Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult

duty at seven, I’m in the OR with the emergency C-section, so we don’t cross paths until it’s 9:00 A.M. and I’m in the nursery. “I heard you pulled a double,” she says, wheeling a bassinet into the room. “What are you doing in here?”
    The nursery used to be where the babies were kept while mothers got a decent night’s sleep, before they stayed twenty-four/seven in their mothers’ hospital rooms. So now, it’s used mostly for storage, and for routine procedures like circumcisions, which no parent wants to watch. “Hiding,” I tell Corinne, pulling a granola bar out of my pocket and devouring it in two bites.
    She laughs. “What the
hell
is going on today? Did I miss the memo for the Apocalypse or something?”
    “Tell me about it.” I glance at the infant for the first time, and feel a shudder run down my spine. BABY BOY BAUER , the card on the bassinet reads. Without even meaning to, I take a step backward.
    “How’s he doing?” I ask. “Is he eating any better?”
    “His sugar’s up but he’s still logy,” Corinne answers. “He hasn’t nursed for the past two hours because Atkins is going to do the circ.”
    As if Corinne has conjured the pediatrician, Dr. Atkins comes into the nursery. “Right on schedule,” she says, seeing the bassinet. “The anesthesia’s had enough time to kick in and I’ve already talked to the parents. Ruth, did you give the baby sweeties?”
    Sweeties are a little bit of sugar water, rubbed on the babies’ gums to soothe and distract them from the discomfort. I would have given the baby sweeties before a circ, if I were his nurse.
    “I’m not taking care of this patient anymore,” I say stiffly.
    Dr. Atkins raises a brow and opens the patient file. I see the Post-it note, and as she reads it, an uncomfortable silence swells, sucking up all the air in the room.
    Corinne clears her throat. “I gave him sweeties about five minutes ago.”
    “Great,” Dr. Atkins says. “Then let’s get started.”
    I stand for a moment, watching as Corinne unwraps the baby and prepares him for this routine procedure. Dr. Atkins turns to me. There’s sympathy in her eyes, and that’s the last thing I want to see. I don’t need pity just because of a stupid decision Marie made. I don’t need pity because of the color of my skin.
    So I make a joke of it. “Maybe while you’re at it,” I suggest, “you can sterilize him.”
    —
    T HERE ARE FEW things scarier than a stat C-section. The air becomes electric once the doctor makes that call, and conversation becomes parsed and vital:
I’ve got the IV; can you get the bed? Someone grab the med box and book the case
. You tell the patient that something is wrong, and that we have to move fast. A page gets sent from the hospital operator to anyone on the team who’s outside the building, while you and the charge nurse take the patient to the OR. While the charge nurse rips the instruments from their sterilized paper bag and turns on the anesthesia equipment, you get the patient onto the table, prep the belly, get the drapes up and ready. The minute the doctor and the anesthesiologist run through the door, the cut is made, the baby’s out. It takes less than twenty minutes. At big hospitals, like Yale–New Haven, they can do it in seven.
    Twenty minutes after Davis Bauer has his circumcision, another of Corinne’s patients has her water break. A loop of umbilical cord spools out between her legs, and Corinne is paged from the nursery, an emergency. “Monitor the baby for me,” she says, as she rushes into the woman’s room. A moment later I see Marie at the head of the patient’s bed, wheeling it with an orderly into the elevator. Corinne is crouched on the bed between the patient’s legs, her gloved hand in the shadows, trying to keep the umbilical cord inside.
    Monitor the baby for me
. She means that she wants me to watch over Davis Bauer. It is protocol that a circumcised baby has to be checked routinely to make