Until the End of Time by Danielle Steel Page A

butthere’s no reason why she can’t get pregnant again and have a normal pregnancy with one tube and one ovary, after she recovers. She’ll have to be carefully watched to be sure it doesn’t happen again, but this kind of lightning usually doesn’t strike twice. It’s very unfortunate, I’m sorry about your baby,” the doctor speaking to him said somberly, but at least Jenny had lived through it. He admitted that it had been touch and go for a while, and the surgery had been delicate to save one side of her reproductive organs, so they didn’t leave her sterile.
    “How is she?” was all Bill could think of. Her ectopic pregnancy had been more dangerous because it had gone on longer, and she almost died.
    “She’s still groggy from the anesthetic and weak from the blood loss. We gave her three transfusions in the OR, but she’ll be shaky for a while. I’d give it a few months of rest before she gets pregnant again, but there’s no reason why she can’t conceive and deliver a healthy baby in the future. It’s just a trick of nature that happens sometimes, and unless she had severe abdominal pain, there was no way for her doctor to suspect it, and nothing she could have done except terminate the pregnancy before she wound up in a situation like the one tonight. She’s going to be fine,” the doctor reassured him again, “although of course she’s upset about the baby.” She had cried when they told her, and she wanted to see Bill, but she was still in the recovery room, so they could observe her, and he couldn’t go to her until they took her to a room. They didn’t want the hemorrhaging to start again. At this point she wouldn’t survive it, and Bill got that message loud and clear as he listened tothe two doctors. He was only slightly cheered to hear that she could still have another baby. He was too worried about Jenny to care about that right now, and sad about the one they’d lost. The second doctor informed him that it had been a boy, which made it even worse. They had a real person to mourn now, a son they would never know.
    While he waited for them to bring Jenny from the recovery room, he hounded the nurses for bulletins about her. He begged them to let him go to her, and showed them his ID as a hospital chaplain at another hospital, but they still insisted that he couldn’t go to the recovery room to see her, unless he had been called to administer last rites, which fortunately he wasn’t.
    It was afternoon before Jenny was wheeled into a private room on the maternity floor and they let him see her. He had called Helene by then and told her what happened, and let Azaya know that she wasn’t coming into the office, and he called the chaplaincy service and told them that his wife was in the hospital and he wouldn’t be in for several days. Helene was devastated for them when she heard about it and worried about her daughter. She said she knew of two women who had died of ectopic pregnancies when she was younger. It had been in Pittston, and they had bled to death before anyone knew what had happened, or why. She was infinitely grateful that Bill had gotten her to help in time. He shuddered thinking what might have been if he hadn’t woken up and heard her moaning, or if she had bled out so fast, she never woke up and died beside him. It had been a very, very close call.
    He bent to kiss her the moment he saw her, and she started to cry,from the relief of seeing him, the terror of what she’d been through, and sadness over their lost baby.
    “I know, sweetheart, I know …,” he crooned to her, sitting on a chair next to her, stroking her hair, and holding tightly to her hand. “We’ll have other babies. All that matters is that you’re okay. I don’t ever, ever want to lose you. You have to get well now. And then we’ll have another baby.”
    “I want the one we just lost,” she said, sobbing. “It was a boy.”
    “I know. I promise, we’ll have others.” She nodded,