Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [52]
She followed his gaze to Sister Mary Joseph Praise's head, which bobbed like a rag doll's as the anesthetist tugged at her arm to find another vein. Matron, teary and lost in her grief, stroked Sister Mary Joseph Praise's other hand.
When Hema finally delivered the uterus, clamps and all, into a basin, she saw no pulsations in the abdominal aorta. Her hands, steady till now, shook as she loaded a syringe with Adrenalin and attached a three-and-a-half-inch needle to it. She lifted Sister Mary Joseph Praise's left breast, hesitated for a moment, invoked God's name again, then plunged the needle between the ribs and into the heart. She pulled the plunger back, and a mushroom of heart blood appeared in the syringe. Whenever I've had to resort to adrenaline to the heart it has never worked, Hema said to herself. Not once. Maybe I do it as a way to signal to myself that the patient is dead. But surely it must have worked, somewhere, with someone. Why else was it taught to us?
Hemlatha prided herself on being methodical in an emergency, keeping her cool. But she stifled a sob now as she waited, her right hand buried in Sister Mary Joseph Praise's abdomen, palm down, just over the spine, waiting for a throb in the aorta, a slap to register in her fingers. She couldn't forget that this was dear Sister's heart she was trying to jump-start, and whose life was slipping away. They'd shared the bond of two Indian women in a foreign land. The bond extended back to the Government General Hospital in Madras, India, even though they hadn't known each other there. To share a geography and a landscape of memory made them sisters, a family. And Hema could see her sister's hands turning blue, the nail beds dusky, and the skin turning dull. It was the hand of a corpse, and holding it was Matron, her head bowed as if she were asleep.
Hema waited longer than she might have under normal circumstances. It was some time before she could bring herself to say, her voice breaking, “No more. We have lost her.”
IT WAS DURING this hiatus of activity in the room that the firstborn, the one who'd been spared a skull puncture, signaled its presence. It rapped its hands on the copper basin. It brought its left heel down to produce a muffled gong. Now that it had come wholly forth from a dying womb, it reached both arms skyward and then to its right, to its brother. Here I be, it announced. Forget the shoulds and coulds and might haves and hows and whys. I am sympathetic to the situation, the circumstance, and in due course we can explore the details, and, in any case, Birth and Copulation, and Death—that's all the facts when you come down to brass tacks … I've been born, and once is enough. Help my brother. Look! Here! Come at once! Help him.
Hemlatha ran over at this summons, saying “Shiva, Shiva,” invoking the name of her personal deity, the God whom others thought of as the Destroyer, but who she believed was also the Transformer, the one who could make something good come out of something terrible. Later she would say that she'd assumed the worst about the twins. One of them had his head bloodied, and then there was the matter of her dividing the fleshy tube that connected them, and God knows how much distress they'd been in before she cut them free of the womb. But she'd also assumed that Matron or the probationer or both would be reviving the infants while she worked on the mother, though she recalled seeing Matron seated and immobile.
The probationer was mortified at the sound of a baby that had come alive right behind her back, confounding her most basic clinical assumptions. The child was no longer white, but pink, and not jaundiced. The other infant was a robin's egg blue, and it was still and unmoving as if it were the discarded chrysalis from which the crying baby had emerged. Matron, hearing that newborn cry, jumped