Sometimes You Cry At Midday

For whatever is born of God overcomes the world;
and this is the victory that has overcome the world--our faith.

Who is the one who overcomes the world, but he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God? This is the One who came by water and blood,
Jesus Christ; not with the water only, but with the water and the blood.

1 John 5:4,5



Water and blood.
We see a lot of that.


***

It was a somber day in the labour room.
It was only a half day for me because my parents were coming to visit the hospital and see what it’s all like.
It was their second day in India,
and they wanted to come and see
where I was,
what I saw,
what I experienced each day.

The 7 labouring tables were full,
each with differing stages of progressing births.
There is a girl closest to me and the table is tilted up so she’s more in a reclining position rather than flat on her back.
Her pretty face is skewed
with an ill-fitting oxygen mask strapped over her nose and mouth.
She breathes quite fast,
and her rhythmic pace of breathing in-and-out
echoes within the mask,
this constant,
steady
sound,
like a machine monitoring heartbeat,
a sound that is strange to hear outside the chest,
but at the same time,
in the back of your mind
you’re glad you hear it,
even though it’s off-putting,
it would be even worse if there was no sound at all.
At least she’s still alive.

This sets the tone for the day.

Her name is Chiti, she is 20 years old.
First pregnancy, she still looks like a girl,
her hair is long, but messy in her braid,
like she could have just woken up from a teenage girl’s slumber party.
But, instead she is fighting for her life.

I find her file as she keeps this raspy in-and-out pace on her steel bed.
She is pre-eclamptic. Her blood pressure is high, she has severe pitting oedema in her legs. She is also severely anemic-in-failure. With an Hb level of 5, last time they checked. A doctor’s scribbled note says,
“ ? heart disease ”
I flip more through her pages of her file,
she is pre-term, at least 4 weeks too early,
and her baby has already died.
IUD.
Intra-uterine death.

A doctor walks up to her, without a word, reaches inside with a gloved hand and roughly moves this way and that. Chiti winces. Some water starts to pool between Chiti’s legs, and the doctor removes her hand clutching a tip of a sharp syringe needle.
The doctor leaves the needle, point up, on the bed and walks away. I take the needle and throw it away.
Artificial Rupture of Membranes.
She broke her bag of waters, in hopes that this will spur on stronger contractions.

Her grandmother is trying to get through the doors into the labour ward. Family is not usually allowed in, and she is being scooted away by the daima cleaning ladies. Her skin is dark, her face has deep wrinkles, her eyes are round and old and blurry-looking. She wears a sari and you can see her ribcage. Her cheeks are sunken and her droopy little face is adorable and terrible at the same time. She has been weeping in the hallway.
She finally sneaks in somehow, and stands beside her granddaughter, not knowing what to think or do. We come over to them, Hollie and I, and we ask if we can pray. The grandmother takes a piece of her sari from over her shoulder and covers her head. Hollie prays boldly in the Name of Jesus, and I find myself void of words. The only thing I can manage to speak is agreement, “yes... yes... mmmhmm, yes Lord...”

Apparently, somewhere in the notes she received 2 units of blood from the hospital.
But now, what she really needs is plasma, and the hospital doesn’t have it.
The family needs to go to an outside source, and buy FFP, fresh frozen plasma.
But they have not got it yet.
Why? Because they are just too poor.
So poverty is shortening this young girl’s chance for something so basic and vital as strong blood.
But what do you do when your blood is weak,
and that precious bag of golden liquid is not on the way for you?
How many breaths do you keep taking?

We ask how much it costs, if we can give money for it, is there anyone able to even buy it?
We find out her uncle is here too.



Chiti is still breathing shallow and fast, and she is tired.
She tries to shift positon because her back is sore from the steel table,
but then the doctors yell at her to go back how she was.
Her nose ring peeks out behind the hard plastic mask,
her eyes are closed as she concentrates for each breath.
Her face is extremely pale,
not the healthy brown glow of Indian skin,
but skin void of a blush of pink;
sallow, light, sickly.

Her belly is brimming, and heaving with her breaths.
She does not know her baby is dead.

They don’t tell them because then the mothers may not have it in them to push or keep going.


Another woman gets wheeled in on a metal stretcher, gives these hoots and hollers, and the nurses transfer her to a labouring table.
They hook up her IV and then there is this little eruption of many loud voices and a gaggle of doctors ordering things and blank-faced nursing students huddling together like sheep.
Wrong room, she’s actually supposed to be going to get a scan.
So they get her off the table again, and wheel her away.


Across the way, Chiti’s grandmother scrunches down to a heap on the floor, leaning up against the wall. I crouch down beside her, look at her in the eyes, and offer compassion in a way that is languageless.
She cinches her fingers together and points to her mouth. Something to eat.
I don’t have food to give her. I wonder when she last ate.
I take her hand in mine and stroke her arm softly. I ask if I can pray for her, somehow I’ve been given a new burst of hope and endurance for the situation.
I pray for the grandmother, I pray for the girl, I pray for the plasma to get here, somehow.
She covers her sari over her head, closes her eyes and seeks for someone Greater than her in this time of desperate need.
Does she know Him?
She keeps wiping her face with her sari as the tears fill up and brim over her bleary eyes.
I stay with her for a while. She rests her dry, dirty, tired, weary hand in mine.
What a contrast.
There we sit, with the rhythm of Chiti’s raspy, laboured breaths above us, anticipating something but not knowing what yet.


The hooting and hollering woman gets wheeled back in, and now gets placed on a steel delivery bed. A student doctor roughly checks her dilation and the mother winces, and I notice that the amniotic fluid is like a brown sludge. I ask if the baby is in distress, and she tells me the baby is dead.
Oh no.

This is so intense.

And here I stand, in the tension of two women laying across from each other. Both with bellies as ripe as the moon, both struggling for an outcome that is kept a somber secret from them.

I hear a rumour that Chiti's uncle is on the way to get fresh frozen plasma for her.

I keep my eyes on the clock, I need to go soon. I promised my parents I’d be at the hospital gate at 12:45.

I’m watching another birth, I’m checking up on this and that, and all of a sudden, the woman on the bed starts to hoot and holler again. The baby’s head is crowning.
Hollie’s gloves are covered with another woman’s blood, she lifts her eyes, sees the baby coming, opens her eyes wide and with a franticness in her voice, cries, “Fia, get the baby!!”
“My gloves aren’t sterile!”
“It doesn’t matter! Get it!!”

Shocked and unprepared, I run over and help the baby’s head deliver.
“Hollie, this is an IUD. They said the baby is dead.”
She’s pulling on the baby and delivering her like normal.
“I thought you just let the mother deliver herself when it’s a mascerated stillborn.”
“It’s not mascerated. Did you check its heart?”

The baby delivers and her eyes are swollen and her face is bruised. Hollie does a few desperate chest compressions, but then notices that the cord is limp and starting to peel and has no pulse at all. I lay my fingers on the little one’s chest, and I can feel no beat of a heart.

Hollie feels the chest.

“Sorry,
I thought the baby was alive.
I didn’t know she was IUD.
But she’s fresh, she’s not mascerated yet. They only start to get mascerated after sitting 12 hours dead in the womb.”

It’s 10 minutes before I meet my parents.


This poor mother, how does this happen?
9 months of life, and within the last 12 hours, death?

There is so much I don’t know;
I don’t know her case,
I don’t know her history,
I don’t know the reason behind the fetal distress, this cease of heartbeat, this terrible outcome.

All I did
was receive the baby,
making her descent into a world
that she never got to see.

The absence of a newborn cry,
the absence of our rejoicing,
the mother is silent.

We still need to show the mother the sex of the baby, and let her see that her daughter is not alive.
Hollie shows the mother, and I stand by the bed and witness the mother’s reaction.

Shock,
an unchanging face,
blinks of disbelief,
a small glisten of tears.


In that moment I wish I could close my eyes and somehow step away. But I can’t. And I won’t.

The mother lays on the bed and as I come over to her side, her mouth is slightly open, like a mid-sentence gasp,
I look her in the eye, and my heart breaks in her gaze.
I ask if I can pray for her, and she makes a subtle slow dazed bobble of her head.

I pray for the comfort of God in her grief and mourning.
My eyes fill with tears at the sorrow and unimaginable emotion of loss in expectancy.
I pray for the next pregnancy,
I pray for life over her womb,
that it will grow and live and come to full term and delivery.
My voice quivers and I need to take pauses inbetween words.
For some reason, this circumstance is really rocking me to the core.
I say Amen,
open my eyes,
and the mother is looking at me, with glistening eyes,
still shocked, but soft...


I take a deep breath,
and take her baby in a tray
and walk the length of the hallway to the newborn room.
I swallow hard and walk fast.

This is my least favorite part.
We still need to weigh the baby, we still need to handle her.
It is the Lord’s grace that enables me to pick her up,
feel the substantial weight of her newborn body in my hands,
and place her upon the scale.
Newborns squirm and wiggle under handknit blankets behind me.

2.8 kg.
I tell the nurse and she writes a pink tag for the baby’s wrist with the mother’s name on it.
Then I take her off the scale,
place her back on her tray,
and gently place her on the open shelf where the dead babies are put. Across from the row of pink, dry, squirming newborns.
This is so sad.
So so sad.

I remove my gloves and go to the sink. I turn the tap but no water comes. The power is out once again.

I make my exit and walk swiftly down the dark granite hallways to meet my parents in the bright humid sun of midday.

They spot me and saunter over,
“Hi. How was your day?”

I can’t manage to get a word out,
but instead I pause
as my eyes start to sting
and I feel a cry start in the center of me,
travel up my throat, and erupt on my mouth as my body breaks into a rack of sobs.

There they stand. Watching their daughter in the blue collared uniform, standing on the dusty dry dirt of India. Crying.

It was the first time I cried at the Indian hospital.
Why did it have to be then?

There are a lot of hard situations, a lot of sad things, and though they touch deep within me,
rarely it resounds with loud weeping.


Of all times, couldn’t they have seen their smiling daughter greet them at the doors, and welcome them in with a touch of sweetness?


Why does this have to be their first memory of me at the hospital?
Couldn’t I have had a different morning? Couldn’t it be something nice like a happy report of a happy delivery? I guess today they get the Real India.

Some days do not have a good report.
Some days are dire and devastating and you are in the midst of it.

And sometimes
you cry
at midday
in the middle of a crowd,
standing on the dirt,
with the sun on your back and
your mother and father coming up to meet you.