Second Opinion Read Free

‘You’re being dramatic again.’
    ‘No, this time I’m not. Did you see that man’s face when the child was born? It was like someone had lit a bonfire in him. And look at him now. He’s the same age as she is, lots of time for him to start again, find someone else to have babies with. She’s got a very small chance, after all. Poor cow.’
    And Sister Lichfield couldn’t argue with that. She’d come across similar stories before. She knew, better than most, that there was more to having babies than just long labours and stitches and painful perineums. She could write a book, she sometimes told people, about the things she saw and heard in her Obstetric Unit.
    But she didn’t write a book. She went back to work and for a while everything went as smoothly as could be wished. The department managed to streamline its systems to get the patients in and out faster, and so pushed up the throughput (‘What a horrible word!’ Sister Lichfield said to Fay Buckland, the senior consultant on the unit. ‘Makes it sound like those things they use to clean rifles.’ ‘Hush,’ said Fay Buckland. ‘They’re pull-throughs. And the marketeers’ll get you if you talk like that.’) and the Finance Department found them some money to upgrade some of their wards a little. ‘We have to market our Obs department veryvigorously, Sister,’ said Margaret Cotton, who was the Director of Finance for the NHS Trust that the hospital had become the previous April. ‘Because if we don’t the London Implementation Group’ll come and close us down. And we wouldn’t want that, would we?’
    Agreeing sourly that indeed we wouldn’t, Sister Lichfield pushed herself harder than ever, not only doing more than her share of deliveries and teaching the pupils and hustling the less experienced of the house officers along so that they learned their business faster, but also spending (wasting, she called it) long hours in meetings with the head of the Family Directorate which covered Obs and Gynae. and Paediatrics as well as Family Planning and the Fertility Clinic, while they tried to sort out their finances and think of what wheezes they could use to lure pregnant mothers away from the more attractive hospitals in proximity to Old East and into their own eager arms. It was more than enough to expunge from her mind all thoughts of the sad Chowdarys and their dead baby.
    Until one evening in winter, the first of December, when it happened again. This time the baby was a boy, a large and bouncing child who had given them no cause for anxiety at all. He had been born after a mere seven-hour labour of great tranquillity to a relaxed and experienced mother, Helen Popodopoulos, who was delivering herself of her third child in the ward while expecting to be treated on a Domino basis; domiciliary care had been given right up to the time of her starting labour, so she had never attended the hospital’s antenatal clinic, and she had come into Old East only for her delivery, accompanied by her own district midwife, Ann Powell. Sister Lichfield knew her; indeed Ann Powell had been one of her own trainees long ago, and the hospital (as represented by herself) and the district (as represented by Ann) had long enjoyed a happy relationship. So there was no need for her to have any anxiety about the case. The mother was in excellent hands, and should havegone the morning after she delivered to complete the acronym: domiciliary — in — out.
    But she didn’t. Because at six a.m. when the night staff went to fetch the baby to take to his mother — the four babies from the bay Helen was in had been relegated to the nursery for the night because two of the mums were particularly tired after difficult deliveries, and the others hadn’t in the least minded being assured a night’s sleep totally free of the sounds of their crying infants — baby Popodopoulos was dead.
    And this time the reaction was very different, because George Postern Barnabas, who had