Mrs. Czinski did. Nothing happened.
He frowned. “Try again. Harder.”
Nothing.
Dr. Wilson placed his hands on the baby’s legs and tugged, very gently. There was no movement. He squeezed his hand past the baby, through the narrow passage into the uterus, and began to explore. Beads of perspiration appeared on his forehead. The maternity nurse moved close to him and mopped his brow.
“We’ve got a problem,” Dr. Wilson said, in a low voice.
Mrs. Czinski heard. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Everything’s fine.” Dr. Wilson reached in farther, gently trying to push the infant downward. It would not budge. He could feel the umbilical cord compressed between the baby’s body and the maternal pelvis, cutting off the baby’s air supply.
“Fetoscope!”
The maternity nurse reached for the instrument and applied it to the mother’s belly, listening for the baby’s heartbeat. “It’s down to thirty,” she reported. “And there’s marked arrhythmia.”
Dr. Wilson’s fingers were inside the mother’s body, like remote antennae of his brain, probing, searching.
“I’m losing the fetal heartbeat—” There was alarm in the maternity nurse’s voice. “It’s negative!”
They had a dying baby inside the womb. There was still a slim chance that the baby could be revived if they could get it out in time. They had a maximum of four minutes to deliver it, clear its lungs and get its tiny heart beating again. After four minutes, brain damage would be massive and irreversible.
“Clock it,” Dr. Wilson ordered.
Everyone in the room instinctively glanced up as the electric clock on the wall clicked to the twelve o’clock position, and the large red second hand began making its first sweep.
The delivery team went to work. An emergency respiratory tank was wheeled to the table while Dr. Wilson tried to dislodge the infant from the pelvic floor. He began the Bracht maneuver, trying to shift the infant around, twisting its shoulders so that it could clear the vaginal opening. It was useless.
A student nurse, participating in her first delivery, felt suddenly ill. She hurried out of the room.
Outside the door of the operating room stood Karl Czinski, nervously kneading his hat in his large, calloused hands. This was the happiest day of his life. He was a carpenter, a simple man who believed in early marriage and large families. This child would be their first, and it was all he could do to contain his excitement. He loved his wife very much, and he knew that without her he would be lost. He was thinking about his wife as the student nurse came rushing out of the delivery room, and he called to her, “How is she?”
The distraught young nurse, her mind preoccupied with the baby, cried, “She’s dead, she’s dead!” and hurried away to be sick.
Mr. Czinski’s face went white. He clutched his chest and began gasping for air. By the time they got him to the emergency ward, he was beyond help.
Inside the delivery room, Dr. Wilson was working frantically, racing the clock. He could reach inside and touch the umbilical cord and feel the pressure against it, but there was no way to release it. Every impulse in him screamed for him to pull the half-delivered baby out by force, but he had seen what happened to babies that had been delivered that way. Mrs. Czinski was moaning now, half delirious.
“Bear down, Mrs. Czinski. Harder! Come on!”
It was no use, Dr. Wilson glanced up at the clock. Two precious minutes were gone, without any blood circulating through the baby’s brain. Dr. Wilson faced another problem: what was he going to do if the baby were saved after the four minutes had elapsed? Let it live and become a vegetable? Or let it have a merciful, quick death? He put the thought out of his mind and began to move faster. Closing his eyes, working by touch, all his concentration focused on what was happening inside the woman’s body. He tried the Mauriceau-Smellie-Veit maneuver, a complicated series of moves designed to loosen and free the baby’s body. And suddenly there was a shift. He felt it begin to move. “Piper forceps!”
The maternity nurse swifty handed him the special forceps and Dr. Wilson reached in and placed them around the baby’s head. A moment later the head emerged.
The baby was delivered.
This was always the instant of glory, the miracle of a newly created life, red-faced and bawling, complaining of the indignity of being forced out of that quiet, dark womb into the light and the cold.
But not this baby. This baby was blue-white and still. It was a female.
The clock. A minute and a half left. Every move was swiftly mechanical now, the result of long years of practice. Gauzed fingers cleared the back of the infant’s pharynx so air could get into the laryngeal opening. Dr. Wilson placed the baby flat on its back. The maternity nurse handed him a small-size laryngoscope connecting with an electric suction apparatus. He set it in place and nodded, and the nurse clicked a switch. The rhythmic sucking sound of the machine began.
Dr. Wilson looked up at the clock.
Twenty seconds left to go. Heartbeat negative.
Fifteen…fourteen…Heartbeat negative.
The moment of decision was at hand. It might already be too late to prevent brain damage. No one could ever be really sure about these things. He had seen hospital wards filled with pathetic creatures with the bodies of adults and the minds of children, or worse.
Ten seconds. And no pulse, not even a thread to give him hope.
Five seconds. He made his decision then, and hoped that God would understand and forgive him. He was going to pull the plug, say that the baby could not be saved. No one would question his action. He felt the baby’s skin once more. It was cold and clammy.