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 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 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?”
I picked the nursing sheets out of the chart, tapped them on the desk to even the corners, and kept them close to my chest. Cheryl blinked twice, waiting. Grayer appeared from the hall leading to the labor rooms, officiously announcing, “Miss Hanna! You’ve a new admit in C. And post-partum needs Garcia’s chart.” Her eyes flitted between the two of us who remained transfixed at the desk. I sighed, and handed the nursing chart over to Cheryl.
I headed to the small break room adjacent to the lab where we’d first met, hoping the look on my face served as a beacon, a lighthouse warning of Grayer’s advance, yet showing the safe route around the shoals.
Opening the half-fridge, I yanked out a plastic cup of orange juice, meant for diabetic patients in hypo-glycemic crisis, ripped off the aluminum foil seal, and slurped the contents in one gulp. My forearms shivered while a cold electric pulse shot up my spine and down my legs. My hands shook a bit as I tossed the cup towards an open trash can, causing me to miss wide left. Obstetric emergencies no longer fazed me; I could rescue a fading baby in under ten minutes from the time I called an emergency C-Section. Something else, not the shoulder dystocia, had sapped my strength. The shot of orange juice revived my mind, but still I felt cold. I clenched my teeth, and sat down, steeling myself for the next crisis sure to come my way sometime in the next seven hours.
My thoughts drifted while I sat, breathing slowly. I glanced at the bulletin board, and noticed something new amongst the baby pictures and tired cartoon strips: a of map Mexico. A swath of colored pins covered the area just below the US border, in Baja California, Sonora, and Chihuahua. I went over to the map, bending and squinting, wondering what they all meant.
“I think the other nurses don’t like that,” I heard behind me. The inner shivers started up again.
“Huh?” I managed, turning round to the door, seeing Cheryl once again, smiling just for me.
“I’ve been asking all my patients where they’re from, then I put a pin there. I get the feeling the staff here, the ones who’ve been around forever, don’t like all these ladies coming over to have their babies.”
I raised one side of my mouth, a half-hearted returning smile. My eyes crinkled, and I shook my head several times. “Why? Who cares?”
“Well, I’m interested in finding out. They’ve all got a story, all these patients. Everybody else sees them as an imposition, not a person – the Eclamptic. The Footling Breech. You know? The other interns make fun of them, the residents ignore them as people. And the nurses – the nurses act like these women have stolen something.”
“Why’d you do that, stick those pins in?”
“I don’t know, I’m just interested in that kind of stuff.” She paused, waiting. When I said nothing, she went on, “I was an Anthropology major.”
“Where? When?”
“UC Santa Barbara. I graduated four years ago.”
“1971?”
“Uh-huh.” Her smile turned dreamy as she nodded affirmation.
“So you’re what, 25?”
Another nod. “April 11.”
“Really? My birthday’s April 9th! 1949, right?”
She checked at her watch. “I’ve got a break now, 15 minutes. Want to go down to the cafeteria, see if we can find something?”
“It’s closed at 10, you know.”
“Yeah, but sometimes they leave stuff out.”
“Or you can sneak into the coolers, get some pudding.”
With that, we walked to the elevator foyer, the doors opening and disgorging another patient into our night.
The Women’s Hospital cafeteria occupied the first basement, along with the lab. We took the service elevator, sharing the car with bundle of soiled linens, headed for the sub-basement laundry. Cheryl wrinkled her nose at the foul cargo. At this late hour, we had an express trip covering six floors without a stop.
Florescent lights popped and flickered overhead, and our bootie-covered shoes added a scratchy refrain reflecting off the green concrete walls. The sliding gate protecting the cafeteria remained open only wide enough to allow only one of us to slither in at a time. I headed straight for the cooler, and grabbed two bowls of wriggly chocolate pudding while Cheryl fiddled with the coffee urn.
Glancing my way, she raised a white ceramic cup, questioning with her eyes.
“Nope, never drink it. It just wakes me up,” I said. She giggled, pouring herself some over two heaping spoonful’s of sugar.
“Any milk in there?” she asked. I grabbed a pint carton, the top already folded open. “So, an OB who doesn’t drink coffee?”
“Yeah, never got into it at college. Everybody else needed it to stay awake at night to study. I wake up at 6 naturally, and did all my studying early, before classes. In the evenings, I’d go around to people’s rooms and bother them.”
“Where did you go to college?” We pulled out two round-bottomed chairs, the aluminum feet scraping a loud echo across the floor of the empty room.
“In Connecticut. Wesleyan.”
“How’d you get out here?”
“The only medical schools I got into were USC and University of Cincinnati. I grew up there, and didn’t really want to go back, I guess. Besides, if I was going to spend eight hours a day in class, then study all night, I thought it would be a good deal if it were always nice when I did go outside.”
She nodded, stirring some milk into her coffee. I pulled the Saran Wrap off the bowls of pudding, and slid one over to. The space between us narrowed, and I felt a warmth start to fill the cavernous room. “So did you always want to be a doctor?”
I nodded. “Well, not always, of course. When I was a kid, I planned to be a baseball player in the summer and a mountain climber in the winter. But when I was fifteen, one day in the spring I was sitting on the diving board by our pool, and thought about what I should do ‘when I grow up.’ My mother’d always told me I could do, could be anything I wanted, and I was still young enough to believe her, so I ticked through a lot of things, and decided to be a doctor.”
Cheryl stayed quiet while I paused, so I went on. “I wanted to deal with people with no artificial barriers between us – just me and them, helping take care of the one thing they really have, their body.”
“But why OB?”
“I went to medical school thinking I wanted to be a psychiatrist. But during the first summer, I worked in a child psych clinic here, and realised I didn’t want to sit on my rear end eight hours a day listening to people tell me how bad the world is. In the fall of my third year, the first night on my OB rotation,” here I looked up, toward the now unseen melee in 5L, “I fell in love with it. Bam, just like that. Women came in, labor progressed, babies came out. It was exciting, and things mostly go well, not like other parts of medicine. I wanted to be around that more, I guess.”
Cheryl fixated on her coffee, so I added, “The more I do it, the more I learned, being born, it’s the one thing we all have in common, the most human thing there is.”
Cheryl raised her head, solemnly looked at me, and said, “Mothers. We all have a mother. That’s what I like about it, why I want to be a midwife. It’s where I can help change the world, getting mothers and their babies off to a good start in life. What could be more important?”
While she talked, I noticed the first inklings of a feeling I’d had several times before. When I did that first night on OB. When my father took me on my first ride up a chair lift, and down a ski slope on Dollar Mountain at Sun Valley. When I won my first ribbon in a swim meet, coming in second place. My face softened as I took in her sincerity.
“I’ve gotta go back,” she said, setting down her half-empty coffee cup. “Grayer’ll kill me if I’m not on time.”
I followed her to the elevator, waiting open for us. Once inside, after she’d pushed “5”, I found myself asking, “Listen, maybe we should go out after work sometime? Did you ever see The Godfather? Part 2 just came out…” I clenched my jaw, wondering where that had come from. It wasn’t me, I’m sure, at least not the cautious, introverted left side of my brain. Something, someone else had spoken.
As the doors slid open, she turned and said, “Sure. I’ll see you at 7:30, when I’m off? We can talk then?”