October 7, 1969
Harsh white light shone insistently on her eyelids. The woman surfaced slowly from the depths of a long, unnatural slumber, becoming slowly aware of her surroundings as her senses began to attain clarity and focus. The low buzz of
electronic equipment, the steady beep of a cardiac monitor and the soft whisper of a respirator droned monotonously near her left shoulder. The cool, crisp smell of
alcohol and astringents suffused the air under-laid by the stifling odor of illness. The mattress on which she lay was thin, inadequate next to the steel it cushioned and her back ached from long hours of lying prone.
Gradually, she became aware of the whispered conversation on the other side of the room. It was intense in nature, judging by the sentence fragments that drifted her way and she wondered dreamily whom they were discussing. The voices however, were fuzzy and vague, like they were coming from the opposite end of a long tunnel and she found herself unable to piece together more than a little of what they were saying.
“…Severe concussion...X-ray…lucky...alive...”
“…That man…wild look about him…”
“…Husband…”
“…Early pregnancy…very early…”
Trying to better understand the whispered conversation, she turned her head slightly to the left. The voices faded out as
pain began to pound in her temples. Hammers shivered over the crown of her head and down her back, driving her to the trembling edge of madness as bright pinpoints of light and
color began swimming gracefully, malevolently in front of her eyelids. The muscles in her neck and back cried out in staunch protest and an anguished moan exited her parched mouth in the form of a
dry, gritty squeak.
The other occupants of the room heard her. The conversation ground to a halt a moment before one of the voices, the deep, reassuring baritone of a male carefully modulated to a gentle hush asked her how she was feeling.
Unable to open her eyes more than a sliver against the brilliance of
fluorescent lights, she saw a featureless shadow outlined irregularly in front of the glare. Her lips parted slightly, trying to speak, to convey to him the pain that held her in a merciless embrace. Communication however, was showing itself to be a monumental task, likened to the troubles of a small
child who had not yet learned to meld sound and syllable in sensible union. She could only seem to force one word past her dry, swollen tongue, the effort monumental, her voice a gravelly gasp completely foreign to her ears, “Thirsty.”
Through a blurry haze she watched the nurse move quickly, quietly across the room, her footsteps hushed in her thick soled shoes and her light tread so smooth and flowing that to the woman in the bed whose fevered imagination had taken off in the most bizarre way, it seemed as though the nurse didn’t walk and in fact had no feet at all. The woman imagined that the nurse floated serenely, silently a few inches above the floor, reaching the carafe that sat but a few inches away from the bed on a rolling stand which she had not the ability to reach by herself.
Grabbing a depressingly small paper cup, she filled it with an even smaller amount of liquid and added a straw. The nurse held it to her mouth and helped the woman hold her head up slightly that she might drink, cautioning her to sip slowly. She obeyed, drinking carefully despite the moment of rebellion she felt in wanting to cool the burn in her throat with the
water and let it help relieve the hunger cramping her stomach.
She hadn’t the strength however, and she soon found that she could only drink a little before she fell back on the bed, gasping as sharp points of agony curled sinuously up her body. Shaking visibly and limp with
exhaustion she looked around the room for a moment, her gaze traversing the shadowy figures gathered around the bed. Then she closed her eyes and surrendered once again to darkness, seeking escape from the pain in sleep.
March 28, 1970
The small cry of a
newborn broke the hush that had settled like a pall over the
operating room, amazingly lusty in spite of the fact that the baby had been born three months too early. The little mouth opened again and another tiny bellow came forth. The doctors and nurses surrounding the operating table looked at the infant in surprise. Small though it was, weighing only slightly less than three pounds the baby was proven to be tenacious.
The doctor, though intensely curious about the child spared it only a moment of his attention and a single glance before he resumed his useless endeavors on the mother.
She had wasted away during the
pregnancy; her face and body both of which at one time had been fairly aglow with youth and vitality were emaciated. Her eyes stared up at him uncomprehendingly. Emotionless now, they were dull and glazed with
fatigue and pain where once they had sparkled with life and determination, the intense blue of a perfect summer sky.
Less than six short months ago she had been admitted into this hospital, the tragic victim of a drunken driving accident. She was also expecting the child that he but a few moments past had delivered into the waiting arms of the nurse standing at serene attention nearby.
When she had come in to the hospital broken and bloody though she had been he had seen in her thick, lustrous hair and smooth complexion a normally healthy woman, a fighter in her own right. Despite the battered state she’d been in when she had been admitted his initial prognosis for her recovery, if not a full one, had been good.
That was before they had discovered the existence of the baby however, the child that grew within her. They had tried to compensate for her the nutrients that the baby would need to develop and would take from the mother if no ready supply presented itself. Unfortunately, even the vitamin regimen in combination with the strict diet routine that they had studiously applied could not save her. The child had taken it all, growing and developing at an astonishing, an almost upsetting rate. While the woman had all but lain to waste, the child matured within the bounds of her womb growing strong and healthy and with dizzying speed. The doctor, stricken with a sense of angry futility had watched the expectant mother die a little more every day.
He’d known her blood was too thin; the pale, delicate state of her body showed even outwardly that she was anemic. He’d had to cut her however when she’d begun first stage labor at twenty-eight weeks, twelve full weeks preterm. He’d had to take the baby who had taken from her lifeless body voraciously that which she had needed herself to survive. As a result she had never healed fully or properly from the
car accident and her body would not have been able to withstand the rigors of natural
childbirth. Her flesh was still bruised darkly, swollen and misshapen from the numerous injuries she’d sustained. She was now a shell of the woman she had been, withered to nothing and he knew she would not survive. It was only a matter of time before her exhausted body gave way completely, succumbed because she could no longer fight the pull.
Trying to stem the flow of blood from the woman was a lesson in the improbable as if the indomitable will of death that already hung its heavy, ghostly shroud over her. Silent communion with an invisible specter showed in her slack, delicate features and was determinedly taking her life just as he was sworn to try to preserve it, to cheat death. Folding in and stitching the final layer of her skin, her life’s essence flowing out of her despite the sealing of the incision in her abdomen, the doctor tied the last knot in her sutures and cut the string knowing that there was nothing more he could do for her. His heart and head pounding with the futile rage that welled in his chest, he nevertheless controlled his breathing and quelled the urge to shout at the heavens with outrage, angry that all his practice in the healing arts could not save this woman. He looked away from the face that he couldn’t bear to see any longer lest he lose his own mind in the resigned, defeated depths of her eyes.
Finished with his ministrations on the woman he turned to watch the infant wheeled away in an incubator and believed like everyone else that the baby would die.
The high-pitched whine and flat line pattern of a dying heart broke the silence behind him. Without having to turn around and look into her soulless eyes, he knew that she was gone.
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