OB call is the worst.
I’m already annoyed because my sister left today and I have no idea when I’ll see her again, and now I’m stuck at the hospital until this woman delivers. She’s been eight centimeters for ten hours, and she’s adamantly refusing a Cesarean—despite that it was recommended four hours ago—andPitocin—the only medication that could help her deliver vaginally.
It will give you adequate contractions.
It will progress your labor faster.
It will get a living, breathing baby in your arms.
But no. She’s stuck on this idea that Pitocin is straight up devilry created by hospitals to disempower women or some shit. Somewhere, someone convinced her thatnaturalis the only real way to have a baby, and women who do it differently are a weaker subset of the species. Her birth plan doesn’t allow for any medications or pain relief, and it ends with an all capitals command:
DO NOT EVEN MENTION A C-SECTION TO ME. I WILL REFUSE.
The nurses say she fired her OB when he proposed it earlier. Now the hospitalist is caring for her.
Or attempting to, at least.
We should have a bucket of fortune cookies at the entrance to L&D, and all the fortunes say the same thing: You don’t get points for doing it the hardest way imaginable.
If this woman broke her leg and her femur was sticking out of her body, would she want to heal naturally? If she contracted a flesh-eating bacteria and her skin melted off her body, would she decide to deal with that naturally?
It’s natural to die. Does she realize that?
All of that only means one thing. At some point, her baby is going to crash and this will become an emergency, so I’m spending the night at the hospital tonight, and I want to stab knives into the walls. At least the cafeteria is open. I can drown my irritation in French fries and Tropical Vibe Celsius.
I’m halfway there, taking the shortcut through the busy emergency department, when a desperate voice shouts for help from one of the trauma rooms. An entire battalion of nurses and doctors darts inside, and I peek through the glass at a bloody mess of a man lying on the table. The monitors above him show his vital signs just fell to the floor.
A woman stands beside him, holding his limp handwhile screaming for answers—“What happened? Why isn’t he breathing?”
Someone gently shoves her to the side to make room, and the professionals take control—doing chest compressions, shouting for meds. They run the code with cold perfection, because they’ve done it many, many times before this. Because this is the emergency department, and sometimes people don’t make it out of here alive.
But I’m not watching the code. I’ve seen people die. I’ve performed those compressions myself. No, instead, my entire focus is zeroed in on the woman. Her tears. Her disbelieving cries of “He was fine!”I’m watching her hope dwindle with each minute that passes, as the odds of this man surviving grow dimmer. I’m beholding the exact moment she realizes she’s lost something precious tonight. I’m witnessing her soul be shorn in half.
This is the picture of heartbreak.
And I can’t watch anymore.
No longer hungry, I head blindly back upstairs. My skin tingles as memories rush beneath the surface despite my attempts to push them away.
Icy skin.
A fall beneath a roiling flood.
Laughter I’ll never hear again.
A panicky gush of cold rises up, and I’m tempted to retreat to the hill in my mind, where I’m always safe and alone. Better to be alone than hurt. Why have I been forgetting this lately?
Proceeding gracefully—i.e. stomping—toward my call room, I smile at the night nurses before throwing myself onto the rickety, uncomfortable bed. At least these call room TVs have HGTV. I can continue my nighttime research on the mystery of how an elementary school teacher and a professional organizer can afford a 1.3-million-dollar home.
Lights off, I curl up under the thin blankets that keep my feet too warm and the rest of me too cold, and resign myself to misery. But as soon as I’m idle, my mind dredges up the memories of that photoshoot, just like it’s done during every second of downtime since it happened.
Goddamn traitor, my mind is.
Iknewthat photoshoot was a bad idea. Before, how it feels to be held by Asher was a mystery to me. A faraway imagining. Now my stupid fantasies are on overdrive, flaunting the exact degree of warmth in his hands, the thin band of green that disappears when his eyes dilate, the absolute safety of his arms around me.
Falsesafety, I have to remind myself, remembering the heartbreak I just witnessed downstairs.
This is Asher’s fault for opening up to me. Deep down inside, Iamfemale, and he plucked right at those very feminine instincts, the ones that urge me to nurture. I want to nurture the shit out of that man. And I sort of want to fuck him, too.
