My wife is such a badass

I’ll try to do this story justice. Over dinner, it handily defeated my harrowing tales of version skew between the head and compute nodes on a big cluster.

The story starts off at 6am yesterday, with Jen on the helipad at the hospital waiting for a Coast Guard helicopter to arrive.

Said helicopter bore a woman in preterm labor. Said woman had gone into labor on Block Island at about the 30th week of pregnancy. At the time there was one (1) doctor on the island who had exactly zero of the usual requisites for dealing with ordinary labor, set aside what you might need when birthing a preemie. Mom had gone into preterm labor once before while on the island, and had lost the pregnancy after a speedboat ride to the mainland. The doc was pretty composed, and had her one (1) paramedic run home to get a bunch of plastic wrap to swaddle the kid in case mom delivered in the helicopter. Apparently with preemies you want to make sure that they stay warm, and don’t lose all of their body water through their skin. Something like that.

The doc got a helicopter ride, at least in part, because the coast guard had no interest whatsoever in delivering this kid themselves if there was any chance of having an MD around to do it. Go Coast Guard. I have to say that I would make exactly the same decision, in a similar situation.

Apparently, if the coast guard lands a helicopter in the city, you have to have the fire department around to block traffic. So they had a total of two ambulances, ten firefighters, one OB fellow (Jen), one pediatrics resident, and a variety of police and paramedics hanging around. Freakin’ huge coast guard chopper comes in on tiny little hospital helipad, they load up into the ambulances, and haul ass back to the hospital (the helipad is out in the middle of the parking lots). They got the woman to the hospital without delivering and administered drugs to slow down the labor process. Last we heard of her, she was considerably settled down and not yet delivered.

Once everyone calmed down a little bit, they realized that the coast guard had bailed, taking the block island doctor’s stuff with them. The last we heard of her, she was with the security desk at the hospital, trying to finagle a ride back to the block island ferry.