Hard Labour

2

2Vince handed the baby over to the shocked midwives and walked out into the corridor where the head of the resuscitation team was busily washing his hands at a scrub basin. Danh ‘Danny’ Nguyen had been in the same year as Vince at medical school and they had roomed together during their first year in college. Danny had only been in Australia two years before he’d blitzed Year Twelve at Melbourne High and romped into Medicine at Melbourne University. He’d done part of his specialist-physician training in Warrnambool, fallen in love with a local girl and settled there, much to the displeasure of his extended Vietnamese family in Melbourne.

‘s**t, Ox, I’m sorry,’ he said, using Vince’s old Newman college football nickname. ‘We just couldn’t get her going. First arrest I’ve ever seen on the mid floor, mate. I think I’ll leave the next part to you.’

Vince was suddenly very much awake. ‘Thanks, Danny. You’re probably a bit more used to the death bit. I’m more of a birth man myself.’ He shook his head. ‘So, what’s the story?’

Danny shrugged as he dried his hands. ‘There was a Code Blue for the labour ward. Apparently, she’d just delivered then suddenly went flat. They couldn’t get a blood pressure reading or pulse so they hit the buzzer.’

‘What do you reckon happened, mate?’ Vince asked, frowning. ‘She was young and healthy.’

‘I don’t know. Your guess is as good as mine. The midwives say she didn’t have a post-partum bleed, so I guess she must have had a pulmonary embolus or an amniotic fluid embolism or something. Cerebral haemorrhage maybe. She didn’t have any past cardiac history, did she?’

Vince shook his head. ‘No, nothing. s**t, Danny, she was only twenty-three. No history of anything in the past and nothing amiss antenatally.’

The sound of a wailing baby came from the adjacent special care nursery, where Vince and Danny could see the night staff attending to their tiny patients—doing observations, tube feeding, giving antibiotics and checking blood sugars. They watched silently for a minute or two.

‘Well,’ said Danny eventually, ‘we’ll just have to wait for Sarah Bell to give us the answer. I’d better get back to ICU. It’s more my home ground than this place. And Ox,’ he added with a chuckle, ‘you’ve got a big blob of that shitty meconium stuff on your shirt. I knew there was a good reason I didn’t go in for Obstetrics.’

Vince tried to wipe off the sticky black mess and only succeeded in spreading it further. His old Prof used to say that meconium had the same tenacity as Lady Macbeth’s dammed spot.

‘Ninety-five per cent of the time it’s all happy days.’

‘Yeah, it’s the other five per cent I could never stand.’

‘You and me both, mate,’ Vince muttered, taking a deep breath and returning to the Birth Unit.

* * *

The midwives had the baby on the trolley and were doing what midwives do after a birth; up until now they hadn’t had the opportunity. The long umbilical cord was still dangling with the attached forceps swinging like a pendulum and the baby was still covered with greasy, blood-stained vernix. The nurses were visibly upset as they went about their business: shortening the cord, putting on a name band and placing the baby in a warm wrap.

‘How’s the bub?’ asked Vince quietly.

‘She’s fine, Doc. Good Apgars,’ answered the senior night midwife in a subdued tone, completely different to the buoyant one of her early morning phone call of less than thirty minutes ago.

‘I’ll check her out later, Richo.’ He turned his attention to the other side of the room, where the new father was still lying on the birthing mat with his dead girlfriend folded in his arms, her tangled mane of blond hair hanging like a hessian curtain and her nose stud catching the overhead lights and sparkling like the first night star. The boy’s skinny body was shaking with convulsive sobbing.

Vince squatted and put one hand on the narrow shoulder and the other on Polly Cotter’s hand, which was flopping limply across her lover’s lap. ‘Emu, I am really sorry about this,’ he said slowly, searching for the right words, ‘but I think you must have worked out what’s happened here.’

The youth suddenly stopped sobbing and turned to face Vince. His long hollow face, framed by jet-black dreadlocks, reminded Vince of a Goya painting he and Lydia had admired at the Prado a lifetime ago.

‘Polly is dead, Emu, and … and at this stage I don’t know why.’

He paused and forced himself to meet the boy’s bewildered gaze. ‘It’s really rare for someone to die in childbirth these days, mate, so something very unusual must have happened. We’ll just have to wait until the post mortem to find out. The doctors and nurses tried everything but there was just nothing else they could do.’

Emu Quick’s pallid face, scarcely more vascular than that of his girlfriend, whose lifeless body he gently lay back down on the blood-stained drapes covering the birth mat, suddenly crumpled into tears again. Then he slowly stood, shaking his head.

‘You must have some bloody idea, Doc. Twenty-three-year-old chicks don’t just fucken die havin’ babies!’

The words hit Vince like a sledgehammer and forced him to think out loud.

‘She could’ve had a big haemorrhage, mate, just after she had the baby or maybe a problem with her heart. Sometimes an air bubble can develop in the water around the baby, then enter the mother’s blood stream and block off a big artery. Or a blood clot can form in a leg vein and travel to the lungs.’

The boy’s dark eyes seemed to bore right through Vince and he could see his lame explanation was going nowhere. Words wouldn’t work and he knew he should try to reach out to the shocked youth in some way, but he just couldn’t. Not anymore.

‘Look, mate, I’m really sorry but I don’t have the answer. Polly is dead and we’ll soon find out why. Your mum and your sister are out in the Nurses Station, why don’t you go home with them? The midwives will look after the baby and we’ll have another talk when I know more.’

After Emu gave Polly a final embrace and sobbed his last goodbyes, Vince walked him out to the waiting family. The two women jumped up from their chairs expectantly.

‘What’s goin’ on, Aaron?’ asked Emu’s mum, her voice tremulous and anxious. ‘We heard the little one cryin’ but they wouldn’t let us go in.’

Emu shrugged and shook his head, tears again streaming from his eyes.

His sister, Gabrielle, put her arm around him and looked at Vince. ‘We seen all youse runnin’ in and out, Dr Vince. Is something wrong with the baby?’

‘Polly collapsed just after giving birth,’ said Vince quietly. ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you both that, unfortunately, she has passed away. The baby is fine,’ he added as a lame afterthought. Beautifully done, dickhead.

He left them to their grief; there was no point attempting another feeble explanation.

Vince spent several minutes writing a detailed account of the proceedings in Polly’s notes—he’d learnt the importance of good records the hard way. Whatever he wrote now would be subjected to intense scrutiny later. He returned to the birth room, already restored to its usual orderly state by the grim-faced nurses, ready for the cleaners who would arrive when morning came. Even Polly had been tidied up and laid out on the birthing bed—her head on a large pillow, closed eyes facing the ceiling, a rolled white towel tucked under her chin and her body a small but symmetrical shape under the bedclothes. It seemed that if all traces of death could be removed, then it was as if it hadn’t happened at all.

He went into the nursery to do his routine neonatal baby check. The night supervisor, Pat Richardson, was preparing a bottle of formula—a stark reminder of what had happened.

‘Another one of yours came in the middle of all that, Vince,’ Pat informed him. ‘Lisa Cabresi, a few days over, multi three, contracting since midnight, membranes intact and not much happening on the CTG, so we put her to bed and she’s sound asleep now.’

On it goes, thought Vince.

The baby was in good condition and he passed her back into the safekeeping of the sombre midwives. He recorded the details of his examination and headed downstairs and out of the hospital into the cold darkness of pre-dawn. It was just before five as he got into his car; too late to go back to bed and too early to be up.

Vince often found himself wide-awake in the early hours after a bit of labour-ward action and usually went out for a run or surf depending on the swell and his mood. These nocturnal activities made him tired and even grumpier than usual by mid-afternoon, but it was worth it for the luxury of a couple of solitary hours in the ocean.

These days he preferred his own company to the clamour of the maddening crowd. He figured Thomas Hardy was right on the money whereas John Donne had it all wrong. Vince was quite content to be an island. Not only that, but after the events of tonight, he knew there would be rough seas ahead and he needed some time in the wind and waves to clear his head.

Sitting there in the hospital car park, surrounded by darkness, Vince suddenly had a vivid vision of another dead woman in another labour ward and was instantly reminded of the reason for his banishment to the bush. He immediately felt that familiar tightness in his chest and escalating sense of panic, and fought to slow down his breathing as he’d been taught.

He fired up the engine of his ancient Volvo station wagon, Benny, and pulled out, heading south through the dark town, turning left onto Merri Street, which ran along above the main beach, and parked in behind the sand dunes at his favourite surfing spot, the Flume.

Vince clambered up onto the sand hill behind the car park to check out the surf. As always it was lighter at the beach and judging from the sound of the waves and what he could see and feel, there seemed to be a good offshore breeze and a decent swell. Being winter there was no one else around and Vince was happy to put up with the cold in return for the solitude.

He plodded and slid back down the hill to the car park, lifted Benny’s tailgate and pulled his gear out onto the cold, damp sand, shivering inside as he recalled that pale, lifeless body on the floor.

Clad in his old Rip Curl steamer wetsuit, he paddled out through the surf just as the sun started its ascent over the breakwater and the heavy black curtain began to lift. He felt that familiar stinging salty slap in the face as he rode up and over the freezing white water.