I worked in Labor and Delivery last night, attending to the various pain needs and requirements of the parturient population at XYZ Hospital. My night consisted mainly of putting epidurals into screaming hysterical womens’ backs. One after another after another, I was like a mean lean epidural-inserting machine.

Except for two ladies,

in rooms at opposite ends of the long hallway,

who disengaged my rhythm and gave me reason to pause.

Lady A had just suffered a miscarriage, at 16 weeks along in her pregnancy. She had been trying unsuccessfully to have a second child, and now had to suffer this loss. She delivered the dead fetus painlessly, spontaneously, unwantedly, fearfully. No epidural was needed for her. But she was having trouble delivering her placenta, which should have naturally followed after the delivery of the fetus. The obstetrician required my anesthetic assistance in order to retrieve it without said patient jumping fifteen feet off the bed hollering for divine intervention. After about a 20 minute D & C in the OR, her uterus was clean and dry, and she was comfortably back in her room still dreaming anesthesia dreams and temporarily keeping at bay all of her psychic and unfulfilled maternal pain and loss.

I walked into Lady B’s room at the other end of the hallway to find my patient handcuffed to her bed with a 2-prison guard escort. Lady B had incurred enough parole violations that she was back in the slammer again, and was now about to have her second child. Her medical and personal history read like a hit parade of bad behavior: polysubstance abuse, hepatitis B, regular tobacco and marijuana smoker, gonnorrhea, prostitution. I slipped in her epidural and wished her a happy labor.

Two women, two lives at opposite ends of the corridor and opposite ends of the universe. What is random, what is deliberate? What is fair? One life lived unfulfilled, one life lived unexamined. One life never realized, one life about to begin. Played out on the stage of a labor and delivery unit during a blip in Time.