“Saturday morning. I was in the nursery when Corinne—the baby’s new nurse—brought him in for a circ.”
“What were your responsibilities that morning?”
She frowns. “I had two—no, three patients. It had been a crazy night; I’d worked a shift I wasn’t supposed to work because another nurse was out sick. I had gone into the nursery to grab clean linens, and to scarf down a PowerBar, because I hadn’t eaten at all during my shift.”
“What happened after the baby was circumcised?”
“I wasn’t in the room, but I assumed it all went normally. Then Corinne grabbed me and asked me to watch over him because another one of her patients had to be rushed to the OR, and protocol required that a postcirc baby be monitored.”
“Did you agree?”
“I didn’t really have a choice. There was literally no one else to do it. I knew Corinne or Marie, my charge nurse, would be back quickly to take over.”
“When you first saw the baby, how did he look?”
“Beautiful,” Ruth says. “He was swaddled and fast asleep. But a few moments later I looked down and saw that his skin was ashen. He was making grunting noises. I could see he was having trouble breathing.”
I walk toward the witness box, and set my hand on the rail. “What did you do in that instant, Ruth?”
She takes a deep breath. “I unwrapped the swaddling. I started touching the baby, tapping his feet, trying to get him to respond.”
The jury looks puzzled. Odette sits back in her chair, arms crossed, a smile breaking over her face.
“Why did you do that? When you’d been told by your supervisor tonottouch that baby?”
“I had to,” Ruth confesses. I can see it, the way she breaks free, like a butterfly from a chrysalis. Her voice is lighter, the lines bracketing her mouth soften. “It’s what any good nurse would do in that situation.”
“Then what?”
“The next step would have been to call a code, to get a whole team in to resuscitate. But I heard footsteps. I knew someone was coming and I didn’t know what to do. I thought I’d get in trouble if someone saw me interacting with the baby, when I had been told not to. So I wrapped him up again, and stepped back, and Marie walked into the nursery.” Ruth looks down at her lap. “She asked me what I was doing.”
“What did you say, Ruth?”
When she glances up, her eyes are wide with shame. “I said I was doing nothing.”
“You lied?”
“Yes.”
“More than once, apparently—when you were later questioned by the police, you stated that you did not engage in any resuscitative efforts for that baby. Why?”
“I was afraid I was going to lose my job.” She turns to the jury, pleading her case. “Every fiber of my being told me I had to help that infant…but I also knew I’d be reprimanded if I went against my supervisor’s orders. And if I lost my job, who would take care of my son?”
“So you basically faced either assisting in malpractice, or violating your supervisor’s order?”
She nods. “It was a lose-lose situation.”
“What happened next?”
“The code team was called in. My job was to do compressions. I did my best, we all did, but in the end it wasn’t enough.” She looks up. “When the time of death was called, and when Mr. Bauer took the Ambu bag out of the trash and tried to continue efforts himself, I could barely hold it together.” Like an arrow searching for its mark, her eyes hone in on Turk Bauer, in the gallery. “I thought:What did I miss? Could I have done anything different?” She hesitates. “And then I thought:Would I have been allowed to?”
“Two weeks later you received a letter,” I say. “Can you tell us about it?”
“It was from the Board of Health. Suspending my license to practice as a nurse.”
“What went through your mind when you received it?”
“I realized that I was being held responsible for the death of Davis Bauer. I knew I’d be suspended from my job, and that’s what happened.”
