Vasser sat at the front desk, feeding another chart, sheet by sheet, onto the patient’s green plastic ID card in the beige stamping tool.
“Whoosh – clomp – ca-chunk. Whoosh – clomp – ca-chunk.” Vasser’s left hand melded with the handle she deployed to emboss each patient’s particulars into the lower right corner of every page. On one side of her desk sat a pile of blank charts all collated and ready for the ten or so patients expected to roll onto 5L during her 11 PM to 7 AM graveyard shift.
“That the Red Blanket?” I asked as I walked by, pausing to glance at the white board behind her, checking if I had another admission while I was delivering Maria, the shoulder dystocia.
Vasser paused mid-clomp, gave a little shake to her curly, unkempt dirty blond hair, and resumed her feverish chart creation. Grabbing another page, she turned away from me and looked at the stapled sheaf of papers, rumpled from the elevator ride on the bed with Maria, saying in her sing-song voice, “Maria Garcia.” She glanced at the whiteboard behind her.” Dr. Truscott.” She resumed the tedium of admitting another new mother to our hospital without further acknowledgement of my presence.
I sank into a rolling chair at a little desk built into the alcove across from her. A clock on the wall started to hum, clicked once, then again as the hour and minute hands lined straight up together. Midnight. Sixteen hours into my own 24-hour shift on 5L, nearing the end of my third of six months on Labor and Delivery scattered throughout the first year of my Ob-Gyn residency.
Why hadn’t I seen this girl, this GN, Cheryl Hanna, before? She knew her way around the delivery room, it clearly wasn’t her first night on the job. Had I been so wrapped up in the continual effort of becoming a doctor that I had dropped all awareness of anyone around me, seeing others merely for how they could help or hinder the eighty or ninety hours of work loaded on me each week?
As I waited for Vasser to finish my chart, a bed rumbled by on my right, followed by the nurse – my nurse – who’d helped in that shoulder dystocia. Turning the corner towards the post-partum room, she glanced back at me, subliminally acknowledging my presence. I began to fill out the forms from the chart Vasser brought over.
A minute later, a creamy arm, lightly tinged with tan, reached out, palm up, while a quiet, almost laughing voice asked, “Can I have my part, please?”
Looking up, once again a smiling face caught me, this time unencumbered by a mask. Blue eyes held mine, and I sensed a tug inside between stolid immobility and warm engagement. Maybe it was the late hour, lack of sleep, but instead of handing them over without a word – the standard interaction between me and any woman my age those days – I said, “So, why? Why do you want to be a midwife?”