A Nurse Tortured My Mom As She Gave Birth To My Brother. Hours Later, He Was Dead.

I don’t recall the specific date when my mother told me about the appalling incident from 25 years earlier, but I suspect it may have been Oct. 8, the anniversary of Paul’s birth … and death.

I was sitting at the kitchen table reading a magazine when Mom abruptly stopped preparing dinner and began telling me a story that sounded like something out of a gruesome horror novel. I listened in shock as she stoically and matter-of-factly explained why her first son’s life ended hours after it began.

Mom had been 28 years old in 1952 and, because Paul was her second full-term pregnancy, she knew how the delivery should play out. When her labor began, Dad rushed her to the hospital. All four of Mom’s babies were born quickly, but Paul had the misfortune of arriving in the early afternoon, when the family doctor was seeing patients and having trouble leaving his office to deliver a baby.

In that small-town hospital, long before fathers were permitted inside the delivery room, my mother was trapped alone with a frenetic nurse who was completely unprepared for working in a maternity ward. As Mom cried out with intense labor pains, the nurse yelled, “Your doctor’s not here! You can’t have that baby now!”

My mother stared off into the distance as she recalled telling the nurse that the baby was coming. In that instant, the nurse morphed from a seemingly compassionate medical care provider into a crazed assailant who did the unthinkable. She grabbed Mom’s right thigh, forcibly crossed it over the left one, and then sat atop both of my mother’s legs, using her weight to keep the infant from emerging through the birth canal. Mom struggled to push the nurse away, but racked with hard contractions, she was no match for this woman.