The professor guides my right hand onto the full-term abdomen, placing the obstetrical stethoscope diaphragm right over where he wants it. The earpieces press hard against the insides of my ears, hurting: I'm not yet used to wearing this instrument. I listen intently, with the teacher looking at my face, enquiringly.
Shutting my eyes and concentrating hard, I try, amidst the muted sounds of road traffic, to hear. All I hear is a hushed hum — a dull static drone: Shh! — come on, focus, listen.
Suddenly, like a miracle, I learn the art of listening. As if from miles away, dull at first, then clearly, is the distant muted tick-tick, tick-tick, tick-tick — the heartbeat sounds of the unborn baby. Ensheathed and wrapped in layers of muscle and floating within its private pool of amniotic fluid — the in-utero third-trimester fetus. I am in rapt attention, afraid to move for fear of losing the magical sound — the pulsations of a tiny heart, receiving maternal blood, and then pumping it on into its own fetal circulation.
By the time I remember to open my eyes, the professor has moved on to the next patient. I continue holding the diaphragm against the abdomen of the young first time mother-to-be: I remove the hurting earplugs. I am so euphoric that I have, for my first time ever, heard the fetal heart sound, that I do something else. I nod my head toward the woman I am examining and pass on the twin tubes with earplugs toward her, urging her to put them on.
She looks puzzled. Using only gesture and mime, I get across to her that, if she wants, she can hear her own baby. She smiles and nods tentatively. I put an index finger up against my own lips to signify “silence.” She nods.
It took a minute or two, then I see the most radiant of smiles a person can ever see. The young woman beams, radiating a thousand watts. Her eyes widen and she shakes her head, incredulous. She clutches on to the metal tubes, pressing them harder against her ears, quivering, afraid of losing the aural ripples from her insides — her own baby's heart, pulsing with the kinetics of life. A tiny cardiac pump that will continue, relentlessly, to contract and expand, through a lifetime.
It has been years now since I heard that faint, yet distinct beat at a free government hospital for indigent people. Where that woman is, or what happened to her newborn, I do not know. But that episode is etched indelibly in my memory. I remember even today how, for one brief interval of time, I and an illiterate, malnourished young mother-in-the-making stole a private moment to share the thrill of a new heartbeat.