Loving family
Vascular Resistance
The blue plastic stopwatch on the coffee table beeped every twenty minutes with the persistent, mechanical malice of a heart monitor that refused to be silenced.
"Drink," Alex said, not looking up from where he stood at the foot of the couch, shaving calluses off the heel of his palm with a dull scalpel blade he had smuggled out of supply.
Izzie Stevens did not reach for the glass. She lay wedged into the corner cushions of the sofa, flanked by four down pillows, two fleece throws, and a rolled-up bath towel designed to elevate her right flank thirty degrees to keep the inferior vena cava uncompressed.
"I am not thirsty, Alex," she said through clenched teeth.
"You have to clear fifty ounces of fluid before noon," George chimed in from the kitchen counter. The heavy clatter of a blender pulverized frozen strawberries and Greek yogurt into a violent, pink slurry. "Your urine specific gravity was one-point-zero-two-five yesterday morning, Izzie. That’s bordering on concentrated. Dehydration increases uterine irritability."
"My specific gravity is none of your business, George!" Izzie snapped, her hands gripping the fabric of the sofa cushions. "And stop testing my pee with pediatric dipsticks! You’re an intern, not a nephrologist!"
"I am trying to keep you from going into pre-term labor again," George replied, emerging from the kitchen with a tall glass of smoothie in one hand and a spiral-bound notebook in the other. He adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses with his wrist. "And Dr. Bailey specifically told us that if your cervical length shortens by another millimeter, you're going back into the antenatal ward on continuous magnesium."
"Continuous magnesium makes me feel like my veins are full of boiling battery acid!" Izzie’s voice rose, vibrating with the raw, frayed hysteria of a woman who had been confined to horizontal living for twenty-four days.
At thirty-six weeks, her body felt like an alien landscape she had been forced to inhabit against her will. The child inside her was massive, dense, and relentless, pressing an elbow into her spleen and a pair of feet directly against the under-curve of her liver. Her blonde hair, normally washed and blown dry with compulsive care, was pinned up in a messy knot with a plastic surgical clamp. Her skin felt hot and stretched so tight across her ribs that taking a full breath felt like inhaling ground glass.
"Iz, drink the damn water," Alex ordered, finally tossing the scalpel onto a ceramic coaster and crossing the small distance between them.
He didn't look like an attending; he didn't even look like a senior resident. He wore a faded grey sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed up over his thick, scarred forearms and flannel pajama pants that trailed on the rug. But the tension in his shoulders was coiled tight, ready to snap. For three weeks, Alex had lived on a diet of stale coffee, hospital adrenaline, and a terrifying, bone-deep vigilance that made him hover over her like a gargoyle. Every time she shifted, every time she winced, his dark eyes flared with that feral, defensive panic he had carried since childhood.
"I don't want water," Izzie whispered, her lower lip trembling with furious, sudden tears. "I want to take a shower. A real shower. Standing up. Without one of you sitting on the toilet lid holding a stopwatch and asking me if I feel dizzy every thirty seconds."
"The warm water causes peripheral vasodilation," George explained gently, setting the smoothie on the side table and sitting on the edge of the mattress where the cushions met her hip. He reached out, his neat, cool surgeon’s fingers brushing a loose strand of hair from her forehead. "If your blood pressure drops, the placental perfusion decreases. We’re just trying to be careful, Izzie."
"You're not being careful, George! You're suffocating me!"
Izzie slapped his hand away.
The sound was sharp in the quiet living room. George flinched, his hand freezing in mid-air, hurt flickering behind his lenses before he smoothed his expression into that patient, maddening bedside manner he used on combative trauma patients.
Alex’s jaw tightened. "Hey. Don't take it out on him. He stayed up until four this morning writing up discharge summaries so he could trade for the day shift."
"Then go!" Izzie cried, pushing against the pillows, struggling to lever herself upright before the sheer, unwieldy weight of her abdomen pinned her back down. "Go to the hospital! Both of you! Get out of this house!"
"Izzie—" George started.
"No, George, I mean it!" Hot, humiliating tears finally spilled down her cheeks, burning against her pale skin. "I am sick of being a patient! I am sick of the dipsticks, and the blood pressure cuff, and the way you two look at me like I’m a bomb about to go off! I am a surgeon! I survived Chehalis! I survived Denny! I survived cutting an LVAD wire! I am not made of sugar glass, and I cannot spend another eight hours watching you two hover over me like two nervous hens waiting for an egg to crack!"
Alex stared down at her, his hands jammed deep into his sweatshirt pockets. The defensive armor was settling back over his face, hard and shuttered.
"Fine," Alex said, his voice flat.
"Alex, no," George said, looking up in alarm.
"No, George, she’s right," Alex rasped, turning toward the foyer. "She wants space? She gets space. I have three consults in the neonatal wing and Arizona Robbins needs a hand on an omphalocele reduction at two. Your mom’s coming at one anyway."
"Alex, please," George stood, his voice catching in the middle. "We agreed one of us would always be in the house until Ma got here."
"She’s thirty-six weeks, George," Alex said from the hallway, pulling his heavy boots on with aggressive, jerking motions. "Her vitals were normal at eight. Her non-stress test on Tuesday was reactive. She’s fine. She just hates looking at us."
"That's not what I said, Alex!" Izzie shouted toward the archway, her voice cracking.
The heavy front door pulled open with a gust of damp Pacific air, then slammed shut with an echoing bang that vibrated through the floorboards.
Silence fell over the Queen Anne house—heavy, cold, and thick with unresolved static.
George stood in the center of the living room, his hands hanging limp at his sides. He looked down at his watch, then at Izzie. The anger in her face had already collapsed into that familiar, hollow guilt that always followed her outbursts.
"You should go too," Izzie whispered, not looking at him. "You’re covering the pit for Cristina. If you’re late, Bailey will put you on rectal exams for a month."
"Izzie, I don't care about Bailey's rectal exams," George said softly.
"I care, George," she said, her voice dropping into a dull, exhausted register. "I need you to have a career when this is over. I need... I just need an hour. To sleep. Without anyone watching my chest rise and fall."
George swallowed hard. He looked at the half-full glass of water, then at the notebook where he had charted her blood pressure at eight in the morning: *118/74. Heart rate 78.* It had been normal. It had been normal every morning for three weeks.
"Ma’s key is on the hook," George said, his voice thick with reluctance. "She’ll be here by twelve-thirty. Her casserole is in the fridge. The phone is right beside your elbow. If you feel a cramp—even a tiny one—you hit speed dial one. It goes straight to my pager."
"I know, George," she said, closing her eyes against the dull grey daylight filtering through the blinds. "I know."
George leaned down. He hesitated for a second, then pressed a soft, lingering kiss to the crown of her head, inhaling the lavender scent of her shampoo.
"We love you, Izzie," he whispered against her hair. "We’re just... we're terrified of losing you. Either of you."
Izzie kept her eyes shut, her throat aching with unshed tears. "I know. Go. Save lives, Dr. O'Malley."
George’s sneakers squeaked softly on the hardwood, retreating toward the front hall. The deadbolt clicked, the iron gate outside clanged shut, and then the Queen Anne house was entirely, completely still.
***
The quiet lasted twenty minutes.
At first, the silence was a relief. Izzie let her shoulders sag, sinking deep into the down cushions, breathing in the cold air that smelled faintly of old plaster, floor wax, and Alex’s cedarwood soap. She didn't have to smile; she didn't have to drink chalky pink smoothies; she didn't have to reassure two broken men that she wasn't going to vanish into the Pacific mist like a ghost.
Then, the pressure began.
It didn't start with pain. It started behind her eyes—a strange, shimmering vibration at the very periphery of her visual field, like heat rising off asphalt in July.
Izzie blinked, squeezing her eyelids shut to clear the glare. When she opened them, the white crown molding above the fireplace was broken by a jagged, silver zigzag of light—a scintillating scotoma that drifted across her vision like an oily film on water.
"Great," she muttered, rubbing her temples with trembling fingers. "A migraine. Just what I needed."
She reached for the water glass on the side table, but as she tilted her head forward, a sickening, violent spike of pain slammed into the base of her skull. It felt like an iron clamp tightening around the occipital bone, squeezing with rhythmic, hydraulic pressure.
Her breath caught.
*Visual changes,* an objective, clinical voice whispered in the back of her head, sounding suspiciously like Dr. Bailey. *Persistent frontal headache unresponsive to rest. Central nervous system hyper-excitability.*
"It's just tension," Izzie told the empty room, her voice shaking. "I yelled at Alex. My neck is stiff."
She swung her bare legs off the sofa, her feet dropping toward the floorboards.
The moment her toes touched the rug, a wave of profound, disorienting nausea rolled through her gut. But it wasn't the morning sickness of the first trimester, and it wasn't the sour indigestion of third-trimester reflux.
The pain was concentrated: a sharp, boring, unrelenting ache lodged deep in her right upper quadrant, burrowing directly beneath the margin of her twelfth rib like a dull wooden stake driven into her liver.
Izzie gasped, her hand flying to her side, fingers digging through the fabric of her oversized sweater.
*Glisson's capsule distension,* the voice recited, cold and merciless. *Hepatic edema. Impending hepatic rupture. Preeclampsia with severe features.*
"No," Izzie whispered, her heart suddenly slamming against her ribs with concussive, frantic force. "No, no, no. My pressure was normal three hours ago. It was normal."
She had to get to the dining table.
The automatic blood pressure cuff—the grey one George had calibrated twice—was sitting in its open nylon case beside the salt shaker. She just needed to slip the cuff over her arm. She needed to see the numbers. If she saw one-twenty over eighty, the panic would dissolve. It was just a panic attack. She was hyperventilating because she had pushed them away.
Izzie stood.
The room tilted sixty degrees to the left.
The floorboards seemed to lurch upward like the deck of a trawler hitting an ocean swell. The grey light from the window exploded into a concussive, blinding flash of white—a brilliant, silent detonation that wiped the furniture, the walls, and the fireplace from existence.
Her ears filled with a high-pitched, screaming whistle, like steam escaping an industrial valve.
Izzie reached out blindly, her right hand clawing for the edge of the sofa arm.
Her fingers brushed the velvet, slipped, and found only empty, cold air.
Her knees simply ceased to exist.
She fell forward, the heavy, thirty-six-week mass of her womb dragging her down with terrifying velocity. Her hip struck the hard oak floor first, followed instantly by the dull, sickening *crack* of her forehead striking the corner of the low coffee table.
Then came the darkness—deep, violent, and absolute.
Her limbs locked in a rigid, tonic spasm. Her head arched back against the floor, her teeth clamping down through the lateral margin of her tongue with brutal force, a thin ribbon of pink, bloody foam escaping her lips as her nervous system surrendered to the electrical storm detonating inside her brain.
Beside her limp, convulsing hand, the blue stopwatch on the table beeped once, signaling that twenty minutes had passed.
***
In the second-floor pediatric hallway of Seattle Grace, Alex Karev was walking so fast his rubber clogs squeaked like wet tires against the linoleum.
"Karev, slow down," Arizona Robbins said, jogging two paces to keep up with his long, aggressive strides, her clipboard tucked under her arm. "The omphalocele isn't on the table until two. We have forty-five minutes to review the ultrasound margins."
"I can't," Alex grunted, staring straight ahead at the elevators, his jaw clamped shut.
"You can't what?"
"I shouldn't have left," Alex muttered, his hands balled into tight fists inside his scrub pockets. "She was pale, Robbins. She looked... she had that look."
Arizona stopped at the nurses' station, frowning slightly. "What look?"
"The look she gets before everything goes to hell," Alex rasped, turning on his heel to face her, his dark eyes wide and bloodshot with exhaustion and a sudden, sharp, inexplicable terror that was making the hair on the back of his neck prickle. "After Denny died. When she was sitting on that bathroom floor. She looked at me this morning like she was already gone."
"Alex, she’s thirty-six weeks pregnant and stuck on a couch," Arizona said gently, placing a hand on his forearm. "She’s allowed to be miserable. She’s allowed to be irritable."
Alex didn't answer.
His cell phone vibrated violently against his hip.
He snatched it out of his pocket, flipping it open with one thumb. "Stevens?"
"Alex?" Louise O'Malley’s voice came through the receiver, high, breathless, and trembling with panic over the roar of highway traffic. "Alex, dear, I’m so sorry. I’m stuck on the Aurora Bridge. There’s a three-car pileup and the police have all lanes blocked. I won't be able to get to the house for at least another hour—"
Alex didn't wait to hear the rest.
He snapped the phone shut, shoved past a nursing student, and sprinted toward the stairwell doors.
"Karev!" Arizona shouted after him. "Where are you going?"
"Get George!" Alex bellowed over his shoulder, his voice echoing off the concrete walls as he hit the stairs three at a time. "Get George out of the pit and tell him to get to the damn house!"
***
George O’Malley was halfway through irrigating a three-centimeter scalp laceration in Trauma Bed 3 when the emergency department doors blew open.
Alex came skidding across the wet floor, his scrub top soaked with Seattle rain, his face wild and pale as chalk. He didn't slow down; he grabbed George by the shoulder of his lab coat and hauled him away from the patient with enough force to pull the suture needle from George’s hand.
"Hey!" the patient yelled.
"Alex, what are you doing?" George gasped, stumbling against the stainless steel tray. "I’m in the middle of a—"
"My truck," Alex barked, his fingers digging into George’s collar like talons. "Now."
"Alex, what happened?"
"Ma’s stuck on the bridge," Alex said, dragging him toward the ambulance bay. "Nobody is with her, George. She’s alone. She’s been alone for an hour."
George’s face drained of color.
The scalp laceration, Dr. Bailey, the residency curve—everything vanished from George’s mind in a single, terrifying heartbeat.
He dropped the needle driver onto the floor, stripped his gloves off with his teeth, and ran.
***
The blue pickup truck hopped the curb of the Queen Anne driveway, throwing gravel against the cedar siding of the house with a sound like buckshot.
Alex was out of the cab before the tires stopped spinning.
He took the porch steps in two lunges, slammed his shoulder into the front door, and found it locked.
"Key!" Alex roared, slamming his fist against the oak paneling. "George, the damn key!"
George was behind him, his hands shaking so violently that the brass ring slipped from his fingers, clattering onto the welcome mat. He dropped to his knees, snatched it up, jammed the key into the deadbolt, and twisted.
The door swung inward.
The house was dark, the grey afternoon light casting long, chalky shadows across the hardwood.
The silence was absolute, save for the rhythmic, high-pitched *chirp* of the forgotten stopwatch on the table.
"Izzie?" George called out, stepping into the foyer, his voice small, tentative, and terrified.
Alex was already past him.
He took three steps into the living room and froze.
"Oh, God," Alex choked out—a ruined, animal sound that seemed to tear straight through his sternum.
Izzie was lying on the floor in the narrow space between the sofa and the low coffee table.
She was curled on her side, her knees pulled halfway toward her massive, distorted abdomen. Her head was wedged against the brass caster of the table leg, a dark, jagged laceration split across her left brow, blood pooling into the blonde hair at her temple and staining the Persian rug beneath her ear.
Her flannel shirt was twisted, her bare arms mottled blue-grey, her lips parted around a swollen, bloody tongue.
She wasn't moving.
"Izzie!" George shrieked, falling to his knees beside her head, his hands hovering over her bleeding face, terrified to touch her, terrified not to. "Izzie, wake up! Please, sweetheart, wake up!"
Alex dropped like an oak tree felled by an axe.
His large, scarred hands immediately clamped onto the sides of her neck, his thumbs pressing into the carotid groove.
"Pulse is thready," Alex gasped, his voice cracking into jagged shards. "One-forty. One-fifty. She’s in ventricular tachycardia or extreme sinus tach! Izzie! Stevens, look at me!"
He pulled her eyelid back.
The pupil was dilated to six millimeters, sluggish, twitching with rhythmic, horizontal nystagmus.
"She had an eclamptic fit," Alex said, the words tumbling out of him in a desperate, furious sob. "She seized, George. Look at her tongue. She bit her tongue in half!"
George reached down, his trembling surgeon’s fingers sliding under the hem of her twisted flannel shirt, resting flat against the high, towering dome of her abdomen.
The moment his skin touched hers, George let out a sharp, strangled whimper.
The uterus was not soft. It was not contracting and relaxing. It was rigid—hard as concrete, locked in a violent, permanent spasm that felt like an iron plate buried beneath the skin.
"Alex," George whispered, his eyes wide and bloodless behind his fogged glasses. "Alex, her fundus is board-like. It’s tetanic. The placenta... it’s abrupting. It’s shearing off."
Alex snatched his cell phone from his pocket, his bloody fingers slipping across the keypad as he dialed the direct trauma line for Seattle Grace.
"Bailey!" Alex screamed the moment the connection clicked. "It’s Karev! I’m at the house with O'Malley! Izzie is down! Witnessed post-ictal state, massive eclamptic seizure, head trauma, and a grade-three placental abruption! We need an OB crash team and two liters of O-negative blood in Trauma Bay One right now! *Move!*"
He threw the phone across the room, where it shattered against the baseboard.
Alex reached down, sliding one arm beneath Izzie’s shoulders and the other beneath her thighs, lifting her thirty-six-week frame from the floor with a roar of pure, desperate adrenaline.
"Alex, we should wait for the bus!" George cried, grabbing her bleeding head to stabilize her cervical spine. "Her neck—"
"The bus will take twelve minutes from Mercer!" Alex snarled, kicking the front door wide open, carrying her down the porch steps into the freezing Pacific rain. "In twelve minutes, she strokes out and the kid suffocates! Open the truck door, George! *Open the damn door!*"
***
The drive down Queen Anne Hill was an exercise in controlled madness.
George sat in the passenger seat, his upper body twisted completely around, holding Izzie’s limp, shuddering frame across the rear bench of the extended cab. He had her head cradled in his lap, using his own scrub jacket to compress the arterial bleeding on her temple, his other hand splayed flat over her rigid, unyielding womb.
"Leo," George wept, his tears dripping onto her pale, blood-spattered cheek as the truck fishtailed through a sheet of standing water on Broad Street. "Leo, hold on. Listen to my voice, little guy. Listen to your dad. Don't you leave us. Izzie, breathe. Please, Izzie, just take one breath."
Behind the wheel, Alex drove like a demon trying to outrun death itself.
He laid his hand on the horn, blasting through red lights, the heavy truck tires hydroplaning across the slick tram tracks. His teeth were gritted so hard that blood was leaking from his gums, his knuckles white as bone on the steering wheel.
"Don't you die on me, Stevens," Alex growled, his voice a low, terrifying rumble that shook the cab. "You hear me? You don't get to die in the back of my truck! We built that damn crib! We signed the papers! You stay right here, or I swear to God I will drag you back from hell myself!"
***
Trauma Bay 1 at Seattle Grace was not prepared for a patient; it was prepared for an execution.
The automatic glass doors parted with a pneumatic hiss as Alex kicked them open, carrying Izzie’s soaked, limp body in his arms.
"Transfer on my count!" Dr. Miranda Bailey’s voice sliced through the chaos like an iron blade.
She stood at the center of the bay, flanked by Dr. Addison Montgomery in full surgical scrubs and Chief Richard Webber, who already had an endotracheal tube and a laryngoscope blade in his gloved hands.
"One! Two! Three!"
Izzie hit the trauma gurney with a heavy, wet thud.
The room exploded into a deafening wall of sound.
*Beep-beep-beep-beep-beep.*
The cardiac monitor screamed: *Maternal heart rate 162. Blood pressure 228/134. Oxygen saturation 86 percent.*
"She’s in hypertensive crisis!" Webber shouted, sliding the blade past her swollen, bleeding tongue. "Her airway is full of blood and emesis! Suction! Give me the Yankauer! Push twenty of labetalol right now!"
Addison Montgomery didn't wait for a drape. She slathered an entire bottle of cold yellow Betadine across Izzie’s massive, rock-hard abdomen, grabbed the ultrasound probe from the rolling cart, and slammed it against the suprapubic crest.
The monitor flickered.
A sound came through the speaker.
It was not the rapid, galloping freight train of a healthy third-trimester infant.
It was a slow, dying drag.
*Thump... thump... thump...*
"Heart rate is fifty," Addison said, her voice dropping into a terrifying, icy calm that made the room freeze. "Severe prolonged deceleration. There's a retroplacental hematoma covering over sixty percent of the posterior wall. The placenta has completely detached. The baby is entirely anoxic."
"She’s seizing again!" Bailey yelled from the head of the bed.
Izzie’s body arched violently off the gurney, her spine bowing, her heels drumming against the mattress in a brutal, tonic-clonic convulsion.
"Four of magnesium IV push!" Webber roared, holding her shoulders down against the board. "Get her paralyzed! Etomidate and sux! We have to tube her now!"
"Addison, the OR is prepped on four!" an intern shouted.
"We don't have four minutes!" Addison screamed, her eyes flashing behind her protective glasses. "The mother is stroking out and the baby has zero oxygen reserve! We do a crash section in the bay! Ten blade! *Now!*"
"No!" George cried from behind the tape line, his hands grabbing the crash rail so hard the metal groaned. "Izzie! Izzie!"
Alex didn't scream.
Alex broke.
He lunged past the yellow line, knocking an IV pole to the floor with a concussive crash, shoving an emergency resident out of his way until he reached the left side of the gurney. He grabbed Izzie’s limp, cold hand between both of his scarred palms, bringing it to his mouth, kissing her fingers with a ferocious, desperate violence.
"Karev, get out!" Webber ordered, sliding the plastic breathing tube between her paralyzed vocal cords.
"I’m not leaving her!" Alex roared, his dark eyes wide, wild, and streaming with hot, furious tears. He leaned straight over Izzie’s face, his lips inches from her ear, ignoring the blood, the vomit, and the screaming monitors. "Izzie! Stevens! You listen to me! You look at me right now!"
Through the chemical fog of the paralytics, through the blinding, explosive pressure in her skull, Izzie’s left eyelid twitched.
Her gaze, unfocused and cloudy with death, drifted toward the sound of his voice.
"You don't get to leave," Alex wept, his voice cracking into jagged, broken pieces against her skin. "I’m a stray dog, Iz! I don't know how to live without you! You and George made me a father! You made me a human being! You fight for this! You breathe for me, Stevens! *Breathe!*"
Izzie’s fingers—cold, limp, slick with sweat—gave a single, microscopic flutter against his palm.
"Time of incision: fourteen-forty-eight," Bailey called out.
With one brutal, practiced sweep of the scalpel, Addison Montgomery sliced Izzie’s abdomen open from the navel to the pubic bone.
Layers of skin and yellow adipose tissue parted like cloth. The rectus fascia gave way under the steel, exposing the dark, purplish-black wall of the uterus, engorged and bulging with concealed hemorrhage.
"Suction!" Addison barked, her forearms already buried in the incision. "She’s bleeding from everywhere! Her platelets are completely gone! Hemabate on deck! Karev, keep pressure on her hand!"
George stumbled to the other side of the bed, his face drenched in sweat and tears, his hand finding Izzie’s other wrist. He bowed his head against her shoulder, his lips moving against her damp collarbone in a desperate, ragged prayer.
"Blessed Mother, holy Mary," George choked out, his voice shaking with the terrified faith of a little boy from Tacoma. "Take my hands. Take my career. Take whatever you want from me, but leave her here. Leave them both here."
"I have the head," Addison shouted, her gloves slick with crimson clots. "He’s wedged deep in the pelvis. Fundal pressure! Bailey, push down!"
Bailey slammed both of her forearms against the top of Izzie’s upper abdomen, shoving down with all her weight.
With a wet, tearing sound, the infant was delivered into the cold, glaring light of the trauma bay.
The room seemed to drop into a vacuum.
The baby was small, completely limp, and blue as slate.
His head flopped back against Addison’s gloved wrist, his arms hanging like damp cloth, his chest silent and sunken.
There was no cry. No breath. No movement.
"Clamp and cut," Addison ordered, severing the cord. "Robbins! Take him!"
Arizona Robbins snatched the child in a pre-warmed blue towel, sprinting across the bay to the radiant warmer station in the corner.
"Heart rate is under thirty!" Robbins called out, her hands moving with frantic, machine-like speed. "No respiratory effort! Starting positive pressure ventilation with one-hundred percent oxygen! Karev, get over here!"
"Her uterus isn't contracting!" Bailey yelled from the bed, her hands deep inside Izzie’s open pelvis. "Uterine atony! She’s dumping blood into the drapes! Four units of FFP! Where is that rapid infuser?"
"George," Alex gasped, his eyes darting wildly between Izzie’s blood-soaked gurney and the silent blue baby in the corner. His chest was heaving so hard he couldn't pull air into his lungs.
George looked at him.
In that single, crystalline second, the trembling intern vanished. The fear that had haunted George O’Malley since the day his father died was burned away by pure, unadulterated purpose.
George shoved Alex hard toward the warmer.
"Save our son, Alex!" George commanded, his voice ringing with absolute, unbreakable authority. "Go! I’m staying with Izzie! I swear to God, she won't die on my watch! *Go!*"
Alex turned and ran to the warmer.
He dropped onto his knees beside Robbins, his massive hands trembling as he grabbed the tiny neonatal stethoscope and pressed the bell against the infant’s narrow, rib-banded chest.
*Thump... thump...*
Twenty-four beats per minute.
"He's dying, Arizona," Alex sobbed, tears splashing onto the sterile towel. "He’s dying."
"I’m intubating," Robbins said, sliding the laryngoscope blade past the tiny jaw. "Give me a two-point-five tube! Suction the cords!"
Alex snatched the thin plastic tube, his surgeon’s hands locking into steady, desperate precision despite the violent tremors in his arms. He guided the tube into Robbins’ fingers.