Last Time For Everything

Chapter Two

I stand outside in the ambulance bay, leaning my body against the building, my cup of coffee my only source of heat as snowflakes lightly begin to fall, landing in my hair.  I close my eyes and listen to the sounds of the city on a late January night.  Even though it's only a Tuesday, people are out and about, creating a buzz as they are every night.  It's not like that back home; even if it was, I would never know.  There's so much land between houses it would take me fifteen minutes to walk to our neighbor's house.

The constant buzz of the city still woke me during the night, but even then I don't mind.  I'm a heavy sleeper, so if the city wakes me up, I'm not tired while I'm up, and if gives me extra time to do things around my apartment that I hold off on when I come home from work.

I can hear an ambulance heading down the road towards the bay, surely it's the ambulance transporting my patient, since there have been no other notices about incoming traumas.  I tilt my head back gulping down the last bit of my coffee.  The back of my neck presses against the cold metal of my new stethoscope that my parents had got me for Christmas.  In true Mason fashion, the stethoscope was covered in camo, with "Army Strong" written in little black letters around the diaphragm.  As I toss my empty cup into the garbage bin next to me, I take a deep breath, mentally preparing myself for the patient about to arrive.  

As the ambulance pulls into the bay and comes to a stop, I head over to open the back doors.  A dark haired paramedic steps out as the paramedic who was driving, a bit of an older man, comes around back to help the stretcher out of the back of the ambulance.

"Cara Nettles, 39, eight months pregnant, took a slip down the last few stairs at her house.  All of mom's vitals stable in the field", he tells me as they place the stretcher to the ground, and Cara's husband, Rick, hops out of the ambulance behind her.  As the older paramedic begins to roll Cara into triage - with Rick trailing along behind - the dark haired paramedic turns to me and begins to talk in a more hushed tone.  

"I couldn't find a heartbeat on the fetal monitor", he tells me, a concerned look in his eye, as well as in his tone.  "Did you tell her that?", I ask looking at him with a blank face, to which he shakes his head in response.  I let out a breath that I didn't even know I was holding giving him a small nod.  I thank him as we walk into the building, and I rub my hands together to regain feeling in my fingers.  As he turns to fill out paperwork at the ER desk, I begin to head back to triage, pulling gloves onto my hands before entering the room.

Cara had been my patient for only a short time, seeing as her and Rick moved to Chicago only months before me, but I was well aware of Cara's medical history.  This was her fifth pregnancy.  Her first four all resulted in a late term miscarriage.  This was her first pregnancy that had lasted eight months, and we were already aware that the baby suffers from Down's Syndrome.  

I take one last breath, and enter the room to an ER nurse already hooking Cara back up to a heart monitor and an IV bag to keep her hydrated.  Rick is in the corner, giving another nurse her medical history - a general formality even though I knew her medical history forwards and backwards - as Cara looked up to meet my gaze.  I do my best to keep my face expressionless.  I don't know what to expect when I do this checkup; I don't want her worrying and I don't want her to get her hopes up, so I want to stay neutral.  I want to be Switzerland.

"I didn't give up", Cara says as I turn to push the ultrasound machine closer to her stretcher.  "I didn't give up on having my own biological child that I carry and deliver.  I didn't give up even when the doctors told me I should.  I finally make it this far, and I could be in the same situation for the fifth time over what?  A slip down three or four steps?".

As she talks her voice isn't exactly upset, but it isn't calm.  It just sounds as if this is something she was expecting and was ready for, which breaks my heart.  "Cara", I sigh, "I really need you to just try and breathe for me.  I don't know the condition of the baby, and whether there was a possibility of them being hurt or not, I need you to stay calm.  I know it sounds cliché, but I don't need to tell you this is a high risk pregnancy.  Now more than ever, we need your blood pressure and heart rate stable, okay?", placing my hand onto her shoulder and rubbing it in circular motions as I give her the instruction.