Chapter 3 - The Sterile Room
The emergency room at Northwestern Memorial was a symphony of controlled chaos that I knew by heart. The squeak of rubber soles on linoleum, the rhythmic chiming of the telemetry monitors, the smell of antiseptic and industrial floor wax—it was a world where I had spent twelve hours a day, five days a week, saving other people's lives.
But tonight, I was the one on the yellow board, my head secured by foam blocks, an oxygen mask pressed over my nose and mouth, while a team of doctors and nurses I had worked with for years descended on my body.
"Lucy! Can you hear me?"
The face that appeared above mine was Dr. Sarah Jenkins. She was a senior OB/GYN resident, a woman who had drunk three pots of coffee with me during a twenty-four-hour shift last winter when we had a run of ruptured ectopics. Her eyes were sharp, professional, but beneath the clinical mask, I could see the tight line of fear.
"I'm here, Sarah," I said, my voice muffled by the plastic. "Gestational age twenty-four weeks and three days. Uterine contractions started approximately ninety minutes ago. Fetal movement is... extremely sluggish."
"We're on it, Lucy," Sarah said, her hands already moving over my abdomen, placing the warm gel of the ultrasound transducer against my skin. "Let's get a line in her. Standard labor panel, CBC, CMP, type and screen. Start a bolus of lactated Ringer’s. We need to get her hydrated now."
"What about the heart rate?" I asked, my fingers digging into the vinyl of the mattress as a fresh contraction squeezed my lower back.
The room went quiet, save for the static of the ultrasound machine. Sarah moved the probe in small, circular motions, her eyes locked on the monitor that I couldn't see from my position.
Then, through the static, came the sound.
Thump-thump... thump-thump... thump-thump.
It was slow. Too slow. A normal fetal heart rate was between 110 and 160 beats per minute. This was a lazy, struggling rhythm, hovering somewhere in the eighties.
"Fetal bradycardia," Sarah muttered, her voice dropping to that low, calm register doctors use when they are trying not to let the patient see them panic. "Lucy, she's distressed. The hypoxia from the elevator and the stress of the labor are putting her heart under too much pressure. We need to stop these contractions and get some oxygen into her blood."
"Give me terbutaline," I said, my nursing brain taking over where my maternal terror wanted to freeze. "And a magnesium bolus. Let's try to quiet the uterus before we have to cut."
"We're already preparing the syringe," Sarah said, squeezing my hand briefly. "You're not the nurse tonight, Lucy. You're the patient. Let us do the work."
The door to the trauma bay burst open with a loud slam.
"Lucy!"
Alex stood in the doorway. He had not taken off his turnout gear, though his helmet was gone, his hair standing up in wild, sweat-damp spikes. His face was pale, his eyes bloodshot, his lips trembling as he looked at the monitors, the IV lines, and the green drapes of the sterile field.
"Get out," I said.
The words were small, but they cut through the noise of the room like a scalpel.
Alex took a step forward, his heavy boots making a wet, sucking sound on the freshly cleaned floor. "Lucy, please. I didn't know. The rookie... Mark Kelly... he gave me the ring. He told me... he told me what you said. Lucy, you don't understand. Valerie was—"
"I said, get him out," I repeated, my eyes looking straight at the ceiling, refusing to acknowledge his presence.
"Sir, you need to step back," one of the trauma nurses—a tall, built guy named Marcus who had helped me restrain combative patients in the past—said, placing a heavy hand on Alex’s shoulder. "This is a sterile procedure room. You're not dressed for it, and the patient is unstable."
"She’s my wife!" Alex roared, shaking off Marcus’s hand. "That’s my baby in there! Lucy, look at me! Valerie had a panic attack. She was closer to the door. She was hysterical. I had to triage the most critical—"
"The most critical was the eighty-year-old man having a myocardial infarction," I said, my voice rising, my chest heaving against the oxygen mask. "The most critical was the six-year-old child who was dehydrating. The most critical was your pregnant wife who was going into early labor. But you didn't even look, Alex. You didn't look because you saw her."
"She was terrified, Lucy!"
"She was performing!" I screamed, the effort bringing on a sharp, stabbing pain in my pelvis that made the heart monitor on my baby beep in a rapid, warning tone. "She looked at me, Alex! When you carried her out, she looked back at me and she smiled! She won! She’s been trying to win for ten months, and you finally gave her the trophy!"
"Lucy, please..."
"Get him out!" Dr. Jenkins ordered, her voice cutting through the argument like ice. "Her pressure is spiking. The fetal heart rate is dropping to seventy. Marcus, get security. Now."
"Alex, leave," I whispered, the energy leaving my body in a single, cold rush as the drugs began to hit my system. "If you stay in this room, I will have the hospital administrator bar you from the building. I mean it."
Alex looked at me, his eyes wide with a mixture of anger, guilt, and a sudden, terrifying realization that the woman who had always been his safe harbor had finally closed her gates. He looked at the wedding ring in his hand—the simple platinum band that Mark Kelly had handed him on the fourth-floor landing—and then slowly stepped back into the hallway.
The doors swung shut, locking him out.
"Alright, Lucy," Sarah said, her voice calm but urgent. "The terbutaline isn't working fast enough. Her heart rate is sixty-five. We don't have time to wait for the magnesium to quiet things down. We're going to have to do an emergency C-section. Right now."
"She's twenty-four weeks, Sarah," I whispered, tears finally breaking past my lashes. "She's too small."
"She's a fighter, Lucy," Sarah said, her hand resting on my forehead. "Just like her mother. Now breathe. We're going to put you under."
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As the black circle of the anesthetic closed in on my vision, my last thought wasn't about the elevator, or the dark, or the man who had left me behind.
It was about the first breath my daughter would have to take in a world that we would have to face alone.
