breathe. She assured them that she wasn’t going to leave her in labor for long, and they would do the C-section soon. Hugues thought it looked like the worst of both worlds, a painful labor and then a cesarean section, which meant major surgery. They examined her again then, which only made it all worse.

“I want to go home,” she said to Hugues as she burst into tears. He wanted to take her home too, but with their babies in their arms, safe and sound. And for now they needed to be here.

Two more doctors entered the room shortly after, and half a dozen nurses. The epidural was stepped up, and things started to move very quickly, as they rolled Natalie onto a gurney between contractions and rolled her down to surgery, with Hugues holding her hand and the whole team following. Because she was having triplets, there was a lot more going on than usual. With hormone treatments and IVF, they were seeing many more multiple births, and three was still a reasonable number. They had delivered quadruplets the day before.

Once they were in the surgical suite, everything moved quickly, too quickly for Natalie to even know what was going on. They turned the epidural up and numbed her completely. Her stomach was being swabbed, three pediatricians came in, three incubators appeared out of nowhere, and a sheet was put up just past her shoulders so she couldn’t see what was going on, and they asked Hugues to stand near her head. Both her arms were strapped onto boards with IVs into them, so he could no longer hold her hand, but he bent to kiss her face, and she smiled up at him through her tears. And then things started moving even faster. One of the heartbeats had become irregular on the monitor, and the doctor in charge of the team told her they were starting the procedure.