A Thousand Naked Strangers - Kevin Hazzard Page 0,81

until there’s nothing left but to walk right to them. Some medics go their entire career without delivering a single child. This year my career total hits thirteen.

They’ve found me at a strange time, all these vaginas and the babies emerging from them. My wife is pregnant with our first child, one of a thousand babies scheduled to be born this year. We were told more than once that pregnancy might not be in the cards for us. For many pregnant women—definitely the ones who deliver in an ambulance—conception is the easy part. They’ve often accomplished that task accidentally, sometimes unknowingly. Not us. We’ve endured years of fertility treatments, including multiple failed in utero and in vitro fertilization attempts. The growing swell of my wife’s belly—the presence we fear might fade away without a sound—represents tens of thousands of dollars, an uncountable number of ultrasounds and doctors’ visits, intrusive exams, pills, shots, and our own fluctuating hopes.

Over and over we tried, and then one day Sabrina was pregnant. In vitro attempt number three worked. So began nine months of analyzing every dizzy spell, every cramp and unexpected movement, for signs that something—anything—was happening. People tell me that being in medicine and knowing about the human body is a good thing. It’s not. Knowing what could happen—having seen it, how it affects people—is not good. There are truths I’d rather not know.

During the years-long process—our reproductive wilderness years—I believed, maybe without real conviction, that the worries would end once Sabrina was pregnant. But as any parent can attest, fears are only amplified once a child ceases to be theoretical and becomes a living, breathing, gestating possibility.

First Trimester

The first miscarriage I worked was the worst. Tiny hands, fully formed, curled into fists that dangled from arms attached to the world’s smallest human. Nobody told me it would be like this. I imagined blood and pain and a quiet woman. Instead, we got a person in miniature, asleep in the Tupperware. At first our patient wanted to hold him, then didn’t and placed him on the stretcher. We hit a bump and the container fell off. He landed in the street, as soft as a raindrop. The process of picking him up and finding a suitable place to carry him was funereal—imagine two ashamed pallbearers in the orange glow of a streetlight.

Most times it’s not that dramatic. Often first-trimester problems arrive as a presentiment—an anonymous voice from deep inside the body, whispering that something might have gone wrong. Sometimes there’s blood, sometimes not. Many women know, though they might not be able to put a finger on how. All too often it’s not a miscarriage, only morning sickness or cramps or back pain, the dizziness that creeps in from dehydration and exhaustion. These women, the ones who call every day for the duration of the pregnancy, have stacks of unfilled prescriptions and discharge paperwork from last month, last week, last night. Their paperwork is nothing but admonishments—direct and not at all subtle—not to return to the hospital, not to call 911. But still these women call. And we take them.

Second Trimester

It happened on a normal day. We were dispatched to the far end of town for a woman with abdominal pain. She was pregnant and bleeding in her apartment. When we walked through the door, she didn’t speak. Her mother was there and said she was twenty-three weeks pregnant. When we reached the back of the ambulance, she yelled that something was coming. In went the stretcher with us behind it. I yanked her pants off. The doors were open. There was no time. There, in full view of the world, she delivered a tiny, lifeless child onto the stretcher. She was panting and nervous, asking how he was doing. The words uh, well, not good shouldn’t have to be the first thing a new parent hears. We clamped the cord and cut it, wrapped him in a blanket, and placed him on his back. He wasn’t breathing, had no heartbeat. We suctioned his mouth and tried to stimulate him. Nothing. I began chest compressions, using a single finger on his tiny chest. We tried to ventilate him, but our equipment was too big. We were twenty minutes from nowhere, an eternity when you have something too small for any of your equipment. Never had a situation felt so hopeless.

We arrived at the hospital with a nervous mother and a child that never was. Then, as we pulled the stretcher out of the