chapter 1 (cont.)

     Clair�s life ended at the moment her baby�s began. He came out with her innards entangled around his body. After him, blood flowed from her at the pace and sound of a babbling brook, red with the breath of her life. Her baby had taken away her strength, her will, and then herself.

     The nurses surrounding her bed saw Clair�s skin turn dull as life exited her body. Everyone in the delivery room heard her last long breath; it chilled the atmosphere. They all felt it�the ultimate sacrifice. She had reached her end by giving a new life beginning.

     Dr. Rudison looked at the clock on the delivery room wall and pronounced Clair�s official time of death. A nurse checked her vital signs and recorded the time of her death, and with the same pen in motion she recorded the baby�s birth.

     No sooner than the doctor turned back to the baby, he called out for assistance in ceasing Clair�s hemorrhaging. An intern immediately raced to his side until he could once again manage on his own.

     With the rage of blood under control, Dr. Rudison�s eyes grew wide when he saw that the baby�s entanglement was his mother�s intestines and umbilical cord, pinning bits of her various organs to his body.

     The doctor summoned his senior intern Josh to manually operate the digital med-cam. There was no way he could describe what he saw to the medical community with the same shocking effect of seeing it first-hand.

     Josh unlatched the overseeing camera from its tripod and began panning and zooming while Dr. Rudison rotated the baby like he was inspecting a rare diamond. What may have been a gruesome sight to the layman�s eye was like a newly discovered archaeological find to the doctor and his beleaguered intern.

     Dr. Rudison took his time untangling the baby trying to determine how he�d managed to get himself snarled. The doctor�s extensive top-notch education and twenty-five years in medicine dictated that such a predicament was not physiologically possible�a zero percent probability�thoroughly contradicting what he saw with his own eyes.

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