State of Wonder - Ann Patchett [27]
“How are you feeling now?” the flight attendant asked.
“I’m fine,” Marina said. Her eyes were dry and she concentrated on keeping them open.
“Well, don’t feel embarrassed. This nice man here woke you up
in time.”
The nice man smiled again at Marina. Something in that smile implied that he was sheltering a small flame of hope that there would be a reward for his good deed.
“Some people’s seatmates aren’t so thoughtful,” the flight attendant said. She was lingering. There wasn’t much to do in first class, not enough people to take care of. “They let them snore and scream and carry on until you can hear them in the rear lavatory.”
“I’m fine now,” Marina said again, and she turned her face to the window, wondering if there was an empty seat at the back of the plane.
She tried to separate what had happened that night from her deposition. She tried to place herself back at the actual event instead of the endless and exhaustive retelling of that event. The patient was twenty-eight, African-American. Her hair was straightened and pulled back. She was tall, broad shouldered, enormously pregnant. Marina was surprised to remember how much she liked the woman. If the patient had been afraid she never showed it. She talked about her other children in between her contractions and sometimes through them: two girls, and now they were having their boy. Marina paged Dr. Swenson and told her the patient’s contractions were four minutes apart and she hadn’t begun dilating. The infant’s heart rate was unstable. Marina told Dr. Swenson that unless the situation improved they would need to do a cesarean.
And Dr. Swenson said, she was very clear on this, that Marina was to wait. She was not to do the section without her.
“Can you see anything down there?” asked the man in the suit.
“No,” Marina said.
“I don’t know how you can stand it. Me, I can’t do the window seat. If it’s all they’ve got I pull the blind. I tell myself we’re in a bus. I used to not be able to fly at all and I went to a class where they taught us to hypnotize ourselves into thinking we were on a bus. It works as long as I have a drink. Do you want a drink?”
Marina shook her head.
“Part of the paper?”
Marina looked at him. He was pale with high red cheeks, a fellow traveler who wanted her to ask him why he was flying to Miami and if that was his final destination. He wanted her to tell him she was going on to South America so that he could be impressed and ask her what she planned on doing there, and she would do none of that. She would do nothing for him.
She had done C-sections before but on that night she was told to wait and monitor and call back in one hour if there was no improvement. The fetal heart rate dropped and climbed, dropped and climbed, and still the patient wasn’t dilated. Marina paged Dr. Swenson the second time, and she waited and waited but there was no call back. When she looked at the clock she realized that only forty-five minutes had passed, not an hour. The rules were intractable. She had not followed the rules. It was exactly the thing Marina had always admired about Dr. Swenson until she was the one trying to get her on the phone. The patient was a talker, and they had time to talk. She said she was exhausted but that it wasn’t so much the labor. She said her two-year-old had kept her up all night the night before with an earache. Her husband had dropped her off in front of the hospital. He was driving their girls out to his mother’s and that was two hours away. Two hours out and two hours back but at the rate she was going he’d be there for the birth so she said she didn’t mind waiting. She wanted him there. He had missed the first two, circumstances, she said, not his fault. Her voice was strong, louder than it needed to be in the small room. “You always forget what childbirth is like,” she