An Irish Country Courtship by PATRICK TAYLOR

Author:PATRICK TAYLOR
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2012-01-14T04:44:15+00:00

28

Willing to Pull His Weight

Barry’s hand trembled. He’d only ever done three forceps deliveries when he was training, all of those under supervision in a teaching hospital. He wished O’Reilly was in charge.

“The heart rate’s sixty,” Miss Hagerty said.

Barry gritted his teeth. He was sorry he’d not been able to put in a nerve block to numb the entire birth canal, but by the time he’d scrubbed his hands and put on his gloves, the first baby was nearly born. Nor had he time now. The second twin’s heart could stop at any second so there was no time for a block, but he’d risk the minutes it would take to inject some local anaesthetic before he cut a wide episiotomy. “Just a jag, Hester.”

She flinched as the needle went in and Barry injected. He waited for the local to take effect.

When he had examined Hester moments earlier, he’d found that the widest part of the baby’s head had entered the pelvis, a precondition for a forceps delivery of a premature baby. Not only was the head engaged, it was also properly positioned, with the baby’s chin well tucked into its chest and the back of its skull, the occiput, facing the mother’s front.

“Heart rate’s forty-eight,” Miss Hagerty said.

Barry had to ignore the fact that the slowing of the heart was due to oxygen lack, but it was lack—not total deprivation. If the heart stopped and the oxygen supply to the little brain failed, he’d have four minutes before the baby would suffer irreparable brain damage, and not long after that it would die. The temptation was to rush. His mentor in the Royal Maternity had had a great Latin expression for situations like this. Festina lente. Make haste slowly.

He took heavy scissors. The imminence of the act he must perform stilled his tremor for the moment. He made the incision. It would give him extra room in which to work.

“We’re ready, Barry,” O’Reilly said. His voice was steady with no hint of the urgency Barry knew the far more experienced O’Reilly must be feeling. Barry started to sweat, pulled in a very deep breath, closed his eyes, opened them, and saw the trembling in his hand was worse.

He pursed his lips, clenched his fist, and when he opened it to pick up the right forceps blade, the tremor had stopped. He felt the metal cold through his glove. The heavy handle, grooved to allow a firm grip, ended in a lock that would be fitted to the second half of the instrument once it also had been inserted. Past the lock, the blade was curved out to one side to fit around the contours of the baby’s skull and shaped in a fore-and-aft direction to accommodate the direction of the birth canal. It looked like an enormous spoon, except that most of the bowl had been removed, leaving only a rim of metal around the circumference. A set of Wrigley’s obstetrical forceps was simply a pair of tongs. The blades were for grasping the object to be moved, and the handles for pulling.

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