Apgar 0/0....

Today was a normal day for me. Woke at 5:35am after tossing and turning till nearly one in the morning, showered, dried my hair, put on my scrubs, walked to car, picked up my friend Kyle and rode to work. Kyle and I got out of the car at 6:38am, as usual, and went into the hospital to begin doing discharge paperwork with our group, or those that show up early with us. One the two people we work with was on call last night. He told us that during the night an emergency C-section was done, and the baby was dead. Fetal Demise. Stillbirth. Apgar 0/0. Agpgar is the numeric measurement of a baby's viability (ie.... Activity, Pulse, Grimace, Appearance, and Respiration) with each area getting between 0-2 points, for a possible 10. This baby, a little girl, was 0/0. The mother, who was under general anesthesia, was unaware for almost seven hours of her daughter's short life, a life that did not even make it beyond the womb. I will go into the medical logistics of what happened. It would be too much medicine and too long and too complicated. And regardless of whose fault, residents, attending doctor, nurses, or no one at all or everyone at once, a baby girl is no long with us and the 24 year old mother is left to wonder. Even more, one of the delivering resident's is 18 weeks pregnant with her own son.

So while this was a normal day for me, while I was tossing and turning at 12:38 am, a girl around my age was losing her first child. It is just one of those things that reminds us to our lives in perspective.