Story code: ST-000404
Part 2: The Ten-Minute Lie
The metallic scent of copper flooded the sterile room, thick and suffocating, arriving before anyone even moved. I stared at the horrifying pool of dark, arterial crimson soaking through the absorbent mattress pads, staining the pristine white sheets, and dripping steadily onto the linoleum floor. It looked like a crime scene. The heat of the blood pooling beneath my lower back was entirely at odds with the terrible, icy trembling seizing the rest of my body.
Dr. Vance stared at the bed, her mouth slightly open. The self-righteous, indignant fury drained from her features in an instant, replaced by a pale, slack-jawed shock. For three agonizing seconds, she did absolutely nothing. She just stood there, her clipboard pressed tightly against her chest like a shield, looking at the catastrophic bleeding as if it were a personal insult-a deliberate act of defiance against her flawless authority.
“Hit the button,” I tried to whisper, but it came out as a weak, breathless wheeze, my lungs paralyzed by the searing, jagged pain in my abdomen.
Chloe did not hesitate. She lunged past Dr. Vance, her shoulder forcefully slamming into the wall as she smashed her palm against the blue emergency code button beside the door. Almost instantly, a piercing, high-pitched alarm joined the frantic, erratic warning chimes of the fetal monitor.
The loud, shrieking noise seemed to snap Dr. Vance out of her trance. But instead of rushing to my side to assess the hemorrhage, she spun on Chloe, her eyes wild with a sudden, defensive panic.
“What did you give her?” Dr. Vance screamed, her voice cracking as her professional veneer shattered. “Did you give her some sort of unregulated herbal supplement? What did you make her drink?”
“Are you insane?” Chloe shouted back, her hands hovering helplessly over my legs, terrified to touch the pooling blood. “She is bleeding out! Call the OR!”
The heavy wooden door flew open, hitting the wall stop again. A swarm of nurses flooded into the tiny room, their rubber-soled shoes squeaking frantically on the linoleum. The charge nurse-the same woman Dr. Vance had been casually complaining to just minutes earlier-pushed through the crowd. She took one look at the soaked sheets and let out a sharp, horrifying gasp.
“Code Crimson! Get the crash cart, page anesthesiology, and alert the on-call surgical team!” the charge nurse barked, immediately taking absolute control of the room. She grabbed a pair of purple nitrile gloves from the wall dispenser, snapping them onto her hands. “Doctor, what is the situation?”
Dr. Vance stiffened. Her posture went instantly rigid as she shifted rapidly into damage control. Through the blinding haze of my pain, I could see the exact moment she decided to protect her medical license at the expense of my reality.
“Massive placental abruption,” Dr. Vance said, her voice dropping into a clipped, authoritative register that completely erased the last ten minutes of her gross negligence. “The patient was highly uncooperative. She was thrashing wildly against medical advice, hyperventilating, and inducing extreme physical stress on her body despite my direct, repeated orders to remain calm.”
“That is a lie!” Chloe yelled, pointing fiercely at the fetal monitor behind the bed. “The baby’s heart rate started decelerating ten minutes ago, and she was in excruciating pain! You refused to look at the monitor! You refused to physically examine her!”
“Get this woman out of my room!” Dr. Vance roared, pointing a trembling, manicured finger at my doula. “She has been actively interfering with my patient’s care and escalating a panic attack that led directly to this trauma! Security! Remove her from this wing immediately!”
Two large hospital orderlies appeared in the doorway, pushing past the frantic nurses, and grabbed Chloe forcefully by the arms.
“Maya! Tell them!” Chloe screamed as they dragged her backward into the busy hallway. “Look at the monitor strip! Check the time stamps! Check the paper!”
I tried to lift my heavy head off the pillow, to scream that Chloe was right, that Dr. Vance had ignored the blaring alarms, that I hadn’t been thrashing at all. I desperately needed the nurses to know the truth. But another violent wave of blinding, agonizing tearing ripped through my midsection, sending a fresh, sickening gush of hot blood down my thighs. My vision went entirely white at the edges. My lungs refused to expand. I could only manage a pathetic, wet gurgling sound as my head fell back hard against the mattress.
“Hold on, Maya, stay with us,” the charge nurse said urgently, her hands pressing firmly on my shoulders to keep me steady. She looked back at Dr. Vance, her eyes wide with terror. “Doctor, her pressure is bottoming out fast. The fetal heart rate is down to sixty beats per minute. We need to move her to the OR right this second.”
“Unlock the bed,” Dr. Vance ordered, her voice trembling just enough for me to hear the underlying panic she was desperately trying to mask. “Prep her for an immediate crash C-section.”
The room dissolved into a chaotic blur of rapid motion. The heavy hospital bed jolted violently as the brakes were released. I was moving, rolling rapidly down the hallway, the harsh fluorescent lights overhead flashing past my eyes like strobe lights in a nightmare. The alarms blared everywhere around me, a deafening symphony of absolute emergency.
I was completely surrounded by medical staff, yet entirely isolated. Chloe, my only true advocate, was gone. The freezing air of the surgical wing hit my face, and the overlapping shouts of the delivery nurses were replaced by the sharp, terrifying metallic clatter of surgical instruments being hurriedly prepped.
An anesthesiologist in green scrubs jogged alongside the moving bed as we crashed backward through the heavy double doors of the operating room. He leaned over me, holding a clear plastic mask attached to a thick corrugated tube.
“What is the timeline, Dr. Vance?” the anesthesiologist demanded, his eyes darting to my bloodless face. “How long has the fetus been in distress? How long has the patient been hemorrhaging?”
This was it. This was the crucial medical history that would dictate exactly how the neonatal intensive care team treated my baby the moment they were pulled from my body. Every single second of oxygen deprivation mattered.
I turned my head weakly, fighting through the dark gray fog pulling at the edges of my consciousness, and locked eyes with Dr. Vance. I saw the cold calculation in her gaze, the brutal math of self-preservation.
“The distress is entirely acute,” Dr. Vance stated smoothly, without a single hint of hesitation. “The decelerations just started less than two minutes ago when the sudden abruption occurred. The baby has been perfectly stable until exactly this moment.”
My heart slammed violently against my ribs. It was a complete, calculated lie. The monitor had been warning her for over ten minutes. My baby had been suffocating for ten minutes, and the NICU team was about to receive a severely compromised infant without any preparation for prolonged hypoxia.
“No…” I choked out, my tongue feeling like dry lead in my mouth. “Ten… ten minutes…”
“The patient is delirious and going into hypovolemic shock,” Dr. Vance announced loudly, stepping closer to deliberately block my face from the anesthesiologist’s view. “Put her under. Now.”
The cold plastic mask clamped down tightly over my nose and mouth, forcing the bitter gas into my desperate lungs.