A Long Awaited Experience
Whenever Eric Delko was nervous or excited, he fidgeted. He was fidgeting now waiting for a nurse to call him into the examining room. Calleigh had gone in ahead of him and he was told he would be called in momentarily when everything was set for the ultrasound.
Ironically the nurse now working there worked at Dade-Memorial three years prior. She was the nurse first handed him Chloe. Eric knew the 40-something woman looked familiar.
"Mr. Delko?"
Eric looked up.
"You can come in now."
Delko stood and followed the nurse down the short hall to the examining room.
"How's your little girl?" She asked. "Mommy was showing us some new photos of her. She's a doll. She must be excited."
He smiled.
"She is. She's an awesome kid."
"You two should bring her in sometime. I'm sure she'd like seeing the baby and hearing the heartbeat."
Eric and Calleigh intended to do that at some point, when the baby looked more like a baby.
Knowing about Chloe, inside Calleigh's file the doctor had written second child, first pregnancy.
Calleigh smiled at her husband from the table. He smiled back at her, he walked over, squeezed her hand and kissed her lips before taking a seat on the stool next to Calleigh's head. Calleigh jumped a little feeling the cold gel on her bare abdomen. The doctor apologized. After several moments of moving the wand around the woman turned screen so the couple could see.
"There's your baby," she said, pointing to small dot on the screen.
"Wow," Calleigh breathed.
"Yeah," Eric whispered.
Calleigh looked up at Eric and he kissed her lips. There were tears in both their eyes. Deep down Eric had always wished he had got the chance to see his daughter this way but the fact that he didn't, wasn't going to make him feel any less for her once his second child was born. Hearing the unborn child's heartbeat was an equally overwhelming experience.
"You okay, hon?" Calleigh asked, seeing he was completely speechless, a tear running down his right cheek.
"Oh yeah," he whispered.
The ultrasound determined Calleigh was six weeks pregnant. The technician did a printout of the ultrasound image for both parents, and one for Chloe.
"She might want to show that to her little friends," she said.
Back at work both proud parents showed off the image of their baby-to-be.
"So, this is the little one," Natalia said, looking at the image. "Sweet."
"Yeah, the little one that's going to get me whatever I want at any hour for the next eight months," Calleigh smiled.
"Eric's going to love that," Natalia laughed.
"Nice," uncle Horatio said of the image Eric showed him.
"We got to hear the heartbeat, too. It was incredible, H," Eric replied.
"I bet it was, Eric. I bet it was," Horatio said.