The Pull of the Stars(33)

Bridie, fetch the doctor at once.

Will I not help you get her into bed first?

I roared: Go!

I couldn’t put words to the terrible calculations I was making.

Right away, she said. Dr. Lynn?

I flapped my hand. Any surgeon.

For a posthumous caesarean section, an obstetrician wasn’t absolutely necessary, since there was no mother to save, only her dead flesh to slice, a living baby to seize. The window of opportunity was twenty minutes, but the faster the better—less risk of damage to the brain.

Bridie’s feet thudded off down the corridor.

I found I was as weak as water.

Delia Garrett sat bolt upright and stared at me accusingly as if this room were an antechamber of hell and I the attendant. Mrs. Noonan—is she gone now?

I nodded. I’m so sorry you—

Then why are you shouting, Nurse—what’s so bloody urgent?

I couldn’t tell her that sometimes a surgeon would harvest a woman’s fruit while she was still warm.

I got my arms under Ita Noonan and heaved her onto the bed. My back spasmed. I laid her out flat. I closed her startled eyes and clasped her hands together. One of them slipped down and off the cot, so I retrieved it and tucked it back into the blanket. For lack of a priest, I murmured, Eternal rest grant unto her, and let perpetual light shine upon her.

I resisted the temptation to check my watch; the minutes were ticking by and I could do nothing to slow them. Maybe it would take Bridie more than twenty minutes to find a doctor, in which case we’d all be spared this awful decision.

I rolled up my apron and threw it in the laundry basket, tied on another to be ready for whatever came next. What more could I do than keep putting one foot in front of the other?

Dr. Lynn glided in, Bridie on her heels. She checked for a pulse in Ita Noonan’s neck while she listened to my rapid-fire report.

In the back of my mind, I was thinking, What have I done? Why did I have to send Bridie so bloody fast? If my qualms persuaded the doctor to haul out a stunted, suffering infant at twenty-nine weeks, or twenty-eight, or even twenty-seven, for all we knew…

I saw the moment Dr. Lynn decided not to cut. A slight shake of her braided head; no layperson would have understood what she was communicating.

I felt groggy with relief.

Death from febrile convulsions consequent on influenza, she scrawled at the bottom of Ita Noonan’s chart, then signed K. Lynn.

I wondered what the K. stood for.

I’ll inform the office myself, Nurse Power.

I wondered if this was the first patient Dr. Lynn had lost today.

I tried back pressure on Mrs. Noonan, I told her, and arm lifts.

Resuscitation’s always worth attempting, she confirmed flatly. It sets one’s mind at rest to have done all one can.

(But my mind was not at rest.)

If I’d realised how fast she was slipping away, I asked, should I have tried a stimulant—smelling salts or a hypo of strychnine?

Dr. Lynn shook her head. That might have bought her a few more minutes of pain but wouldn’t have saved her. No, some flu patients are dropping like flies while others sail through, and we can’t solve the puzzle or do a blasted thing about it.

Mary O’Rahilly coughed in her drugged sleep.

Dr. Lynn went over and put the back of her hand to the girl’s pink cheek to check for fever. Then she turned on the spot and looked at the grieving woman.

How’s your cough, Mrs. Garrett?

A shrug as if to say, What does it matter.

The doctor asked me, No signs of puerperal infection?

I shook my head.

Once Dr. Lynn had gone, Bridie sidled up to me at the counter where I was counting packets of swabs. What was all that about twenty-nine weeks?

I hesitated, then said very quietly, If the foetus had been farther on—more ready—the doctor would’ve taken it out.

How on earth—

By opening up the belly.

I gestured, using my finger as the scalpel.

Her light blue eyes widened. That’s disgusting.

I managed a small shrug. To save one life out of the two…

And send it home with no mammy?

I know.

It was now 5:53 by my watch. I wondered when exactly the scampering heartbeat of the last Noonan child had stilled. What did it mean to die before ever being born?

Bridie, could you go for a couple of orderlies to collect Mrs. Noonan?

Certainly.

In her absence I cleaned the dead woman, working gently, as if Ita Noonan could still feel everything. I had time on my hands, and somehow I couldn’t bear to leave the preparation to the mortuary attendants.

Delia Garrett had turned towards the wall as if to give her fallen comrade a bit of privacy.

I got Ita Noonan into a fresh nightdress, and I unclasped the miniature tin crucifix from around her neck and tucked it under her thumbs. I put a white cloth over her face.

I packed up her few things. A paper bag I found turned out to hold her shorn hair—that almost broke me. Those Noonans waiting for her to come home, the barrel-organ man (when would he hear that he’d been widowed?) and the seven children, would receive instead of her this bag of limp curls.

Groyne followed Bridie in, serenading her:

When I leave you, dear, give me words of cheer,

To recall in times of pain.

They will comfort me, and will seem to be

Like the sunshine after rain…