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Chapter 9
The homecoming was sweet and well thought out. She had friends and family there, plus of course the same gossip magazine and some people from the entertainment industry. It was fun and lively and on the back of the exposure, Barbara started to get offers. She did some work for another movie, started her own autobiography, appeared on Oprah and generally allowed herself to ride the crest of the attention wave.
It was while appearing on Ellen that Jake walked out of the wings and proposed to her on national TV. She said yes of course and they married later that year.

Everyone wondered if Barbara had started to let herself go a bit within a few months of the marriage as she seemed to be putting on weight. She had wondered herself to be honest. Her body had changed a lot since her injury. It wasn’t that though, she was pregnant. Eventually the penny dropped and she got tested, discovering that she was in fact nearly four months along before she had realised. Her periods had been somewhat abnormal since she had been permanently paralysed and she just hadn’t felt the difference.
The baby seemed fine though and Jake went into prospective parent overdrive. From around seven months in, Barbara was noticeably big and finding life more difficult. She had seen a specialist and they had told her she would be best off with a caesarean to avoid complications and she agreed.
Getting dressed took her forever and was such an effort. She generally got dressed in bed, but moving side to side in order to pull clothes under her was exhausting and she began to feel more and more tired. Jake helped a lot, but still he couldn’t be there every minute of every day because his own career had begun to take off and he had a regular part in a new comedy series.
At eight months the doctor insisted Barbara went into hospital on bed rest. Everything was too much effort and she felt like a beached whale. They decided she would have the baby in two weeks time and scheduled the op, but before then, Babs started feeling faint all the time. Her blood pressure was funky and so they moved up the C-section and she had the baby that week instead. It was a healthy baby boy weighing in at seven and a half pounds. He was not as big as he might have been at forty weeks, but a good weight nonetheless and he was cleared to go home after a couple of days in the hospital.
Jake was thrilled and had pictures of him on his phone that he sent to everyone. He held him and fed him, because the doctor had put Barbara back on her regular meds after the op so she wasn’t allowed to breast feed. She was also incredibly tired and the whole experience had taken a lot out of her. They talked about names and decided upon Ryley.
Jake took their son home two days later but Barbara was still not well enough to leave.

Jake wasn’t getting a whole lot of sleep with the baby, even though his Mom had moved in for a while to help him out. He had been up once that night already when he got a call from the hospital.

He rushed through the doors and found what he needed to know. The doctors had moved Barbara from the maternity unit to ICU. She was lying wired up to all-sorts of machines when he got there.
He found the doctor he needed to speak to.
“What the hell happened? Why is she here?” He was frantic.
“Calm down, sir. We need to have a serious talk about your wife.”

The doctor explained that the original treatment of the infection in her spine had not proved successful. The infection had not been bacterial as they had originally thought, but viral and had simply lain dormant for some months. The pregnancy may well have been what kick started it back into action. Barbara had started to suffer shortness of breath earlier that evening and it had taken them sometime to track down what was going on from her medical records. They had done tests and decided to intubate her and move her to ICU.
Jake had sat and listened with his head in his hands. Just as they had begun to find their way and with a new baby, things had started to spiral out of control. They had both assumed that her paralysis was the result of a bacterial infection from the epidural, but from what the doctor was now saying, it didn’t sound like it was. Viral infections were not the same and couldn’t have resulted from the epidural.
The doctor looked at Jake. “You need to make a tough choice.”
Jake sat and thought about the alternatives. One was to do nothing, allowing the virus to burn itself out but with the possibility that Barbara might die or be left brain damaged; the best case scenario seemed she would be no worse than she was now but the odds were not good.
The other was to allow the doctors to cut open her spine and remove the infected part, her spinal cord. She would be paralysed at a higher level than at present but it seemed like they could stop the virus from spreading further if they acted quickly. There would be no going back so it was all or nothing.
“Do the surgery,” Jake eventually responded.