Geoff sighs. “If you get lucky tonight, maybe you won’t care so much.”
“I’m not getting lucky tonight.” I stride toward the exit.
Geoff follows. “You never know.”
“Yes, I do.”
I hate everything. Every. Fucking. Thing.
Before I reach the door, a nurse barges through it. Whoa. “Uh,” I say. “This is the men’s room—”
“I know.” She pauses to catch her breath. “You weren’t answering your pages. Doctor White needs you in the OB OR.Now.”
Hold the phone. Dr. White needsme? What the fuck? Someone’s dying. It’s the only explanation. And now I’m about to have a heart attack.
We rush for the OR, and she fills me in on details along the way. Emergency C-section for non-reassuring fetal heart tones. Large baby. Difficult delivery. Bleeding, bleeding, bleeding.
“She’s already lost a liter of blood,” she says. “The one thing she said before they put her to sleep was ‘Don’t take my uterus!’ But Doctor White is already talking about a hysterectomy.”
Fuck.
When I scrub in, Dr. White is barely able to keep up with the bleeding. The anesthesiologist is emergently hanging blood products. The patient is intubated and under general.
“Thanks,” White says, voice calm despite the pool of blood he’s operating in. “Needed a second pair of competent hands for this one, I think.”
Competent?
I shouldn’t pause on that, given the emergency occurring before my eyes, but this guy doesn’t give compliments. At least, not to me. Has the world gone wonky?
“What’s happening?” I ask.
“Thought placental abruption at first. Then I got in here and saw she ruptured her uterus.” He chuckles darkly. “So much blood I thought I must have somehow gotten into the goddamn aorta, but nope.”
“We’re at fifteen hundred cc blood loss, Doctors,” a nurse says behind White.
Now that I’m helping, the surgical field is clear enough tovisualize the multiple fountains of blood that pour from this flayed uterus. Christ.
“I’m going to take her uterus,” he announces to the entire OR.
Against her consent?
“Hang on,” I say. “We haven’t tried everything yet.” Cesarean hysterectomies aren’t simple surgeries under the best of circumstances. There’s true risk of morbidity. Mortality.
Plus, the patientwantsher uterus.
“Organ is bleeding,” White replies, returning to his usualare-you-an-idiot? voice. “Cure is removal.”
I hold a hand over the field. “Let’s try to get it under control first. Even if we can’t save her uterus, it’ll make the hyst easier.”
White nods, and we get to work. We try to sew the organ back together with brisk, efficient throws of suture. Both of us attack it at different angles, tying knots tight enough to make the muscle turn white. It still bleeds, but the fountains slow to trickles. I snag a particularly helpful bit that closes off one gushing artery.
“Nice move, kid,” White says.
“Two liters, Doctors.”
“Is the hysterectomy kit open?” White demands.
No, it’s working! Can’t he see that? If we take her uterus, we steal her fertility. She’ll wake up to a world of devastation.
