Trapped (16 page)

Chapter Twenty-Nine

“Dr. Russo
—Dr. Harvey Russo. Call the ER, stat,” blared the Brier speaker system.

Harvey stood outside delivery room number three, having helped a healthy
eight-pound, four-ounce girl into the world. He always felt great after a delivery.

He dialed the ER. “Dr. Russo
, here.”

“Dr. Paul needs you down here right away. He has a bad one.”

Harvey tossed his sweat-stained surgical cap into the garbage, grabbed his white lab coat from the rack, took the elevator to the ground floor, and rushed to the ER.

Ernie Paul had recently finished his training in emergency medicine at USC
, where he had worked at LA General Hospital. After that experience, it took something special to alarm him.

“Edna-Sue Jones signed in at
five-thirty this morning, complaining that she had a stomachache,” Ernie said. “We had a busy night. Her vital signs were stable and she was obviously intoxicated, so we didn’t get to see her until nine a.m.”

“I’m waiting for the punch-line,” Harvey
said.

“It’s coming. Edna-Sue is 19 years old. She’s an alcoholic and cocaine addict
. She’s had five pregnancies and four births.”

“Great,” Harvey
said. “Please tell me she had a miscarriage along the way.”

“You should be so
lucky, Harvey. You’ll love this. She’s had zero prenatal care, she’s markedly obese, and swears that she had no idea that she was pregnant.”

“
Harvey shook his head. “Wonderful.”

“It gets better. She has cocaine in her system
and a sky-high alcohol level. He paused. “And, yes, I’ve saved the best for last, last—she’s in active labor, six centimeters dilated, and has at least one C-section incision.”

“How’s the baby?”

“Not good. We’ve recorded clear signs of fetal distress.”

“Where is she? We better slow down her labor and get that baby out ASAP.”

Ernie led Harvey into Treatment Room II.

Edna-Sue lay on her side on the
gurney. She was vomiting into an emesis basin held by another large woman. Her nurse, Karen Rose, was on her arm checking the patient’s blood pressure.

As Harvey waited, he said, “Let me examine her,
and then I’ll order medications to slow her labor and control vomiting. I’m sure she’ll need an emergency C-section.”

When Harvey approached, Edna-Sue turned
, and said, “Who the fuck are you?”

Drunk is bad enough
, Harvey thought, but mean drunk is worse.

“I’m Dr. Russo. I’m an obstetrician and I’m going to help you deliver your baby.”

“What are you talkin’? I ain’t got no baby. All I got is a stomachache. Mamma, tell them.”

“I’m sorry, D
octor. Edna-Sue is not herself. I’m her mother, Rachael Carter. Please tell me what’s going on.”

“I will, as soon as I examine your daughter and run some tests,” Harvey
said.

“He ain’t touching me,” Edna-Sue
shouted. “That other one,” she said, pointing to Ernie, “he seen enough.”

“May
I speak with you for a moment, Mrs. Carter?” Harvey asked.

She nodded and they left the room.

Outside, Harvey said, “This is a dangerous situation. We’re trying to stop your daughter’s labor because after C-section, she could damage her womb, or maybe even lose it. Moreover, the baby’s life is in jeopardy. We’re already seeing signs that the baby’s in trouble.”

“Let me talk to her.”

Harvey, Ernie, and Karen Rose, her nurse, waited outside the closed door. They heard shouting and sobbing.

When Karen stuck her face in the room, Edna-Sue shouted, “Get the hell out of here,
bitch.”

“They don’t pay me enough for this,” Karen
said.

After thirty minutes, Ernie said, “We better do something, and soon. They’re going to blame us for anything that happens.”

Ernie knocked on the door, and then entered without waiting for permission. “We’ve waited long enough…”

“
It’s okay, Doctor,” Rachael said.

Harvey and Karen entered. When the nurse looked at the fetal monitoring strip, she said, “This baby’s in distress, Dr. Russo.”

Holding the strip, Harvey said, “Let’s get her to surgery, and I mean now. Call NICU and have Mike Cooper join us.”

When the anesthesiologist, Mickey Katz, finally completed the spinal block, not easy in a woman so big, they draped and prepped Edna-Sue for surgery.

Edna-Sue flailed and pulled at her r
estraints. She screeched and spewed every expletive in her generous vocabulary.

“Put her out, Mickey,” Harvey
said, “before she does some real damage, or I kill her.”

Mike studied the fetal monitor. “You better get going
, or you’ll be delivering a dead baby.”

Harvey ran his scalpel vertically through the skin, and as he approached the uterus, the incision burst with dark blood and clots. The assistant, his young partner, Kirby Dornan, pulled the baby out
, and then handed the bloody, blue and ashen tiny body to the circulating nurse, who placed it on a heated table for Mike and his NICU nurse.

“It’s a bloody mess,” Harvey said as he explored the incision. “She’s ruptured her uterus. It’s flaccid. It’s got to go.”

“She’s nineteen,” Mickey said. “You don’t want to do a hysterectomy in such a young woman, no matter how many kids she already has.”

“
It's a hysterectomy or the morgue,” Harvey said. “I don’t have time for this shit. Where’s the mother?”

“She’s in the waiting room,” Mickey
said.

“Kirby, you must get the mother’s permission for the hysterectomy. Make her know how serious this is.”

Kirby returned to the operating room with the form in his hand. “Got it. Go ahead.”

“Let’s get it out,” Harvey
said.

As he began the dissection in preparation for the hysterectomy, Harvey said, “How’s the baby, Mike?”

“We’re working on him,” Mike said, “but his head and his jaw is small. Put this together with the flat face and the small nose, and it adds up to Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. If the baby survives, a big if, he has a life of grief ahead.”

Edna-Sue awoke the next morning. When they told her about the hysterectomy, she went nearly berserk, and broke several surgical sutures. Harvey replaced them at the bedside.

Edna-Sue never asked about her baby.

Two days later, Edna-Sue signed herself out of Brier Hospital, AMA, against medical advice, leaving her disabled baby behind.

After three days of unexplained lumbar pain, Mike was in for an MRI.

“It’s just an MRI scan,” Lisa
said. “No big deal.”

“No big deal for you,” Mike said
, holding his aching back.

“I don’t get it. Maybe this is only a sprain, but you could have a ruptured disk. We need to know.”

“It’s one thing to understand the power of a phobia; it’s another to experience it.”

Mike remembered his first trip with Lisa to the California Caverns
, where they gave visitors the option of a real spelunking experience, rather than the gentleman’s stroll through the caves. Before visitors chose the crawling, wriggling, and squirming alternative, each candidate had to work their way through a stone tunnel, which barely accommodated the shoulders and hips of a normal sized man. The tunnel ended in an inky-black four-by-four foot solid stone room.

Those who refused
enter, or came out screaming, were advised to choose the walking tour.

Mike
looked at Lisa, and said, “The walking tour sounds good to me.”

He
had glanced at his body, the tunnel and the darkness within, and said, “I don’t think this body will get through that rat hole. Don’t ask me to try.”

“Come on,” Lisa
said, “you can make it.”

“When I think
of getting trapped in that hole—let’s say that I prefer save us both embarrassment. I’ll meet you on the other side the tunnel.”

“Okay, okay, we’ll do it your way,” she said.

“Fear is evolution’s most potent mechanism for survival,” Mike said, “and, like most things in nature, its expression varies. At one end are those who fear everything. At the other are those who fear nothing. I’m nearer the latter end, except when it comes to closed spaces.”

“Has it always been that way?”

“For as long as I can remember. The bigger I grew, the worse it got.

“When I saw the movie,
World Trade Center,
with Nicolas Cage buried in the rubble on 9/11, I had to turn away. TV coverage of children trapped inside a pipe or a well, unable to move or take a deep breath, drives me crazy.

“My nightmares, more intense than life, were worse. I’d
awake in the dark, unable to move, my arms trapped at my sides. I’d scream, my voice resounding off the rock walls and fading into the distance. The intolerable situation left me with a Hobson’s choice, insanity or death.”

“What causes it?” Lisa
asked.

“The best exposition of phobia was the study of fear of heights
that I heard in medical school. They brought subjects to the edge of an elevated platform with barriers of varying heights. Most subjects easily approached the verge with barriers of four or five feet, while nearly 100 percent refused to approach, or felt extreme anxiety when they reduced the barrier to two feet or less. Those who couldn’t approach even with barriers of five feet or more were defined as having acrophobia, the fear of heights. Those who could approach the verge without a barrier were our steeplejacks and skyscraper construction workers.”

“I never understood how those workers could function on those steel beams hundreds of feet in the air. My legs shake when I think about it.”

Mike hadn’t thought about this until he walked into the cool MRI room for a scan of his injured back. The huge machine with its gaping white orifice extended into a black cave.
There’s not much room inside
, he thought, gazing at his broad shoulders and hips.

“It’s going to be fine,” the MRI technician
said. “Everybody’s claustrophobic to some degree. It’ll pass in a few moments.”

Mike lay on the sliding litter like a torpedo waiting to
be rammed into the submarine launch tube. Suddenly, he noted the change in his breathing. It was getting more difficult. His heart pounded, and he broke out in a sweat. His chest ached, and he felt lightheaded. He sensed that he was dying, and when he felt the jerk of the litter moving him toward the shark’s waiting jaws, he sat up, and screamed, “No—No—I can’t do this!”

“You can do it,” the tech
said.

“It’s sedation
, or send me to a place with an open MRI. You’re not getting me into that damn thing.”

Chapter Thirty

It took several months for Lisa to regain her normal hormonal balance and her periods.

After years of focusing on nothing but pregnancy, they relished the chance to cleanse the chaos of hormonal confusion that threatened their intimacy.

At first, they scrupulously avoided the subject of children, but soon neither thought about it actively—difficult to do while working in NICU.

The disappointment and frustration had them turning more toward each other
, and they became closer and more intimate. They particularly enjoyed their lovemaking for its own sake, coming together almost every day.

When Phoebe announced she was pregnant, Lisa felt joy for her friend, mixed with envy and a dash of sadness for herself.

Phoebe and Jason married in a private civil ceremony
, and then went to dinner with their small families and closest friends.

“You don’t have to say it, Lisa. I can see it in your face,” Phoebe
said.

“All you see is my unbridled joy for you and Jason, and for your pregnancy. I’m
—we’re coming to terms with our problem, but we’ll never let it distract from sharing the happiness with you and Jason.”

The real test came eight months later, when Lisa sat with Phoebe as she nursed Max, her nine-pound baby. She could feel the warmth and the strong maternal bond as Max fed on his mother’s breast. Lisa thought for a moment that her own breasts were engorged.

“Here, take him,” Phoebe
said. “He’s through, I hope. Keep him upright for a moment, so he won’t spit up on you.”

Lisa laughed. “You’ve giving me advice on how to hold a baby? I’ve been spit on by the best.”

After a moment, she cradled Max against her chest, and felt the warm innocence of this new life. As she folded her arms around the baby, she started to sing Brahms
Lullaby and Goodnight,
and looked self-consciously at Phoebe.

“Aren’t you feeling well?” Phoebe
asked. “You sound like you’re ill.”

Lisa laughed. “That’s what Mike says
, too. I can’t carry a tune in a bucket.”

A moment later, Max turned his head toward Lisa’s chest, and opened his mouth in a sucking motion.

“Sorry, Max,” Lisa said, handing the baby back to Phoebe. “He’s not through, yet.”

Phoebe took him back
. While he feasted on her other breast, she said, “Get me the phonebook. I want to look up wet nurses.” She caressed Max’s dark hair, and said, “Just kidding, Maxie.”

Lisa took the day off. It was their third anniversary, a beautiful sunny day. She planned to be at home to prepare for a quiet evening. She’d gone to the market, and bought a sourdough round and two large fresh Dungeness Crabs, which she soaked in a special marinade they loved. She iced a bottle of Moet et Chanson Brut, and set to work on Mike’s favorite, a chocolate truffle cake. Phoebe and Jason had agreed to come over at eight for coffee and dessert.

Mike drove out of the Nordstrom’s parking lot with Lisa’s gift-wrapped present, a silk blouse, sitting on the front passenger seat. He was in a great mood, and was looking forward to their dinner that night. As the light turned green and he crossed Ignacio Valley Road, he caught a glimpse of something in his peripheral vision coming from his left. In an instant, the violent crash left everything turning black.