The summer sun had turned the tarmac of Everland Theme Park into a griddle, and Eileen felt every degree of it pressing down on her swollen body. At twenty-eight years old and just shy of thirty-eight weeks pregnant, she resembled a small planet in a floral sundress, her belly so enormous that the fabric had given up trying to stretch and now simply rode up over the curve of her navel like a tide retreating from a boulder. She was the adoptive mother of four children already, ages four to nine, and this biological pregnancy had been a surprise that arrived like a freight train through the wall of her carefully planned life.
"Mom, can we do the bumper cars again?" shouted Marcus, her eldest, tugging at her damp sleeve.
Eileen wiped a sheen of sweat from her upper lip and tried to smile. Her thighs chafed with every waddling step. The baby had dropped low weeks ago, a dense cannonball lodged in her pelvis, and walking had become a negotiation between her will and the grinding pressure between her hip bones. She had what her own mother had once called "birthing hips" during a family dinner that made Eileen want to sink into the floor, but right now those hips felt like a cage. The baby was too big. She knew it. The ultrasound at thirty-two weeks had shown measurements well above the ninety-seventh percentile, and her OB had used the word "macrosomia" with a grave face. They had scheduled an induction for thirty-nine weeks. That was six days away.
"I need to sit down for a minute, loves," she said, her voice thin and breathy. She lowered herself onto a bench near the carousel, the impact sending a shockwave through her sacrum. The children swarmed around her like excitable ducklings, clutching stuffed animals and sticky with cotton candy. Lily, her youngest adopted daughter, climbed into Eileen's lap without asking, and the pressure of the child's small body against her distended abdomen made Eileen gasp. The baby inside responded with a violent roll, something hard and round like a skull pressing down against her cervix.
"Off, off, sweetheart, Mommy needs a second," she said, lifting Lily to the bench beside her. She leaned forward, elbows on her knees, and breathed through a contraction. She had been having Braxton Hicks for weeks, false labor that tightened her belly like a fist and then released. But this one felt different. This one started in her lower back and wrapped around to her front like a belt of red-hot iron being cinched tighter and tighter. She counted. Forty-five seconds. Then it let go, and she exhaled a shaky breath.
Just a false alarm. Just the heat. Just the fact that she had been on her feet for four hours, her ankles now the size of small melons, her feet bulging over the straps of her sandals like dough rising over a pan. She took a long drink from her water bottle and watched the carousel spin, the cheerful music grinding on her nerves like a dentist's drill.
The next contraction came seven minutes later. She was standing in line for the funnel cake stand, and it hit her so hard that her knees buckled. She grabbed the metal railing and hung on, her knuckles white, her mouth open in a silent O. A teenager behind her asked if she was okay. Eileen nodded and lied through her teeth. "Just the heat," she said again. But the contraction lasted seventy seconds this time, and when it was over, she felt a trickle of something warm and thin run down the inside of her thigh.
She looked down. A clear, pink-tinged fluid was spotting the tarmac between her sandals. Her water had just broken. Not a dramatic gush like in the movies, but a persistent, humiliating leak that soaked through her underwear, ran down her legs, and began to form a small puddle beneath her sundress.
"No, no, no, no, no," she whispered, clamping her thighs together as if she could will her amniotic sac back into integrity. The children were ahead of her, gathered around the funnel cake window, oblivious. She had her phone in her pocket. She could call her husband. She could call an ambulance. But before she could do either, the real contraction hit.
There was no buildup this time. It was like being struck by lightning from the inside. Eileen's entire body seized, her abdominal muscles contracting with such violent force that she doubled over and let out a sound that was half moan, half scream. The funnel cake line turned to look at her. A mother with a stroller pulled her children back. The teenager who had asked if she was okay now backed away with wide eyes.
Eileen tried to straighten up, to walk toward a bench, to do anything other than collapse on the ground in front of hundreds of strangers. But her legs would not cooperate. Her pelvis felt like it was being split apart by a wedge, the baby's head ramming down against bone that refused to yield. She sank to her knees first, the rough tarmac scraping her skin through her thin dress, and then she toppled sideways onto her hip, her enormous belly making it impossible to find any position that didn't feel like torture.
"Mommy?" That was Marcus's voice, suddenly close, suddenly frightened. "Mommy, what's wrong?"
Eileen rolled onto her back without thinking, the supine position a desperate instinct to relieve the pressure on her spine. But lying flat made everything worse. The weight of the baby crushed her diaphragm, and she felt like she was drowning. She tried to push herself up on her elbows, but another contraction ripped through her, this one so powerful that she saw stars burst behind her eyes. She screamed. A real, raw, throat-shredding scream that echoed off the facades of the carnival games and sent pigeons flapping out of the food court.
Someone was calling 911. Someone else was trying to corral her children, who had begun to cry. Eileen could hear Lily wailing "Mommy, Mommy!" over and over, but she couldn't respond. She was in another world now, a world of red pain and crushing pressure and the terrible, undeniable sensation of her body trying to expel something far too large for the passage it was being forced through.
Her sundress had ridden up to her ribcage, leaving her swollen belly and the soaked crotch of her underwear exposed to the afternoon sun. A park employee ran over with a beach towel and tried to cover her, but Eileen thrashed her legs open and closed, unable to control her own movements. The baby was coming. It was coming now, and it was not waiting for an epidural, not waiting for a hospital bed, not waiting for the OB to finish her lunch.
The paramedics arrived seven minutes later. Seven minutes of Eileen writhing on the hot tarmac, of her screaming until her voice cracked, of a crowd of tourists gathering in a loose circle around her like spectators at a gladiator match. Two women in their sixties stood at the front, one clutching a churro, both watching with morbid fascination as the young mother's body convulsed through each wave.
"Ma'am, we need you to stay still," said a paramedic named Davis, a stocky man with a buzz cut and calm, practiced hands. He was kneeling between her legs, which were now splayed open in a way that would have made Eileen want to die of shame if she had any room in her brain for shame. She did not. The only thing in her brain was pain, pure and elemental, the kind of pain that strips away every layer of civilization and leaves behind a howling animal.
"Get it out," she sobbed. "Get it out of me, please, it's too big, it's not going to fit, please, please, you have to cut it out."
Her second paramedic, a young woman named Reyes, was setting up an oxygen mask and trying to get a blood pressure reading. Eileen's arm was flailing, and Reyes had to pin it down with her elbow while she fumbled with the cuff. The baby's heart rate was being monitored by a handheld Doppler that Davis had produced from his kit. The numbers were dropping. Each contraction squeezed the umbilical cord, and with a macrosomic baby wedged tight in a pelvis that was not designed for such a cargo, the cord was taking a beating.
"We need to move her to the ambulance," Reyes said.
"There's no time," Davis replied. He had pulled up Eileen's dress all the way to her chin now, exposing her fully. Her underwear was already off, torn away by Eileen herself in a moment of primal instinct. Her perineum was bulging, the baby's head crowning in a way that made Davis's jaw tighten. It was not a normal head. It was enormous, the size of a cantaloupe, and it was stretching Eileen's tissues to a translucent, terrifying thinness.
"Ma'am, I need you to push on the next contraction," Davis said.
"I can't," Eileen wept. "I can't, it hurts too much, I can't do it."
But her body did not wait for permission. The next contraction seized her without warning, and her uterus bore down with such ferocious power that she felt something tear deep inside. She screamed again, a hoarse, ragged sound that turned into a guttural grunt as she pushed involuntarily, her diaphragm locking, her face turning purple with effort.
The baby's head emerged another inch. Then it stopped. It was stuck, the widest part of the skull caught against the inferior aspect of her pubic symphysis, a bony shelf that refused to let it pass. Davis looked at Reyes, and Reyes looked at Davis. They had both seen shoulder dystocia before, but this was something else. This was a head dystocia, the entire fetal skull too large to fit through a pelvis that had been described by Eileen's OB as "adequate but on the smaller side."
"We need to reposition her," Davis said. He tried to get Eileen to roll onto her hands and knees, a position that might open her pelvis and allow the head to pass. But Eileen was beyond following instructions. She was locked in a supine position, her legs shaking uncontrollably, her hands clawing at the tarmac. Every time Davis tried to move her, she shrieked and thrashed. The crowd was growing. Someone was filming on a phone. The carousel music played on, oblivious and cheerful.
"Supine it is," Davis muttered. He looked at the bulging, stuck head and made a decision. He reached for his obstetric kit and pulled out a vacuum extractor, a soft silicone cup attached to a hand pump. He had used it only twice before in the field, and both times he had hated every second of it. But the baby's heart rate was dropping further, and Eileen's pushing was becoming weaker, her body exhausting itself against an impossible obstacle.
"I'm going to put a cup on the baby's head to help pull while you push," he explained, his voice loud and firm. "Eileen, do you understand? You have to push as hard as you can when I tell you."
She nodded, her face slick with sweat and tears and snot. Her hair was plastered to her forehead. Her eyes were wild and unfocused. She looked like a woman in a war zone, which, in a way, she was.
Reyes positioned herself at Eileen's side, holding her hand and counting down to the next contraction. Davis inserted the vacuum cup carefully, pressing it against the baby's scalp, and attached the pump. He pulled the handle, creating suction, and the cup latched onto the head with a wet, popping sound.
"Now push!" Davis commanded.
Eileen bore down with everything she had left. The veins in her neck stood out like ropes. Her face turned from purple to a mottled, terrifying burgundy. She screamed through clenched teeth, a scream that went on and on and on, and Davis pulled on the vacuum with steady, controlled traction. The baby's head moved. Not much, just a centimeter, but it moved. The widest part of the skull scraped past the pubic bone with a sound like wood grinding against stone, and Eileen felt a searing, tearing pain in her perineum that made her previous agony feel like a mild headache.
"The head is out," Davis said, his voice tight. But his relief was short lived. He could see the baby's neck, and then the shoulders, and his heart sank. The shoulders were enormous, broad and thick, and they were wedged against her symphysis and sacral promontory like a cork in a bottle. This was a true shoulder dystocia, the kind that made obstetricians reach for the Zavanelli maneuver and paramedics reach for their radios to call for a helicopter.
"Reyes, I need suprapubic pressure. Now."
Reyes moved to Eileen's lower abdomen, just above her pubic bone, and pressed down hard with the heel of her hand. The goal was to push the anterior shoulder out from behind the pubic bone, to jiggle it loose while Davis applied traction. Eileen, who had been gasping for air between contractions, felt the pressure and screamed again. Her entire body was a single, pulsing nerve ending. She could feel every millimeter of the baby's passage, every scrape of bone against bone, every tear of her flesh.
"Push again, Eileen! Harder than you've ever pushed in your life!"
She pushed. Her vision went white. She heard herself making sounds that she had never heard a human make, sounds that belonged in a horror movie, low and guttural and desperate. Davis pulled on the baby's head, angling it downward to free the posterior shoulder, while Reyes pressed and rocked her hand against Eileen's abdomen. The baby did not move. It was stuck, truly stuck, and for a terrifying moment, Davis thought he was going to lose them both.
"One more time," he said. "One more big push. Reyes, McRoberts maneuver."
Reyes grabbed Eileen's legs and pushed them back toward her chest, hyperflexing her hips so that her knees were practically touching her ears. The supine position with legs pulled back is the McRoberts maneuver, and it flattens the sacrum and opens the pelvis as much as possible. Eileen's stretched, abused body complied, though she wept from the strain on her lower back.
Eileen summoned something from the depths of her soul, a final reserve of strength that she did not know she possessed. She pushed with a force that felt like it might crack her own spine. Her rectum prolapsed slightly. Her perineum tore with an audible rip, a second-degree laceration that sent a gush of blood onto the towel beneath her. And the baby's anterior shoulder finally, finally slipped past the pubic bone with a wet, grinding pop.
The rest of the body came in a rush, a torrent of vernix and blood and amniotic fluid, and Davis caught the baby in his hands just before it hit the tarmac. It was a boy. He was enormous, easily eleven pounds if he was an ounce, with a round, chubby face and shoulders like a linebacker. He was not crying. His color was dusky, his body limp.
"Come on, come on," Davis muttered, wiping his mouth and nose with a bulb syringe. He suctioned the airway, flicked the soles of the baby's feet, and rubbed his back with a rough towel. For three agonizing seconds, nothing happened. The crowd was silent. Eileen, who had collapsed against the tarmac in a heap of sweat and blood and exhaustion, lifted her head and watched with eyes that held all the terror of a woman who had just endured the unimaginable only to face the unthinkable.
Then the baby drew a ragged, gasping breath. Then another. Then he opened his mouth and let out a cry that was not the mewling of a newborn but a full throated, indignant wail of a creature who had been dragged unwillingly into a world of heat and noise and bright sunlight. He was purple pink and furious, his fists clenched, his legs kicking at the air.
Eileen sobbed with relief. She reached out her arms, and Reyes placed the baby on her chest, a slippery, heavy, warm weight. He was so big that he covered her entire torso, his chin resting on her collarbone, his feet dangling past her belly. She held him and shook and cried and laughed, all at once, while the crowd erupted into applause.
The children had been moved to the side by a park employee, and now they pushed forward, Marcus holding Lily's hand, both of them staring with wide eyes at the bloody, squalling baby on their mother's chest. "Is that our brother?" Lily asked, her voice small.
Eileen laughed again, a wet, hysterical sound. "That's your brother," she said. "That's your brother, and he is very, very impatient."
The paramedics were still working, delivering the placenta, applying pressure to Eileen's torn perineum, wrapping the baby in a thermal blanket. But the emergency was over. The worst was behind them. Davis sat back on his heels and let out a long, shaky breath. He had delivered over a hundred babies in his career, but he had never seen a macrosomic infant birthed on a theme park tarmac with nothing but a vacuum extractor and sheer, stubborn will.
The park staff had cordoned off the area with folding screens decorated with cartoon characters, a surreal backdrop for a birth scene. The manager, a harried woman in a polo shirt, approached with a stack of complimentary passes and a first aid kit that seemed laughably inadequate. "We're so sorry this happened," she said. "We'd like to offer your family free admission for life."
Eileen looked up at her, then down at the chunky, red faced baby on her chest, then at her four other children clustered around her like a protective flock. She was lying on the ground in a pool of her own fluids, her dress torn, her body broken and bleeding, her hair a rats nest of sweat and grit. She was mortified. Every person in that crowd had seen parts of her that she had never intended to show anyone but her husband and her doctor. Someone had filmed it. It would probably end up on the internet. Her mother would see it. Her coworkers would see it. The entire world would see her screaming and shitting herself and tearing open on hot pavement.
But the baby was here. The baby was alive. And as she looked at his enormous, perfect face, at the dimples in his cheeks and the dark fuzz on his head, she found that she could not bring herself to care about the rest.
"Free admission for life?" she said, her voice hoarse but steady. "We have five kids now. You might regret that."
The manager laughed, a nervous, relieved sound. The crowd laughed with her. The baby, having exhausted his initial outrage, had settled into a contented grunting, rooting blindly for a nipple that Eileen was not yet ready to offer. She pressed a kiss to his forehead, tasting salt and blood and the peculiar sweetness of newborn skin.
"Welcome to the world, you giant," she whispered. "You could not have picked a more dramatic entrance."
The ambulance arrived then, a proper transport vehicle with a stretcher and IV fluids and pain medication. But Eileen refused to let go of the baby, and the paramedics did not try to make her. They lifted her onto the stretcher with the baby still on her chest, and as they wheeled her through the parting crowd, someone started another round of applause. A little girl pressed a wilted flower into Eileen's hand. A teenager gave her a thumbs up. An old man tipped his hat.
She was still mortified. She would be mortified for years, every time she told this story, every time someone recognized her from a viral video, every time her children brought it up at Thanksgiving. But as the ambulance doors closed and the siren began to wail, Eileen looked down at her enormous, healthy, screaming baby boy and smiled.
He was worth every second. Every tear, every scream, every tear of her flesh and every drop of her blood. He was worth the heat and the pain and the humiliation and the crowd. He was worth it all.
And she would never, ever let him forget it.
tangentwithtanner
stormborns
