Code Red in Maternity: An NHS Midwife’s Emergency Stories

Some colours you learn to live with.

Blue for calm. Green for the scrubs you pull on at 7.15am. Pink for the little hat they put on a newborn before anyone has even wiped the vernix off. Yellow for the plastic bags that say clinical waste – do not reuse.

And then there is red.

Not romance red. Not postbox red. Not the red of a Christmas jumper or a child’s wellington.

Code Red red.

In the NHS, a Code Red usually means fire. You hear it over the hospital tannoy and your body moves before your brain does. Code Red, labour ward, room four. Except sometimes there is no fire. Sometimes the red is coming from inside a person. A mother. A woman who walked into your care three hours ago laughing about how she was sure it was Braxton Hicks, and now the sheets are turning the colour of jam, and her partner is gripping the bed rail with both hands, and she looks at you like you are the last solid thing in a world that just tipped sideways.

I have been a midwife for fourteen years. I still do not get used to it.

This book is not a textbook. It is not a complaint about the NHS – though Lord knows the NHS has cracks you could lose a whole ambulance in. It is not a call to anything except maybe honesty. Because the truth is, we midwives tell each other the war stories in the break room over lukewarm tea and a biscuit that has been open too long. We laugh a bit too loud. We go back out. And we never quite tell the whole thing to anyone outside.

So here is the whole thing. Or as whole as I can make it.

Ten emergencies. Ten red lights. Some of them ended with two hearts beating. Some ended with one. Some ended with a silence that followed me home.

My name is Hollis. I work nights, mostly. I have delivered babies in lift lobbies, in car parks, once in the back of a taxi whose driver said he was never taking a fare to maternity again. I have put my hand inside a woman to push a baby’s head off a cord that had no pulse. I have watched a father learn that his child was gone before he ever heard a cry.

And I am still here. That is the part that surprises me most.

If you are pregnant, or planning to be, or anxious about birth – please keep reading, but know this: the stories here are the exceptions. The one-in-a-thousands. Most babies arrive with a shout and a squall and two pink feet kicking. Most mothers bleed the normal amount. Most Code Reds in maternity have nothing to do with fire.

But sometimes they do.

And when they do, you want to be with someone who knows the colour of no warning.

That someone is usually a midwife. And this is what it looks like from our side of the sheet.