I was sitting in my doctor’s waiting area perusing through piles of long-expired magazines. It was 40 minutes past my appointment time and there were others who had waited longer. The staff told us that the doctor was running late, she had an emergency delivery at the hospital. We were offered to reschedule but I preferred to get my visit over with, as did most of the others, apparently.
Eventually, the door opened and my doctor hurried in. As she took the scarf off her head, she apologized to the staff and everyone sitting.
“Thank you for waiting,” she said. “It was a difficult delivery but there’s another beautiful baby boy out there today!” Everyone clapped and the extended appointment times were quickly forgiven.
Not long after, my name was called. I put down the April 1999 edition of Mother and Baby and headed into one of the exam rooms. When she came in and saw it was me she exclaimed, “Oh! Now here is someone who will appreciate my hectic morning!” (and I did). “It was a problematic pregnancy, the numbers were off, there were issues at the hospital but it came off OK and now mother and baby are doing well.” She seemed so relieved.
“That must be the greatest experience,” I told her. “Presenting a happy mom with her healthy baby…”
She knew I was a paramedic and we had often shared interesting medical conversations interspersed with the usual chit-chat as she scraped my cervix. She was my favorite doctor by far. I had met her own kids at the office and she frequently gave me what she called “Standard Jewish Grandmother Advice” about love, baking, and getting older, even though she was not much older than I was.
“You’ve never delivered a baby?” she asked me, surprised. “You need to intercept all of those cab drivers who are doing it. They’re all over the news.”
“I’ve delivered babies,” I told her. “But I’ve never had a happy, normal delivery.”
She looked concerned, as is everyone I tell this to, especially my new coworkers who have yet to have a baby delivery under their belt. Her look turned to horror when I elaborated on the handful of delivery experiences I had. I am grateful there aren’t that many.
Often, it’s not so much the delivery but the circumstances around it. I am incredibly happy that I have not encountered any serious issues during the process itself. The mothers really do all the work, usually. You just guide the little one out, suction, flick the feet, place 2 clamps on the umbilical cord, and cut in between. Easy, right?
Not exactly, it is a bit nerve-wracking for me, for some reason. It would probably be good to do all this in a controlled environment but that has never been my experience. It’s always occurred in inconvenient and less-than-ideal areas where you’re groping about for all the little things that get scattered when you rip open an OB kit nervously.
None have ever been delivered in the back of my ambulance, which would have been a more controlled setting. But I’ve seen ambulances where a baby had been born and the aftermath made it appear as if a serial killer had brutally tortured several people with a knife so it probably isn’t as controlled as I would like to imagine it is.
The circumstances that made my delivery experiences PTSD invoking had more to do with speculation about the series of events that would happen after. All of my baby births have involved underweight, drug-addicted little infants who were quickly handed off to the social service agencies of our city. It’s difficult to process the feelings of hopelessness you experience when you assist in the arrival of someone who immediately needs help from our overburdened bureaucracies, in addition to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.
The first baby I assisted in delivering was to a homeless woman in a small park flanked by tall office buildings. The park was not very big and she was right in the middle, sitting on some newspapers on the floor next to a bench.
She was naked from the waist down with her legs spread wide. She had not gotten prenatal care and wasn’t sure how far along she was. When we got there, the baby was just about to rear his tiny head. She couldn’t be moved.
As the baby was coming out, I looked up to see hundreds of people looking down at us from the floor-to-ceiling windows of the buildings surrounding us. We used a sheet to create something of a tent but they probably knew by now what was going on. It was a harrowing experience for a first-time OB call and I was far more nervous than the mom.
When the baby was born, he was really tiny. The mother smiled when we gave him to her and she rubbed his small face with her finger. She seemed a bit distant and not at all happily overwhelmed as I expected her to be.
I look back and wonder if she were trying not to get too attached to a baby that would probably be taken away and put into foster care. I had assumed she was exhausted from giving birth without an epidural.
She had told us she had given birth once before. “Another boy,” she had said, somewhat wistfully.
She told us he was in foster care, explaining that in NYC babies weren’t allowed to live on the street with homeless mothers. She expected to be given a placement in a family shelter now that she had this child. She hoped that when that happened, she could try to get her first child back. It hadn’t occurred to me at the time that she probably could have gotten into a family shelter with the first child, with that policy, and yet her child was still presently in foster care.
Not long after arriving at the hospital, the baby was quickly whisked away into an incubator. We found out that he was only 5 pounds and would probably be going through some alcohol withdrawals.
People at the hospital berated us for not keeping the baby warm enough, despite using our last sheet and blasting the heat in the ambulance in the summer. This was the same hospital that was stingy with their one-for-one policy with bedsheets. We now have swaddle blankets for infants that do a better job of conserving body heat, but at the time we were at the mercy of the hospitals for sheets and blankets which were used for so many things, including blocking the view of unwanted onlookers and keeping newborns warm.
When we returned again a few days later with a different patient we were told that the mother had snuck out of the hospital, leaving her baby. She had given us all a fake name.
Once again we were treated harshly for “not checking her ID” as if we had technology that can detect fake Medicaid cards. They had fallen for the same ID but it was easier to lash out at us, I suppose.
I asked (someone else) about the baby and they said he was still in the pediatric ICU and would be placed in foster care. We were able to see him for a brief time. Surrounded by other tiny babies he looked rather healthy and very cute and also very vulnerable. I couldn’t imagine someone running out on this little one. His first experiences in this cold, harsh world had already been cold and harsh.
I was initially filled with anger towards the mother. But I understand that she was an addict and addiction-thinking is governed by instincts that become redirected toward everything substance-related. Perhaps, I reasoned, she had left him for unselfish reasons, knowing that she couldn’t give him what he needed.
It filled me with tremendous sadness, thinking about that poor little baby starting out so alone. What would life be like for him? Would he ever see his mother again? Would he meet his brother? Would he get adopted by a nice family?
Whenever I think about this call it becomes a long list of negative thoughts: of the lonely baby, the mother so substance-addicted that she chose a life on the street with her drug of choice over this little boy, the hospital with their petty need to take things out on us that we had no control over, and those office workers with their horrified faces. I imagined the story the gawkers would tell their friends later and how the story would be told.
I also wondered about all the blood that had been left in the park. We didn’t have any kind of resources to clean it up and I remembered the police officers, who had been on the scene with us, leaving at the same time. An average person walking their dog through the little area would probably assume someone had been murdered.
I never saw the mother again. It’s a little strange for EMS people to not run into the same homeless people in the area. They become our regulars and we develop a rapport with them. We even get to know the ones we don’t transport on a regular basis, waving to them as we drive around the neighborhood. Maybe she had found some other place to go or had gone into treatment, prompted by the birth of a baby she had left at the hospital.
When my story, and my exam, was finished my MD said little. I felt terrible for taking away the high of her successful morning and tried to steer the conversation toward other things. Afterward, I went over to the office staff to give them my copayment and take the usual card they hand out, which reminds you to make another appointment at a specific date. This time, I was also handed a prescription. No medications had been discussed and I was a little surprised. But it wasn’t for medication. It had the address of a bakery nearby. She had written on it, with a smiley face, “Get yourself some cheesecake. (a small one). Doctors orders”
Recent Comments