Page 5 of Spectacular Things
Pusha-Pusha-Pusha-Ah!
“What a game!” Dr. Elliott declares. “Mia, almost time to start pushing.”
“Here we go!” Oliver whoops, massaging Mia’s shoulders like she’s a prizefighter between rounds.
On the television and at full volume, sportscasters discuss the U.S. win and Cricket’s last-minute save.
“I’ll be right back,” Dr. Elliott says, glaring at the numbers on Mia’s monitor. “Just breathe and try to relax.”
Mia promises she’ll try just as her phone rings. Her sister.
“You did it!” Mia shouts. In the background, she hears the inebriated National Team chanting, Oosa-Oosa-Oosa-Ah!
“ We did it! Cricket shouts back as champagne sprays the side of her face and someone licks it off her cheek. “How’s it going over there?”
“I’m nine centimeters!”
“Hell yeah!” Cricket cheers. “What’s that mean?”
Before Mia can respond, Taylor, one of the four mothers on the National Team, grabs the phone out of Cricket’s grip and cups her hand around the speaker.
“Go Mia!” Taylor yells. “Nine centimeters? It’s game time!”
“My sister’s having a baby!” Cricket announces to the locker room.
Taylor puts the phone on speaker and yells, “Push, girl, push!” And someone in that squad of twenty-two Gold Medal Olympians, swaying together with arms interlocked, has the brilliant idea to change their chanting from Oosa-Oosa-Oosa-Ah to Pusha-Pusha-Pusha-Ah!
Thousands of miles apart, Mia and Cricket hear each other’s silence amid all the noise as they both rub at their wet eyes, overwhelmed by the support from the team and wishing their mother were with them.
“You won a gold medal, Cricky!” Mia yells into the phone. “You did it!”
“And you’re doing it!” Cricket shouts back. “I love you! Tell that baby I’m coming!”
Two hours of pushing later, Mia and Oliver are delirious from exhaustion when the monitor begins to beep and won’t relent. The OB barely glances at it before turning her back to place two calls, speaking so quietly that Mia and Oliver can’t hear what she says from only a few feet away.
She hangs up and turns to them. “We’re changing the game plan,” she says. “Mia’s blood pressure is spiking, so we’re going to stabilize you with magnesium while trying to really get moving toward delivery, okay? Okay.” She does not wait for their reaction.
“Mia, I want you to focus on your breath, and since we’re going to start increasing your levels of Pitocin, expect to feel the contractions intensify rather…expeditiously.”
Twenty minutes later, Mia pukes for a second time from the pain.
She hears plastic tearing and paper rustling and metal instruments clinking.
A whole team is telling her to push, and she thought she was, but they’re saying it’s not enough.
Oliver’s eyes are bloodshot as he tells her to keep going, it’s okay, it’s okay, and between surges of torture she notices she broke the skin on his hand.
Finally, a nurse says, “One more push and you’re going to be a wonderful mother,” which makes Mia smile and she begins to say thank you but she can’t quite get the words out. She can’t quite—believe—how impossible—this is—and yet—she’s still—pushing—
“Here she comes!” Dr. Elliott says, and Mia feels the head and shoulders dislodge and the slippery little body slide out and it’s all so primal it’s like she’s the livestock in some farm documentary—and that’s before she hears the piglet squealing in distress as Dr. Elliott asks, “Would you like to hold her?”
Mia nods, too exhausted to speak. Dr. Elliott puts a bundle of baby on her chest and when Mia looks down, she gasps with recognition.
This face.
She’s known it her whole life.
Mia never thought she’d see eyes like these again.
“Look at her,” Oliver says, laughing through his tears as he crouches down beside them. Mia nods against Oliver’s unshaven chin. She’s never been this tired or this proud, this happy.
“Okay, Mia, we need a few big pushes to deliver the placenta,” Dr. Elliott says. “And then we’ll clear the room for skin-to-skin and family bonding.” Oliver takes the baby, and in several pushes, Mia delivers the placenta. But Dr. Elliott does not congratulate her or clear the room.
Instead, she tells her resident to call an emergency code.
Within seconds, the room floods with new faces. “What’s happening?” Oliver asks Dr. Elliott, but she ignores him to direct the team as they wheel Mia out of the room and down the hall. “What’s happening?” Oliver yells after them.
“We need to stabilize her in the OR,” Dr. Elliott calls over her shoulder. “She’s losing a lot of blood.”
As Mia disappears within the scrum of medics, Oliver stands alone in the abandoned labor and delivery room. In his arms, the infant looks up at him, a concentration of hope and trust in her startling blue eyes.