Chapter 51 Chapter 51

Chapter 51 Chapter 51
Usually when you wake up in the morning, you assume you’d be doing the same mundane thing you did the previous day. As a Doctor Katherine knew she had six hours of clinic hours on top of shadowing her attending, Lyle. She had to check on the post-op patients and do consultations for other doctors. Ending up on blood-bank duty was nothing out of the ordinary for interns.

In fact, she could only count one intern who hadn’t been on this floor yet. AJ, but that was because he was a surgical superstar, and all the department heads were trying to lure him to their department. He didn’t have time to do something as important as draw blood from a donor, run screen tests, and picking up donors off the floor who had passed out from the loss of blood. What she did saved lives, not at the time, but in the future.

“All right, Lacey.” Katherine pulled the curtain back in place and prepared to take the history of her donor. “Do you have any allergies or chronic illnesses?”

“Not that I know about.” The girl looked like a teenager, but her chart said she was twenty-four. Katherine was twenty-three but her hours at the hospital had made her look forty. She didn’t have that much time to make herself look pretty. Katherine was glad she had already won AJ’s affections, otherwise she wouldn’t be able to keep up with the nurses trying to get his attention.

“Date of last period?”

“Two weeks ago, why?”

“It’s just procedural questions.” Katherine’s mind wondered for a bit. When was the last time she’d had her period? “What’s the date today?”

“The tenth of May,” the girl said confused. “Do you need the year too?” When Katherine didn’t respond, the girl’s voice hitched with panic. “Are you all, right? Are you sure you are a doctor? You seem—your blank expression worries me.”

“No.” Katherine cleared the cloud of nerves in the throat. “Everything is fine. I’ll just draw that blood.”

Katherine delivered Lacey’s and her own blood samples to Rose, the charge nurse for the day. She was so deeply in her own little dazed world that anything the redhead nurse had said didn’t sink in. How was she going to deal with this? She ran into the first on-call room she saw. She sat in the darkness and thought about her latest mess and how she was going to get out of it. A mess, that’s what her parents would call it. She had given up her home so that she could continue working at the hospital. And now if she was pregnant—Pregnant—what the hell?

What exactly was the procedure of telling your boyfriend, whom you cheated on, who was also your roommate with benefits, that you were carrying his baby.

His baby. AJ’s baby.

What if he didn’t want it?

She paced around the dark room, cold sweats making their way down her spine. How the hell was she going to tell him? Was she going to tell him?

Katherine wasn’t ready for a baby; with their schedules she didn’t think AJ would be either. Oh, dear God, she needed to make a decision. But first she would get the results, do a scan, and figure out if she was going to keep the baby before telling AJ. Baby—scientifically, depending on how old it was, it was just a fetus. Keep telling yourself that.

Katherine nearly jumped out of her skin when the door opened. Rose held it ajar and held her charts out to her. “Lacey and Katy Perry are both clean. But ‘Katy Perry’ is pregnant.” Rose’s mocking tone told Katherine that she knew something. Sure, Katy Perry wasn’t the most inconspicuous name she could come up with, but Lacey was singing one of her songs at the time and she didn’t think.

“So, Katy Perry?” Rose’s tone suggested she wanted to know more about the story. Ha! Fat chance.

“I think she’s a runaway teenager.” She hoped the nonchalant tone in her voice would get Rose to back off. “I have to see my patient now, excuse me.”

Katherine grabbed the charts and as soon as she walked around the corner and was out of Rose’s line of sight, she frantically flipped through ‘Katy Perry’s’ test results. She was pregnant. Now all that was left to do was figure out what she wanted to do. Katherine ordered a portable scan, pretending it was for a patient. She wasn’t an obgyn, but she figured she had enough skills to read the age of a fetus from a scan. She sat on a gurney in the abandoned operating room and held the joystick to her belly.

When nothing registered on the screen she drew in a breath of relief. Maybe the lab had got the samples mixed up. Her relief was short lived when she realized the scan was still off. Cautious of the maternal instinct that apparently existed in every single woman, she turned it on once the scan was ready, she held it to her stomach again, and there it was. The fetus looked at least four weeks old.

A baby.

AJ grew up in a loving family, she was sure Rosalinda and Adrian Senior would be overjoyed about their first grandchild. But her parents definitely wouldn’t be. She still didn’t know what her father held against Senior. Anyway, first she needed to figure out what AJ thought of having a baby this early in life.

Katherine ordered AJ’s favorite takeout when she got home. She thought a fully loaded carnivore’s pizza would soften the blow. She sat agitated as the hour ticked by. At first, she had come up with a couple of excuses as to why she should delay telling AJ. She hoped he would come in and talk about how difficult his day was, or he had some major surgery he had to prepare for. But when AJ finally came home, he didn’t look tired or stressed out.

“How was your day?”

“It was the best. I took out a spleen, cast a broken leg and took out a beer bottle from a frat boy’s ear,” he laughed. “University wasn’t that dangerous when I was there.”

“I guess they were doing something stupid.” She swallowed back the lump in her throat. Tell him now, her conscience urged. “AJ, have you thought about having kids with this career?”

“Right now?” He mused. “Our hours are crazy. But if you did get pregnant, I expect you’d take a year off to take care of the baby.”

“What!” She scoffed.

“I’m not trying to be a cave man or anything. But a baby needs parental attention. My mother stayed home with us when Dad went to work.”

“No offense to Rosalinda, your mother is a wonderful person, but she didn’t have a career. I do and taking a year off from Cardiology would set me back,” she protested.

“I’m sure you’ll feel differently when you get pregnant, which is not anytime soon.”

Katherine nodded in silent surprise. She was pregnant now and the thought of sacrificing her career for her child hadn’t occurred to her until now. Maybe she didn’t have that maternal instinct.

Katherine retreated to the cover of her room. She needed to think about her options. Maybe if AJ’s answer had been different, she would be sure about keeping the baby. But sitting next to AJ trying to figure out if she should do away with their love child wasn’t helping her.