4304.201 · July 19, 1984 AD
The Wound From Above
Admitted three days earlier for dangerously high blood pressure, Heather Marie Smith suffered a psychological collapse in a maternity room of the Lyell McEwin Hospital and opened her own abdomen with a shard of broken glass. Staff responded with an emergency caesarean. Her son, Luke Nathaniel Smith, six weeks premature, was lifted out through the wound she had made and drew his first breath as she haemorrhaged on the table. Her husband, Noah, and their infant son, Paul, were present when it began.
The crisis that brought Luke Nathaniel Smith into the world took place in a maternity room of the Lyell McEwin Hospital, where his mother, Heather Marie Smith, had been admitted three days earlier with dangerously high blood pressure. She was thirty-four weeks pregnant, six weeks short of her expected delivery, and that day's appointment was a routine observation. Her husband, Noah James Smith, twenty-three years old, stood at the bedside with their fifteen-month-old son, Paul, in his arms.
Heather was in the grip of a psychological collapse. When Paul reached for her and called for her, she drove the back of her hand into the bedside table and sent a glass of water shattering across the linoleum. The foetal heart monitor, which had been holding near a hundred and sixty beats a minute, began to climb.
Margaret, the senior nurse who had attended Paul's birth fifteen months earlier and had watched Heather with growing concern across the pregnancy, reached the doorway as the glass broke. Noah handed the boy to her, and she carried him out of the room so that he would not see what came next.
Heather told Noah that her waters had broken, gesturing at the spilt water on the floor. He corrected her — she had knocked the glass over; what was on the floor was water and nothing more. She did not accept it. Her demand to have the baby taken out of her rose until she was screaming it, and the monitor climbed past a hundred and seventy.
She closed her hand around a long shard of the broken glass that had landed on the bed, and it cut her palm as she gripped it. Without hesitation, she drew it across her own abdomen.
The wound turned the room into an emergency. The medical team moved to stem the bleeding and to take the child before either he or his mother was lost. Luke was delivered upward, through the opening in his mother's belly rather than down through the passage he had been turned to meet — an emergency caesarean finished through a wound she had begun herself. He came out six weeks premature, blood-slicked and small, and he drew breath and screamed.
As Luke took his first breath, the heartbeat that had been the whole of his world was failing. Heather was haemorrhaging on the table, her pulse sinking under the hands of the people working to keep her alive. The cord was clamped and cut, and the child who a moment before had been part of her was abruptly separate — cold, breathing, and alone in a way he had never been.
