If I had realized that blood rushes out of a Caesarean section incision like a wave at the beach, I would have left my new running shoes at home. All of the obstetricians wore rubber clogs, squeaking slowly to make their rounds and squeaking quickly while running to a Code Blue. But the clogs only seemed to exist in dark green and muddy grey, like the ones that paused in front of me at the nursing station. I’d not wanted to buy anything so dismally ugly.
“I’m doing a C-section,” the obstetrician said. “Come scrub.”
I followed him into the antechamber, putting on a surgical cap and a stiff face mask. We used a foot pump to squirt burnt-orange antiseptic soap onto our hands, made yellow suds in the barn-sized sink. At surgical orientation, I’d been taught to do these things, but wasn’t confident that I could mimic them without an embarrassing mistake, especially this tired.
“Who are you, again?”
“Medical student,” I answered. “Evangeline.”
“Evangeline?” he repeated. “That’s a mouthful.”
I wasn’t sure how to answer; it depended on whether he was joking.
“My father likes big names,” I said. “Mine means bearer of good news.”
I’d never asked his name. Now, it felt too late.
“Ha,” said Doctor X. His face was mostly covered by the surgical mask. His glasses shone with water spots that had dried on the lenses. “Look,” he said, “it’s three AM, and there’s a certain candor that one acquires during a night shift.”
This was my first night on-call, but I nodded, finished rinsing. When I looked up, I realized he had been waiting.
“Evangeline,” he said, “Fix your nose. You’ll have a much easier life.”
He backed open the door to the O.R., and a short burst of noise escaped into the antechamber. He paused in transit, hands in the universal surgeon’s stance, elbows bent upright, fingers limply curled in front of his chest, still dripping. “Don’t take it personally,” he told me. “I’m much older than you, and I know how things work. Now, let’s deliver a baby.”
On the operating table, a woman lay sockless, gasping under the massive weight of her pregnant belly. The anesthetist murmured to her and her husband, who sat near the head of the table and looked wan. A short curtain lay across the mother’s collarbones to shield the surgery from view, like a UN barrier between diplomats and the war zone.
“You’ll feel some pressure,” Doctor X told the woman. He quickly washed her belly with brown antiseptic, pressed down to feel the baby’s position. His scalpel moved across her skin, blood rising from under the blade. That was when a wave of fluid gushed over my side of the table, soaking my shoes. His gloved hand plunged and groped.
“A daughter!” he said, holding her theatrically high.
Cutting the umbilical cord, the father seemed white around the mouth. His body tipped sideways.
“Chair for Daddy!” called Doctor X.
The nurse maneuvered Daddy onto a stool. Doctor X passed the squalling baby, up to the mother, who also began to cry.
“Stay with me, Evangeline,” Doctor X instructed. “Eyes on the surgical field.”
He passed me a pair of forceps, showed me how to position the edges of the cut uterus. “Some people staple it,” he said, “but I stitch. Women are precious vessels.”
My socks were wet. The forceps shook in my hands.
“One of my daughters,” he went on, “I won’t tell you her name, in case you ever meet—had a cosmetic problem with her ears. Would slow down an airplane if she were seated in the cockpit.”
His gloves kept planting symmetrical stitches across the bloody gash.
“Pull—yes, good. She healed well, is happier now. As you would be.”
He tugged on a piece of suture.
“This,” he said, “is a conversation that could get me in trouble.”
I nodded, eyes on the surgical field.
“But I give honest advice.”
Daddy was panting, green-faced. It was not a heartwarming scene, the way I’d expected any delivery to be, even a Caesarean. Smelling of chemicals and flesh, the baby taken to a warming table, the mother still sobbing. Her own nose, I saw now, was angled and bony. Slightly crooked.
I wondered if this father had considered, beforehand, that their baby would have some version of that nose. But Daddy himself seemed a weak specimen, an odd neck tattoo, a shiftiness that suggested he might eventually flee. I wondered about their coupling, whether this baby would have two parents for long.
The surgeon saw me looking, widened his eyes above the mask.
“Exactly,” he said, knotting a final stitch. “Point made.”
A ballet of hands, a dressing applied to the incision. Doctor X’s gown, a soiled crumple on the floor. He looked down, clocking my bloodied shoes.
“We have disposable foot covers,” he said, frowning. “Or get yourself some rubber clogs.”
###
Later, I went to check the baby, sleeping in an isolette.
“She’s a good girl,” the nurse called over. “Feeding well.”
Reading the chart, I registered what had been at stake, how tenuous this pregnancy had been, after miscarriages. How badly this baby had been wanted. How shallow I truly was, despite efforts to pretend otherwise.
My face would never be my ticket, and I’d long pretended I didn’t care. But having had it declared aloud, I was relieved. Doctor X had instructed me to claim what I already suspected, a better father than the one who shared this nose, who’d only given me good news: reassurance, not truth. You’re beautiful, he’d always said. To me.
Later, at home, when I tried to wash my sneakers, darker outlines stuck to the white. The tenacity of blood: my second lesson from the O.R.
Now, I circled the translucent incubator. Pretending to look carefully at each facet of this new human, but really, there was just one thing I wanted to see.