16“Not so different?” I raised a skeptical eyebrow. “What has combat got in common with delivering babies?”
“Soldiers, midwives—we spend days doing ordinary things, waiting for action. And the action itself is often routine. Yet in a single second everything can go completely wrong. We have no time to ponder what to do. So we must think very hard beforehand. Imagine each crisis which might occur and how to react. We can do the optimal thing, quickly and calmly.”
It was how I approached a tricky field situation. The realization was unsettling, a bond I hadn’t expected.
I recalled how nervelessly he’d treated Bella. “You’d thought this through—how you’d perform an emergency Caesarean?”
“You saw. My mother had the surgical kit ready.”
Helping Bella, Jerzy and Pani Jola had acted in perfe
