Trial for Love
Chapter Three: Milk
Even though the police said we 'had temporary custody,' Holly was fitting into Aaron's and my life as easily as if she was our own daughter. Just like any other baby, she woke up a few times during the night, demanding to be fed, but we had come to an unspoken agreement that we would take turns feeding her the ridiculous amount of food that she seemed to require. So even though we were both bleary-eyed zombies from our sleepless night, the day after the hectic ordeal with the police, Aaron and I both got up with Holly at 5:30 – to prevent a disaster like the day I found her.
"So," Aaron said over his cereal. "I'll take you in to school, and then I'll call the doctor and see if I can bring Holly in before I go to work." It had been the plan to take Holly to the pediatric ward today like the police had ordered us to the day before.
"Right," I agreed. "Don't forget to ask them about her ears and her eating habits."
He sighed. I had been reminding him of things like that ever since we had woken up. "I won't," he said wearily. "We've been over this, Alexa. I can take care of it!"
I grimaced and turned around towards the fridge so my back was facing him. If he was calling me 'Alexa' instead of the normal 'Lexie,' it was a sure sign that he was ticked. The best thing I could do now was to shut up and leave him be.
Sighing, I opened up the freezer door and peered inside. Frozen waffles. Yum. I thought he was being a bit impatient, but I suppose I had been a little overbearing since I found Holly. I liked to think it was my maternal instinct kicking in, but still, Aaron was fully capable of handling it himself.
"I know you will," I assured him, trying to make amends. "I just…. I wish I could be there when she's examined."
"You have finals," he reminded me. "And I know you'll want to do well on those so you can apply for residency." His voice took on that superior tone, like a mother sweet-talking an unruly child into going to school. Well, hmph.
When I came home that afternoon, exhausted from another exam marathon, Aaron was sprawled out on the couch, giving Holly a bottle. "Don't you have to go to work?" I asked, remembering what he had said earlier in the week, when he had been at the hospital almost 24/7. The hospital's always busy at this time of year – you wouldn't believe how many people slip on the black ice. I couldn't imagine why the ER staff had let Aaron come home early.
"Holly's appointment ran a bit long, so I called in and they let me off for today. I explained the situation with them, and they agreed that it was more important to follow the police's orders than wrap people's sprained ankles." He answered, easing the rubber nipple of the recently emptied bottle out of her mouth. "I don't suppose you'll want to hear what the doctor said, do you?"
"No, of course not," I answered sarcastically before plopping down on the couch next to him. I extended my arms for Holly and he gave me a protective glare before unwillingly handing her over. Satisfied, I cradled her in the crook of my arm and dropped a quick kiss on the top of her downy head before reaching to the coffee table for another bottle of baby formula.
"Well," he began. "They started off by weighing her. Four pounds, two ounces. I asked them if they thought she was premature, and after they examined her, they said they didn't think so, because she seemed to be as developed as a normal baby."
"But she's so small," I protested. "That's not normal!"
"I know. They couldn't explain it either," he said, adjusting his weight so I could lean on him more comfortably. "I asked about the ears too, and they told me that it was a birth defect, as far as they knew. The nurses thought it was cute, by the way."
I snorted into his arm at that. "Everyone thinks they're cute. She'll probably grow up being called The Girl with the Cute Ears… nobody will know her real name!" I was rewarded with a laugh from Aaron and a coo from Holly, who had no idea what was going on.
"She was well-behaved too," Aaron added. "Weren't you?" he said to Holly. "You were the best little baby I've ever seen!" I giggled a bit, happy that Holly had such an effect on him. Aaron wasn't quite using baby talk with her, but he was getting pretty close. He was usually such a mature and practical man. Inside, I was thrilled that he was in love with Holly too. It was going to be hard to let her go.
"Except during the x-rays, though," Aaron interrupted my internal heartbreak of letting my baby go. "She was a total pill-"
"They did x-rays?" I asked, astonished. Unless something was drastically wrong, we had been taught never to expose babies' fragile bones to the harmful rays.
"Yes… they wanted to check her bone structure," Aaron replied, immediately sensing that something was wrong.
"Well what did they say?"
"Compared to the rest of her body, her bones are growing normally. But compared to every other two-month-old baby out there, she's on the fifth percentile."
"That bad, huh?" I cuddled Holly in my arms a bit, pulling her closer to my body. I could hear the winds picking up outside, just like they always did at this time of night.
"Yeah. They just seem to think she's really small, I guess. At least she's healthy… oh! I was supposed to tell you that she's probably not going to be like this forever. The doctors there thought that her growth was probably stunted for now, but it'll kick back in and she'll be at about five feet tall when she's full grown."
"Five feet? But that's so small!" I whispered, aghast. Aaron and I were both pretty tall – him at 6'3" and me at 5'9".
"It's better than 3'6", which is what she would be if she continued in the growth pattern that she's in right now." I shook my head sadly, wondering what was causing all Holly's problems.
"Did you ask them about the amount of milk she drinks?" I asked, changing the subject.
Aaron nodded. "They said it was very unusual, and that she shouldn't be drinking that much. They want us to taper off the amount we're feeding her. They said we should only give her one bottle every two hours. When she cries and wants more, we should let her cry so she can learn to cope without the bottle."
"But she's always hungry!" I cried, aghast. "You've seen the way she cries, Aaron, and then she sucks down milk like she won't have another chance at one for weeks!"
"I know," he said miserably. "I told them something like that, but they said that it's unhealthy for her to drink that much and it could lead to overeating when she's older."
"What are we going to do, then?" I wondered. "She's going to be crying practically nonstop!"
Aaron leaned forward and picked up a pacifier from the coffee table. "This, my dear," he proclaimed, triumphantly waving it in my face. "We're supposed to distract her so she can learn to focus on something besides food."
A week later, I rose from the warm confines of my bed and stumbled across the room to the corner where we had erected Holly's second-hand crib.
"Holly, Holly…. Shhhh," I murmured, cradling the baby girl against my chest. "It's alright – Mommy's here." I felt a teeny bit of guilt for calling myself her mommy, but I let it pass. There were much more important things to worry about.
I reached onto the dresser next to the crib for a pacifier and unsuccessfully tried to offer it to Holly. "You don't like this one, honey? How about… this one? See the pretty purple ribbon on it?" The only response I got was more crying.
Finally, I gave up and made my way into the dimly lit kitchen. I could just see a sprinkling of stars over the buildings downtown, the sparkling diamonds in the sky making it look like a fantasy world, not Minneapolis. Sighing, I wrenched my eyes away from the early morning sky and to the fridge, where I grasped around for a bottle before warming it up twenty-five seconds in the microwave, all the while rocking Holly back and forth on my shoulder.
I had just begun trying to sing to stop her crying when I felt something brush the back of my neck. I whipped around, only to find Aaron. With my free hand, I clutched my rapidly beating heart. "Oh, Aaron, you scared me!"
His eyes were twinkling slightly, giving away the fact that he was trying hard not to smile. "Why is it that every day I do that to you and you never cease to be frightened?"
"Well, maybe I just have good instincts," I replied, opening up the microwave to retrieve the bottle of formula.
"Here, let me take her." Aaron stopped his goofing around and settled down in a kitchen chair with Holly, looking as natural as a real dad. "You go get ready, Lexie. I've got her." I smiled thankfully at him and turned to go down the hall towards our bedroom.
But suddenly, I spun back around and rushed over to Aaron, giving him a quick kiss, saying, "I forgot to kiss you good morning today!" Laughing, he just kissed me back and playfully shoved me back to the hall.
"You go get ready – we've got to leave early today."
I sighed and pulled my legs up onto the couch with me, sitting with my legs crossed and my laptop balanced across my knees. I'd have to print everything I'd written up out at school the next day, but at least I could type at home.
Having finally gotten my exam scores back, I could begin applying for residency. Aaron could easily get a job anywhere, since ER doctors were pretty high in demand. He had told me just to apply some place that looked good to me and then we could see about a job for him.
I shuffled the stack of papers in front of me before pulling out the one I had written on. I had been researching towns that would be good for us as a family – now that we had Holly. It had been almost two weeks since I'd found her and the police still had no leads to whom she belonged to. They hadn't heard anything about a missing baby within a fifty-mile radius of our house after a week, so they expanded their search nation wide, but none of the missing children turned out to be Holly. The police reluctantly allowed Aaron and I to continue caring for her, but seemed a little wary leaving her in the care of a young, unmarried couple, even though we were both in the medical profession and knew how to handle and care for a baby.
A woman from Child Protection Services showed up on our doorstep one afternoon (luckily, I was home) and looked around the house and asked me some questions, just to make sure we were all right, even though we weren't supposed to keep Holly forever. I told her about the Holly's visit to the doctor's office and that we were putting her on a carefully monitored feeding schedule and she finally admitted that she could find no problems and she supposed it was all right for us to care for the baby.
The thought usually made me smile, but at the moment I was so exhausted from waking up every few hours to feed Holly and then not being able to fall back asleep as she wailed her little heart out. Aaron and I had been trying our best to follow the doctor's orders and cut back on her feeding, but the poor thing was having none of it. At every feeding, she literally inhaled the milk and cried unceasingly when the bottle was taken away. We had given her pacifiers and blankets to suck on, hoping to appease her, but nothing worked. For such a small baby, she could make a terrifying noise. Gone was the sweet, adorable baby I had found on the front porch; the one who cooed when her nose was stroked and smiled when we held her. Holly had turned into a crying machine, day and night, unless she was sleeping from sheer exhaustion, or polishing off a bottle. As much as I hated the noise, I couldn't help but feel sorry for her, she was looking more and more malnourished by the day.
I sighed again, wishing there was something I could do about it. Holly was sleeping at the moment; otherwise I would have been rocking her and trying to coax her into silence with some new, and inevitably uninteresting, toy. Right now I was taking advantage of the rare silence, and I was determined to be quiet enough to let her sleep and keep it that way. Ugh. All I wanted to do was sleep… I leaned my head onto the back of the couch and stared up at the ceiling.
After a few minutes, I knew I would fall asleep if I didn't get back to work, so I wrenched my eyes back to forms I held in my hand.
UNIVERSAL APPLICATION FOR RESIDENCY
POSITION BEGINNING IN: 2007
NAME: Turner, Alexa Rachel
I AM APPLYING FOR THE FOLLOWING GRADUATE PROGRAM: PROGRAM DESCRIPTION Pediatrics
NAME OF HOSPITAL: Anna Jacques CITY: Newburyport STATE: MA
ZIP: 01950
MEDICAL EDUCATION
MECIAL SCHOOL(S): University of Minnesota CITY: Minneapolis STATE/COUNTRY: Minnesota, USA
MONTH/YEAR OF MARTICULATION AT MEDICAL SCHOOL: Last month, fourth year
MONTH/YEAR OF (ANTICIPATED) GRADUATION: May 2006
I had only begun answering the questions when I heard Holly's exhausted but insistent screaming from the bedroom again. Frustrated, I threw my pen down and got up off the couch. "I'm coming, Holly!" I called in what I hoped to be a soothing voice.
As soon as I entered the bedroom and Holly's tear-filled blue eyes saw me, she increased the volume of her screaming another ten decibels. "Ah! Holly, dear, I hear you! Shh…" I cradled the baby in my arms, but the crying just got louder. She didn't even sound remotely like a baby anymore. She sounded like a dying animal, giving deep, heartfelt wails that shook her entire body. The sound filled the entire room and bounced off the walls and rebounded back to my ears.
I futilely tried to get Holly to accept the pacifier, but soon gave up. Checking the time, I once again found myself reaching for a bottle to warm up in the microwave. As soon as she saw my hand emerge from the refrigerator with the bottle, Holly gave a small squeal of what must have been delight and watched silently and unblinkingly as I deliberately moved the bottle through her line of vision. But when she saw that I meant to put it in the microwave and not into her waiting mouth, Holly started crying again, this time in huge, gulping sobs. As if I hadn't endured enough of this already. I was getting tired of this, young lady!
So instead of heating the milk for the usual 25 seconds, I only gave it 15, knowing that Holly couldn't care less what the temperature was as long as she got her food.
The microwave beeped, telling me that it was ready. As quickly as I could, I snatched it out and popped it into Holly's mouth, not bothering to check it on my wrist to see if it was right for her.
As I figured, Holly didn't care at all. She greedily gulped the formula, trying to get at it so fast that I started dripping down her chin. I pulled a dishtowel off the oven handle and wiped her chin. Keeping the towel handy, I sank into one of the kitchen chairs. I cradled Holly's small body to me as I held the bottle to her mouth. She was so small… most babies were chubby enough with their baby fat, and if they ate as much as Holly they should be pretty big. But Holly was so skinny – even the preemie clothes I had bought swamped her tiny frame. I guessed it was just another one of her problems.
She almost seemed smaller than when I'd found her. I had obviously been puzzled over her small size, but she'd been healthy enough, the layer of fat beneath her silky skin had given her the glow that all babies seemed to have. On a whim, I used one hand to carefully undo the snaps on the front of her sleep-suit. Ignoring her impatient wriggle, I slipped my hand inside and caressed the skin of her stomach. Yes, there it was. Beneath my fingers, I could feel the tiny but prominent ridges of her ribcage protruding beneath her skin. She had lost her layer of fat. Why hadn't I noticed before? Who gave her the last bath? Aaron, it was Aaron who bathed her with a sponge two nights ago. Had he noticed it too?
I gently forced the nipple of the empty bottle from Holly's lips. She gave a small whimper and squirmed in my arms, turning her head and waving her tiny arms in the direction of the bottle. I set her on the table and undid the rest of the fastenings on her clothing. Easing the fleece off her little frame, I examined her body closely. Her bones were definitely showing; much more than they had when I had found her, and much more than was healthy. Giving her a full examination, I took note of the glassiness of her eyes and the lethargy of her movements. If I hadn't been feeding her every two hours, I would have said that she was suffering from malnutrition. And yet...
Something was very wrong and I didn't know what it was. I glanced at the clock, praying that Aaron would come home soon, maybe he would know.
A/N: If anyone with knowledge in the medical field would like to give us some tips, it would be greatly appreciated! Thank you for reading!
Also, we had the form Lexie fills out set up like she really filled it out – with her handwriting and everything. Sadly, it doesn't show up on fanfiction. But if anyone would like to see it, please drop your email address in a review and we'll send it to you! Thanks.