Emergency Deliveries

Darla, one of the emergency room nurses, called me into the gynecology room. We’ve got a woman nine months pregnant, but we can’t find a fetal heartbeat. She says she felt the baby kicking earlier this morning, then the contractions started coming. Now she says there’s nothing but contractions. A young, frightened-looking woman lay on the examining table. I took the Doppler, a little handheld device that picks up the faint sound of fetal heartbeats. Though I tried a dozen different spots on her belly, I couldn’t find any sound except for the mother’s heartbeat. I put on a pair of sterile gloves to do a pelvic exam. The patient was a big woman, and I had to slide my hand in past the wrist before I felt anything. But I wasn’t sure what it was. It felt at first like a string of grapes. Then I realized it was ...