At the Emergency Dock, Penni was transferred to another gurney and whisked away by an orderly, leaving Jodie to nod thanks to Tammy and offer a short wave before jogging after her sister.
The orderly wheeled Penni through a crowded hall and into a shallow cubicle set off by only a wraparound curtain that ended two feet above the tile floor. After ten minutes and two more huffing contractions (at least the breathing routine helped stifle the awful moans) and Jodie’s text to Randall and message to the answering service for Penni’s obstetrics practice, a nurse came in and hooked up monitors for both Penni and the fetus. The fetal monitor immediately issued an audible alarm that frightened both sisters until the nurse switched it off. She made light of the incident, saying it was probably a start-up glitch. Penni accepted the explanation as she turned her attention to the start of another contraction; but Jodie knew the nurse was lying, could see from where she sat one of the numbers on the monitor flashing red. The nurse slipped out the end of the curtain after saying the doctor would be with them shortly.
The ER resident, a short man of South Asian ethnicity, took a look at the fetal monitor and Penni’s chart called up on his digital tablet and said in a slightly accented, matter-of-fact tone, “We need to get the baby out.”
The sisters looked to each other then back to the doctor. They were all within arm’s reach of each other in the cubicle.
Jodie said, “The baby is coming out.”
“We can’t wait. We need to do a C-section as soon as we can clear an O-R.”
“What’s wrong?” Penni asked, surprisingly calm in a momentary lull in her contractions.
“There’s an anomaly in the fetal heartbeat that requires prompt intervention.”
Jodie thought of her mother’s complaints about medical jargon and euphemistic language. “Why can’t she deliver normally?”
“She can, but the stress on the fetus could be terminal. I’ll schedule the room; the nurse will be back to prep for surgery.” Without another word, the doctor left.
Suddenly in a surreal bubble of isolation—not only in the cubicle but also on the Emergency floor and in the hospital, the city, the whole universe—the two sisters stared at each other in a silence born of shock and helplessness. They felt at the mercy of a vast creature far bigger than the resident or the hospital or pregnancy or labor or childbirth. They felt at the mercy of fate, and a crushing one at that. How were they to survive?
Then Penni’s hand slowly tightened its grip around Jodie’s fingers, tighter and tighter and tighter. Her breaths came faster and faster, shallower and shallower, until she unleashed a long low moan that was more an animal growl than a human sound, the recalling of some primordial bellow of defiance roared out over a long since erased African savannah. Her whole body clenched into a single spasm surrounded by this groan. She raised her knees and spread her legs. Jodie released her sister’s hand, pulled back the sheet covering her lower body, and slid down the sweatpants.
There was fresh blood trickling out of her dilated vagina. And behind that blood, pushing it and mucous and clear liquid out in front, was the crown of a dark-haired head. Jodie had never seen anything so gross or so beautiful in all her life. But all she felt was life or at least a chance at it, wrestled from the jaws of fear and death.
Penni’s roar slowly subsided as she took a series of rapid breaths. Jodie took that pause as an opportunity to glance around the end of the curtain in search of the nurse or the doctor—any nurse or doctor. But all she saw were patients and family members lining the walls of the hall on gurneys or sitting in chairs or leaning against the walls. The nearest was a black teenager with a bandaged head sitting either asleep or passed out just to her right with an elderly black woman standing stoically by his side.
Jodie looked at the woman with desperate eyes. “My sister is giving birth. I can’t leave her. Will you please find a nurse or doctor to help us?”
The woman stared impassively at Jodie, then slowly, almost imperceptibly nodded.
“Thank you,” Jodie said, but didn’t have time to watch to be sure the woman understood her request and made good on her nod. Behind her Penni’s moan started to ramp up again, only shaped this time into a word, the only word she knew just then—“Jo-die!”
By the time the black woman found a nurse and all but dragged her back to the sisters’ cubicle and the nurse slid though the loose end of the curtain, she found Jodie with her hands and wrists and forearms covered in blood and mucous and uterine fluid, Penni panting rapidly with her eyes shut and her face covered in perspiration, and a five pound newborn girl resting atop the burgundy sweatshirt covering the patient’s stomach, the umbilical cord still running from the baby’s naval into her mother’s birth canal.
Jodie looked at the nurse. “I didn’t have anything to cut the cord.”
The nurse flashed a smile before stepping forward to confirm that the baby was breathing, her eyes open and responding to light, and her heart beating. Then she unlocked a drawer in a nearby rolling supply chest and unsheathed surgical scissors from their sterile wrapper. “Would you like to do the honor?” she asked Jodie.
Jodie shook her head vehemently. “I can’t stand the sight of blood,” she said with no hint of irony.
The doctor returned just as the nurse had finished cleaning up the baby as best she could with the limited supplies on hand then wrapping her in two clean white towels off the shelf. At first the doctor looked alarmed but then managed a thin smile once he’d confirmed that this newborn hadn’t died on his shift. He told the nurse to get Neo-natal down here ASAP with an incubator cradle.
The nurse, who was holding the baby, looked to hand her off to Penni; but Penni’s eyes were closed. She then looked to the doctor who was scrolling through his digital clipboard. Finally she looked to Jodie, who had used hand sanitizer to clean her arms and hands and was wiping them with the cloths left over from cleaning the baby. The nurse offered the wrapped bundle to her.
Jodie looked up in surprise. “She’s Penni’s,” she said in protest.
The nurse gestured to Penni dozing or unconscious between them then handed the baby across. “She’s yours for now.”
Jodie accepted the bundle, startled by how light and fragile she was after all the commotion she’d caused entering into this world. She squatted and cradled the baby on the stretcher next to Penni’s head. She nudged her sister with her elbow.
Penni opened her eyelids sleepily.
“Look who decided to join our party,” Jodie whispered.
Penni rolled her head and looked at her daughter’s creased and flushed face, her eyes shut, from two inches away. “Looks like she’s been through a battle,” Penni said hoarsely.
“Welcome to life.”
“Let’s hope it gets better.”
The doctor interrupted their private sharing. “Congratulations, Mrs. Redmon. A neo-natal nurse will be here shortly to tag your daughter and take her to the nursery on the third floor. They will check her out there and report the results to you.”
Penni nodded.
“How are you doing?”
“I’m tired. I just want to go to sleep.”
“Yes. You’ve been through a lot. You’ve lost some blood. We’ll prep you for a transfusion here but we’ll get you checked into maternity before starting it. Other than that, all your numbers are good. You did great, Mrs. Redmon.”
“We did,” Penni whispered.
“Yes, of course.” The doctor slipped around the curtain, almost running into a nurse rolling an incubator cradle up to the cubicle.