Free Just Here Trying to Save a Few Lives: Tales of Life and Death from the ER by Pamela Grim

have them. “Well, why didn't she go across town to Lying-in?”
    The nurse's smile broadens. She enjoys making you sweat. “Why don't you ask her?”
    She turns away to go back to where the patient is. Her place is taken by another nurse, older but more kindly looking. You still haven't moved. “Well, you must have an OB/GYN doctor on call or something,” you say to the kinder-looking nurse.
    “I guess so,” she says and leans out to call to the unit secretary. “Who's on for OB?”
    “I think it's Dr. Panks,” the unit secretary shouts back.
    “No, he's retired,” your nurse calls.
    “Well, he's on the list.”
    “Dr. Panks?” shouts the nurse who hates you. She's calling from somewhere in the bowels of the ER. “Dr. Panks is up on the third floor. He had a big stroke two weeks ago. He's delivered his last baby.”
    “Honey,” the nice nurse standing before you says. She puts her hand on your shoulder, and as she looks down at you, you suddenly see that she's thinking about how young you look. Then you realize how young you feel. “Honey,” she says. “You'd better get in there.”
    And so you abandon your Chinese food and rise slowly from the chair. You're thinking, maybe this is just premature labor…maybe…just Braxton Hix contractions, the pseudocontractions of false labor…maybe, you know, very early labor, and there would be time to transfer her to another hospital.
    It's not just that you've never
delivered
a baby—it's that you've barely even seen one delivered. You did do the mandatory OB-GYN rotation in medical school, but that rotation wasn't much. You were assigned to the university hospital, along with fifteen other medical students, during the time of a great managed care-induced upheaval. During the six weeks you were on rotation, only five patients delivered. You managed to be there for three of them, but of course the residents had first dibs on the delivery. There were so few deliveries that they weren't about to let the medical students do anything. Besides, there were so many medical students that you had trouble even finding a spot to stand so that you could see what was going on. Finally, on the last day of your rotation, a resident actually sat you down between the hoisted legs of a freshly delivered mother with a gaping episiotomy. The resident gave you thirty seconds of unintelligible instructions, some 5'0 Vicryl thread on a cutting needle and told you to get to work. You applied yourself vigorously, trying to maintain an expression that conveyed you knew what you were doing, but the fact was that this was your first clinical rotation and the only previous suturing you had done was on a dead pig. The resident watched you for almost forty-five seconds before grabbing the needle driver away from you, pushing you off the stool and setting to work himself. That was the full extent of your hands-on OB experience.
    You did have several pediatric rotations during your fourth year, and six weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit. That was back in the days when you thought about becoming a pediatrician—actually, a neonatologist, specializing in high-tech infant care. There you have had a fair amount of experience. You are pretty sure you could resuscitate a baby, but getting that little sucker out into the bright lights and big city—that could be a problem.
    As you slowly rise from the chair, you look into the kind face of the nurse before you. In a voice with a tremble and a high pitch, one you don't even recognize as your own, you say, “How…how…how far apart are the contractions?”
    The nurse just jerks her thumb toward the acute room.
    Get in there.
    You walk down a hallway that seems impossibly long and impossibly dark. You can hear the woman wailing. “It hurts,” she's screaming. “It hurts, oh God, it hurts.” You think, Of course it hurts, you idiot. You're having a baby. In the room is the third nurse, younger and very pretty. “Breathe,” she keeps telling