“Can someone bring an ultrasound into triage 3?”
On labor and delivery, these words, especially when spoken gravely by a senior nurse, are a code: I cannot find the heartbeat. I am worried that there isn’t one.
The attending physician and I each take a pass with the ultrasound, pausing on a heart that should be beating, hoping beyond hope to be mistaken. But then we must tell her.
There is no sound on Earth like a mother’s scream for her baby who will never get to breathe their first breath. Every mother begs for answers, wanting to know: Why? Why my baby? What did I do wrong? Why did this happen? Why, why, why, why, why?
This mother, 36 weeks pregnant, also sobbed, “What if I’d gone to the clinic?”
