The Knife’s Edge. Stephen Westaby

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СКАЧАТЬ midwife recognised that things were not right. She vigorously rubbed the baby’s greasy back and swept her finger around its throat. Rough stimulation suddenly caused its breathing efforts to begin, but with a whimper not a roar. And the baby remained blue, a darker blue despite the rapid breathing, and still cool and limp. Now beginning to panic, the midwife called for an oxygen cylinder and some help. At first, the tiny oxygen mask helped. Baby’s muscle tone improved but her grim slate blue colour persisted. The doctor arrived and listened to the tiny heaving chest with his stethoscope. There was a heart murmur, not loud but clearly audible when searching for something specific. It transpired that the artery to the lungs hadn’t developed properly – pulmonary atresia, we call it. Dark blue blood returning from the tiny body streamed through a hole in the ventricular septum and back around the body. The chaotic circulation was progressively depleted of oxygen, accumulating more and more acid. The baby was doomed. A ‘blue baby’. The doctor shook his head and walked away. Nothing could be done to help.

      All this passed the mother by as she sweated in pain and perineal Armageddon. She was impatient to hold her new daughter. As they handed over the dying infant, the midwife’s grave expression told the story, as did the child’s pathetic face, lifeless and grey, eyes rolling aimlessly. Our factory girl pleaded for an explanation. Why so still and silent? Why not pink and warm like me in the cot next door? Milk started to flow, but there was no suckling. In 1948 blue babies died.

      They returned to the maternity bed next to my mother. There was a stark contrast in mood after nine months of excitement and anticipation – one woman radiant, proud and optimistic with her robust, pink son, the other desolate with a grey, motionless little girl left to die in her arms. The curtains were pulled around. Her expectant husband was stuck at work, rolling steel, never to see his daughter alive. The hospital chaplain arrived as a matter of urgency to christen the child as life ebbed away. It was probably too late, but they went through the motions.

This emotional meltdown already greatly saddened my mother, then the contrasts deepened at visiting time when the families arrived. There were repeated emotional breakdowns as the young woman’s parents, then the bereaved husband, arrived too late to see the dead baby before it was spirited away in a shoe box. Feelings of guilt quickly followed. What did she do wrong? Was it the cigarettes? Or was it the sickness pills? Should she have gone to church? My own family’s joy was tinged with compassion for the poor girl. My mother stayed in the maternity bed beside her for five days while she was taken for pelvic surgery, with nothing to bring home but sadness and stitches.

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