An eighth cry in the room
Shortly after, I felt the contractions again.
I was breathing as the doctors’ voices grew louder. I breathed along with the increasingly rapid beeping of the monitors. Everything around me seemed to be speeding up, while I was simply trying to follow the instructor’s directions.Baby health tracker
Then came another cry.
It was fainter than the previous ones.
But this time, as that sound filled the room, no one immediately breathed a sigh of relief. Everyone seemed frozen.
He is alive.
Eight cries and eight tiny beating hearts.
I don’t remember what happened immediately afterward. What I remember most is the immense wave of emotion that suddenly overwhelmed me.
It was no longer just pain or fear.
I saw my children settled into their incubators. I watched the doctors move from one to the other, focused on each of them.Explore Special Tutors
The doctor himself seemed still shaken
by what had just happened.
“I’ve been working for forty years. I’ve seen plenty of cases. But something like this…”
He shook his head.
“I’ve never seen anything like this before. Do you realize what you’ve just done? You gave birth to eight children. Eight.”
I remembered all those sleepless nights spent counting their movements, terrified that one of them might suddenly stop.
Seven incubators had been arranged in neat rows. And then there was this eighth baby—tiny, the one whose birth no one had anticipated.
I looked at her.
“You were waiting,” I whispered. “All this time, you were waiting for the others to come into the world before revealing yourself. You wanted to be the last one.”
My life, which for months had been filled with fear and uncertainty, was now occupied by eight voices and eight tiny, beating hearts.
The doctor’s words I never forgot
I turned around and saw the doctor standing in the doorway.
“Did you know that?” I asked him.Newborn photography service
“No. I just… sensed something. When I said ‘wait,’ I didn’t know what was there. I just realized we had missed something.”
