Chapter 4
The ambulance had seemed to take an eternity to arrive and, despite Silvia's vivid threats and desperate pleas, they had tried to stabilise Pepa before moving her, but to no avail, her condition continued to deteriorate by the second.
Finally, the Paramedics had reached the same conclusion that Silvia had already deduced and decided that despite their patient's condition they had to risk transporting her. Their rapid journey to the hospital had been a noisy cacophony of bleeping monitors, Silvia's frenzied words imploring Pepa to keep breathing, to stay with her, and the wail of multiple sirens.
It had been much, much later, when Silvia had finally slumped exhausted into one of the uncomfy hospital chairs, shattered by her emotions as much as her near constant pacing around the hospital's small waiting room, that she had discovered that Don Lorenzo - as soon as he had finished exhorting the ambulance to hurry to their assistance - had also called the precinct. Paco, Sara and the rest of Los Hombres had immediately leapt into action, managing for once to undertake a plan flawlessly. Their friends, using the precinct's police cars, had blocked every major road junction, from their home in San Antonio to the Maternity Hospital in the centre of Madrid, bringing traffic chaos to 20 kilometres of the city to ensure there would be no delay in obtaining treatment for Pepa.
Silvia, Paco, Sara and Don Lorenzo waited, some more patiently than others, for any information from the Operating Room. Occasionally a nurse would come through the door at the end of the corridor and all of them would jolt upright, expectantly awaiting news, but none of them stopped to talk to them, to impart any updates.
Silvia had run so many terrible scenarios through her head that she felt like at any minute she could be sick from the worry of it. She mentally cursed her Doctor's training that meant she knew, even though Pepa had made it to the hospital alive, there were still so many possibilities for things to go wrong. For every minute that passed, she came up with more and more terrible scenarios, all of them ending in disaster and the longer that Pepa spent in the OR, then n her mind the higher the odds rose on an awful outcome.
Finally, the operating theatre doors opened once more and this time a doctor came wearily through them. He had obviously tried to clean himself, but his gown and gloves were still daubed with blood. Silvia jumped up and rushed over to him, her worry compounded by his tired and dispirited demeanour. Not far behind her were the other three, everyone crowding around in silence to hear his news.
"Your wife suffered a severe placental abruption," he started to explain.
Silvia was already nodding in understanding, "Si, si, vale", she tried to encourage him, wanting him to get on and tell her about Pepa and their baby, but he continued to explain the Pepa's condition to them in layman's terms, "the placenta prematurely separated from the wall of the womb causing haemorrhaging, a massive blood loss. We managed to stabilise the bleeding temporarily, but we also had to perform an emergency caesarean section as the baby was in extreme danger. Unfortunately, this delay meant your wife had lost too much blood and went into haemorrhagic shock. We lost her on the table."
Silvia knees gave way as her world faded to grey, and it was only Paco's quick reactions that stopped her hitting the floor any harder. Strangely, she realised, some part of her brain was compartmentalising the scene to try to avoid the horrific impact of his words. She could see the worried face of the surgeon his mouth moving soundlessly; the blood on his gloves – her wife's blood; then her gaze took in the tiled ceiling, the sickly glow of the fluorescent lighting; and the shocked faces of Paco and her father. Inside she knew she was breaking into tiny pieces, each one a small, empty, jagged bit of shell, all spiralling towards the earth, containing the remnants of the person she had once been.