It was sticky and hot, both inside and out. Lying on a couch in my home office, I spent my days marvelling at my swollen toes stuffed like mini-sausages into sandals. I had no energy or desire to work, and with another two months before my baby was due, such lethargy was scary, particularly because I’d recently set out my shingle as a freelance writer. But even anxiety couldn’t get me off the couch.

Though carrying a child inside my body for the first time was infinitely remarkable to me, my pregnancy had been medically uneventful. I was healthy. I had no morning sickness, and I’d opted out of prenatal testing, imagining myself too young and strong at 29 to bother, and knowing, too, that more information would only make me more fearful. For though I wanted the baby very much and had no concrete reason to fret, fear had taken up residence in my brain. I worried about everything—the baby’s health and future, my finances, my relationship, my work, how I would manage to write another word, who I would be when I was a mother. I even worried that I was worrying too much.

Preparations for my wedding, two and a half weeks away, added to the stew of anxiety. My boyfriend, Nick, and I had invited 45 of our far-flung friends and immediate family to camp on my parents’ island in Georgian Bay. It had seemed like a good idea when we blithely planned it early in the pregnancy. I had imagined making my entrance, glowing and enormous, seated in a green cedar-strip canoe paddled by my mom and dad.

But it turned out I was worrying about all the wrong things. I had been pregnant for exactly 32 weeks and two days when it all began. Nick and I were meeting with the Unitarian minister who would perform our wedding ceremony when I started having the sort of cramps I associated with my period. At a routine doctor’s appointment that afternoon, my GP did an internal exam and found that my cervix had softened slightly, as it does in preparation for childbirth. But she didn’t express serious concern and booked me an ultrasound for later in the week, saying not to worry unless the baby stopped moving.

The next day, my mother and I were supposed to go to IKEA for baby furniture, but I called her to say I wasn’t feeling well and not to bother coming down. Maybe it’s the flu, I suggested, as waves of low-grade pain rippled through my lower back and my already taut belly hardened like a giant ostrich egg. She decided to visit anyway, and as I lolled lazily on the couch waiting for her to drive from her home in Barrie, I began to wonder when the baby had last kicked. It was strangely hard to remember—the once astonishing sensation of having a fish-creature leaping and twirling inside me had become relatively commonplace. I pushed my stomach a bit to prod the baby.

When my mother arrived, we made a pot of raspberry tea because I’d heard it strengthens the cervix. When I told her I probably hadn’t felt the baby move in a few hours, we decided to call my doctor, who recommended going to prenatal triage at Women’s College Hospital, just to be sure everything was OK. I called Nick but encouraged him not to leave work early as they would surely tell us to go home, that it was nothing. The baby is just sluggish in this heat, my mother and I reassured one another. We figured we might even squeeze in that trip to IKEA.

When we arrived at Women’s College, I shuffled through the glass doors into the old 10-storey brownstone building, its worn-out foyer a stark contrast to the hospitals down the street with their soaring atriums, fancy shops and brand-name cafés. I filled out some forms and told the nurse at the triage desk that I hadn’t felt my baby move for most of the day. I was quickly ushered to the front of the line, packed into a hospital bed and hooked up to a fetal heart monitor. A succession of nurses and interns took down my story and told me that the cramps were actually contractions. They reassured me, however, that my baby was alive, its heart beating steadily. I tried to be calm as masses of tape tracking my child’s pumping heart spilled silently from a machine at my bedside. Nick walked in half an hour later, our GP at his side, just as several nurses rolled in an ancient ultrasound machine that looked like a Commodore 64.

A very short, lab coat–clad doctor with a gentle Ghanaian accent and a mischievous glint in his eye swept the jelly-covered wand across my belly and peered at me over his spectacles. “Are you a smoker? Do you do drugs? Are you sure about the date of conception?” he asked.

No. No. Yes, I think so.

“I’m afraid we have a problem,” he told us, the twinkle in his eye gone. “There’s calcification of the placenta. It looks older than it should—the baby may not be getting enough oxygen. And its heart rate is dipping dangerously low each time you have a contraction. You need to be prepped for a C-section. You’re going to have a baby in 15 minutes.”