When my mother called, I was still strapped to a backboard in the emergency room at County Hospital, my vision blurring with each fluorescent light that passed overhead as the gurney rattled down the hallway. The world around me was a cacophony of voices—nurses calling out numbers, the squeak of shoes on linoleum, machines beeping their urgent warnings. My chest burned with every breath I tried to take, a deep ache radiating from what I would later learn were three broken ribs.
Blood pooled sticky and warm in my hair on one side.
My left shoulder throbbed with a hot, electric pain that made me nauseous. But worse than any of that was the fear.
The all-consuming terror about my baby. I was twenty-three weeks pregnant, and the car that had T-boned me at the intersection had hit my driver’s side door with enough force to spin my sedan completely around before it crumpled against a light pole.
I’d been conscious through it all—the screech of metal, the explosion of the airbag, the eerie silence that followed broken only by the hiss of my destroyed radiator and someone screaming for help.
It took me a full minute to realize that someone was me. My hand instinctively tried to reach for my stomach, but the straps pinned me down. Panic surged.
“The baby—” I croaked, the words scraping like broken glass against my throat.
Sarah, the paramedic with kind blue eyes and freckles scattered across her nose, squeezed my hand. “We know, Harie.
They’re going to ultrasound you as soon as we get you stabilized. Try to stay still for me, okay?”
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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