No air.

"Code Blue, Post Partum, 3rd floor" the page repeated overhead.
We all looked at eachother, disbelieving. We were used to the pages for the code team to the ICU, CCU, Tele floor... But our own?
Should we go? Help out? Postpartum nurses aren't much for adrenaline rushes, our patients have specific reasons for coding and the team doesn't want to touch a pregnant lady or someone who has been recently pregnant with anything less than a 10-foot pole.
Alright, we go.
I wish I hadn't.
We took the elevator, expecting the best.
Should have taken the stairs.
We bolted down the dark hall, turned the corner and found the worst, the very worst.
Wish I had expected it.
We came upon a nurse fluttering around a crib with an oxygen mask. My ears roared. I ran through a checklist in my head.
Fumbled with a stethoscope. Wish she'd stop bagging so I could listen, I can't hear a heartbeat with her bagging.
I can't hear a heartbeat.
Babies frequently need a kickstart. They need a little oxygen, a little pressure to start the gradient shift that will mark the transition out of their previously watery existence.
They finally gasp, turn pink and cry a bit and we walk away.
They all finally gasp, eventually.
All of them.
Where's that heartbeat? I pause compressions, shifting my hands. Am I doing this right? Compress to 1/3 the diameter of the chest. 90 per minute or 120? Bagging too fast. Something about counting, but I can't remember, so I keep counting. I lose it at 100 and start again.
The NICU team arrives. Good someone else to do compressions.
Someone else want to do this? Because so far I'm failing.
Fumble with a stethoscope again. There's a cartoon that I remind myself of but I can't remember which one.
Can't think, keep compressing.
"Do you want to call this?"
What?
Call it?
You've only done two doses of epi. It's only been like 5 minutes.
12 minutes? It's been 12? I've been compressing the whole time. Bagging, compressing, keeping going...
He was a little cold, I guess.
Livido, already, mottled when I got there.
No heartbeat for at least 12 minutes.
"3:56am."
Gone. Long, long gone.
Isn't there more we can do? Other drugs? I took ACLS, can we give lidocaine? Atropine? ECG? I blinked and stopped. They extubated.
I blinked and thought of his parents. Who would tell them?
Who would say "I'm sorry, there was nothing we could do."?
He was dead when I got there. Tiny soul only 28 hours old, already gone. Long gone.
I'm sure they thought they were home free. Having negotiated the treacherous pregnancy and birth process, they were relieved and waiting to go home. Waiting to take their new son home to meet his brothers and sisters, his aunts and grandparents.
But now, they'd just have an empty crib. Empty booties, shirts carefully folded away.

"Do you want to call it?"
There is nothing in the world more tragic.
But sometimes, babies die.

I wandered slowly back downstairs. Thanked the ICU nurses for coming and sat, deer-in-the-headlights. I looked up the NRP guidelines, I'd done it right, it just didn't work.
I heard the story later that the baby had been tucked in the fluffy sheets with his dad. So proud, so happy to have his new son. Fell asleep with the new babe next to him and awoke to find no breaths, no heartbeat. We educate families on bed safety - no babies in the bed because they can get wrapped up in the soft sheets. Sleeping parents have rolled onto their children, unknowing. We educate for precisely this reason. I cannot imagine that father's horror.
The autopsy showed he'd died of suffocation.