Dai Stihó

He tilted the cracked mug back, finishing the dark semi-coagulated crap down as he tried not to gag, and paid the check before heading into the cold Manhattan streets. He walked five blocks to the skyscraper where he swept the floors and cleaned the offices, working five hours every night, five hours that paid less in a week than what the bankers that walked every morning earned in a day. But it was his job, and with things as they were, he wasn’t going to complain about things that were unfair. Besides, he had voted on Tuesday and believed that change was on its way…but it didn’t stop him from wishing it came sooner, especially tonight.

 

Though she knew he liked to sleep until noon, his wife woke him early this morning, sounding and looking very calm – so placid that he almost snapped at her for waking him. But then she told him the news – her water had broken – and he went from sleepy to red-alert in a moment, asking her whether she was sure, if she was hurting, and all the other stupid questions that guys ask when they’re confronted with something about her that they know nothing about. She smiled at him, and in the same calm, steely voice, told him that she needed to be in the hospital.

 

By four in the afternoon, he knew that he wouldn’t be able to be by her side for six hours that morning, because he couldn’t find coverage and they both knew he couldn’t take off. She took it like she took all bad news, smiling stoically and promising him that Manuel wouldn’t come in that time anyway. At ten thirty, he could wait no longer and left her with two kisses and a promise to hurry back.

 

At work, the minutes dragged by as he worried about how she and little Manuel were going to be, about how they would deal if the pregnancy had complications, about how they would stretch the budget for the baby. In the muddled mess of his thoughts, he wasn’t paying attention to the equipment and didn’t realize that the cord of the waxing machine had been chewed on.

 

As he was collecting the cord to move to another part of the lobby, his hand ran over the live wire.
 

In a moment, current passed through his body and sent his heart into ventricular tachycardia; he fell to the floor without ever realizing what had happened. One of the other janitors heard the crash, though, and was wondering why the sound of the machine had stopped; he called 911. At a quarter to midnight, EMS had him on the way to St. Vincent, putting epinephrine and atrophine into him as they tried to shock him. The first defibrillation attempt was a failure; the second, though, brought him back to something the medics could work with.

 

He came back to consciousness ten minutes later, repeating in a trance, “Manuel, Nessa, where are they?” The attending thought he was delusional and was going to sedate him, but a nurse noted that a patient named Vanessa Rodriguez was in obstretics  - and in labor.

 

Nurses are often given less credit they deserve; they do more in the day to day patient care than most doctors can or will. She called upstairs to explain the situation, and after a short consultation, they wheeled Vanessa Rodriguez down into the E.R.

 

---

 

The paramedics that brought him in checked in as their shift ended, asking the attending how their patient turned out. After all, many of the patients that they brought back only stayed briefly in the land of the living.

 

The attending, a severe man that had been in the E.R. for more than ten years, smiled briefly.

 

“The child, mother, and father will all be fine. He’s stable and the pregnancy was without complications - it’s the hospital’s midnight special, gentlemen.”