“What are you doing? He’s in asystole, you plan on shocking him just for fun? Move!”

“No, um…”

“One mil epi. The drawer. Right there!”

Oof. I knew where it was, but my brain wasn’t functioning correctly. Everything was moving so quickly—or I was moving so slowly, not sure which. And, of course, the whole drawer came out, spilling everything. “Dammit.”

“Look at me.”

I did.

“Relax. Grab me the epinephrine. That one, right there.”

I did.

Then I did nothing. I just watched as one of the many nurses who’s name I had yet to learn compressed the patient’s rib cage into his heart in order to push oxygenated blood throughout his system—the oxygen coming from a bag, itself being compressed by another nurse.

Dr. Biswas—in who’s capable and demanding hands my career, and basically my life, had been placed for the next so many months—stared at the EKG, as did we all. Again, as I would learn is common in emergency medicine, time seemed to be at once speeding up and slowing down as we all watched for any sign of cardiac rhythm.

You don’t shock asystole, dumbass! You know that! At that point, though, I may as well have never taken a medical class in my life. It was like jumping into a boxing ring with Mike Tyson and suddenly forgetting how to fight.

“There we go, Mr. Johnson. That’s what we like to see.” With great relief, we all watched as the patient’s heart once again started to beat on its own. It meant very little for his long-term prognosis, but it meant he wasn’t going to die right then, on that table, in that room. With me doing basically nothing.

“Alright, let’s hand Mr. Johnson over to these nice folks and get to the day job, whaddaya say, Nguyen?”

I couldn’t say anything other than, “Ok.”

My own heart returned to normal sometime later, as Dr Biswas and I sat together in the hospital cafe. “You’ll be fine. It’s like this for everyone. Literally, every resident since the invention of modern medicine has gone through the same shit you’ll be going through. You‘ll be fine.”

“Yeah. It’s different, though. Like—“

“Like the training wheels coming off?”

“Yeah.”

“I get it. But remember back, when you were a kid, you came home with more scraped knees and skinned elbows riding without them, but didn’t you enjoy riding that much more? Controlling where you went, how fast you got there?”

He was right. I took a sip of much-needed coffee, letting the caffeine course through my now-constricting veins, stimulating increased respiration—which, in turn, increased my levels of dopamine and serotonin in response. The stimulant properties were no longer as acutely felt, but they also no longer raised my blood pressure—the advantage of being an addict.

The smell and soothing warmth of it also just made me feel better.

We talked for a few more of what I’d soon discover were precious non-chaotic moments before heading to our ‘day job’ in the Mother-Infant Unit. The fate of Mr. Johnson would remain a mystery, handled by the folks in the emergency department. Weird thing, this: One moment I’m being pulled into the ER, simply because my boss and I were proximal to it (must be why they put the cafe close by), to save a life and the next moment I’ve completely forgotten all about it, focused instead on helping brand new humans safely enter into the world.

“She’s at ten; fully effaced.”

“Thanks, Gary,” Biswas said to the nurse, before motioning at me to follow.

The scene was not completely unlike what I’d seen in the movies: Sweating; Screaming; Legs held aloft in stirrups; Nervous, ashen-faced father pacing, helplessly; Seen-it-all nurses silently going about their business. I’d been slotted for the MIU rotation during practicals, but it had been during what one grizzled vet of charge nurse called a “strangely un-fertile time.”

“You remember last summer, don’t you?” she’d inquired. “The heatwave? Power outage? I guess no one was ‘in the mood’ with no AC. But you just wait until nine months from the snow storm we had in January,” she offered with a cigarette-rattled cackle.

What it meant to my education was that this—the inherently chaotic nature of child birth—was all painfully new to me.

“What should I do?”

“You should watch,” Dr. Biswas said as he held his arms out, letting a nurse put on his front-facing protective gown.

“Watch?”

“You were Navy, right?”

“Yessir. 8404. Combat Medic.”

“So you understand.”

He sat on a stool in front of the panting mother, wheeling himself closer as he lifted the pale blue sheet that was giving her the last bit of privacy she’d have until it was over. “You’re doing great, momma. Shouldn’t be too much longer here.”

“I Understand? I mean, I mostly treated healthy, young Marines, you know, in the field—“

“Not that. You understand ‘See one; Do one; Teach one,’ yes?”

“Oh, yeah. Of course.”

“Okay, then. Same thing here. You watch me. Next one, all you. Then, you teach me how to do it.” He turned his attention back to the patient. “Okay momma, I want you to hold off for a second. Don’t push yet. I know, it’s almost impossible, but you have all the strength you need. Just… hold on… one…” He looked at the nurse nearest the monitors. “I see it. Okay, momma, this is going to be uncomfortable, but it looks like the umbilical cord is wrapped—I know, I’m sorry—I just have to, there we go, okay, one more big—You did it!”

Textbooks tell you what meconium is. And vernix. And fecal matter and blood. What they don’t tell you is that all of the above will be smeared all over the wriggling purple cone head the arrives in the world screaming in surprised anger. Or how it smells. Or how the room suddenly gets so much smaller.

But at least I had some inkling of what was coming. Dad—as the crash of a rolling table and the plap of two-hundred pounds of man hitting linoleum would alert us to—did not. Without missing a beat, the nurse that had been at the monitors was quickly helping Dad back up, sitting him in a chair, and providing him with O2.

“Happens all the time,” the nurse called Gary reassured me. “Dad, you going to be able to stand up and cut the cord?”

The new father didn’t speak but simply stood and did what he was told; The sight of his unbelievably strong wife and his brand new baby boy bringing strength back into his limbs.

Once clamped and cordless, the naked newborn was placed on momma’s chest. “Meet you new little boy.”

Exhausted, sweaty, hair matted to her forehead, she somehow looked like a painting; Historical; Meaningful; Eternal. This was my job, for the time, and I was supposed to be clinical, but the romantic in me connected this moment to all those that had come before—all those lives that started the same way, linked through history to this moment: An unbroken chain that reached back to the beginning of time.

I snapped out of it when Gary lifted the newcomer again. “We just need to get some numbers on junior, here.” The child’s first interaction with his new life would be to go through a series of evaluations: Length; Weight; Apgar scoring; PKU. Gary took him to a table and placed him on a chucks pad kept warm by a heat lamp. I moved with them, to observe, when I was directed to come back.

“Nope. You stay with me. Gary’s got Little Man; We take care of momma. Okay, sweetie, you’re just about done. We just need to wait for the placenta, oh, there we go. You did so great.” I watched as Dr. Biswas and the “monitor nurse” gave each other a knowing glance—Momma was fine. He got up, removed his PPE, and shook Dad’s hand. “You survived, Pappa!”

The man’s color had come back. “Thank you, so much, Doctor.”

“She did most of the work,” Dr Biswas said, patting the young father on his shoulder.

Later, Dr. Biswas and I sat together near the nurses station. I felt drained and energized all at once. He, on the other hand, looked like he’d just come back from a shopping trip or the library—Like it was just another day at the office which, I realized, it was.

“So, how you doing? You thinking that you should have gone to law school?”

“Hah. No. I, that was intense. It’s amazing. I felt so useless, though.”

“You were. But that’s good. Mom’s have been birthing kids since forever, so the more useless we are in the process the better; It means everything is happening as it should. It’s when we are necessary in the process that things get dicey.”

“Like the cord.”

“Exactly.”

He took a sip of Pepsi. “Just think,” he said, looking at his watch, “only 33 more hours in your shift!”

Ugh. But also… yay? I was getting sort of stoked. Reenergized. I knew the “imposter syndrome” wouldn’t last. I was ready.

“I’m hungry. Let’s get—“

“Dr. B. EMS is bringing in another one. They think she could be ready any second.”

“Thanks, Gary.” To me, “Okay, kid, your turn!”