Tuesday afternoon

I wake up at one. The sun's shining. I lie awake, not asleep but with my mind empty.

Abruptions are terrifying. One minute, a pregnant mum is clearing the table, settling bickering, yelling at her kids to brush their teeth. The next, she's semi-conscious with a blood pressure of seventy.

I got the call and ran - jeans, bag, oh where are the keys - and made it to the operating theatre two minutes before baby was dragged from a uterus full of blood. Is that a pulse? CPR, lines, fluids, adrenaline, blood, new lines, more adrenaline. We get a heart rate, get back to the nursery.

And then the night begins.

Last night, I witnessed a team coalesce and fight for two lives. We emptied the blood bank and the contents of every drawer. My two shining colleagues with whom the vigil passed kept going longer than I - into the belly of the jet and on to the South. This little baby isn't destined to stay with us long - but he has now been delivered to a shiny white hospital two thousand kilometres away, who can do tests and talk to his parents and help them make decisions they could never imagine.

And us? We were delivered into daylight. Into stupefying sun and the scraps of dinner and the emptiness of sleep.

And the unrecognised joy of simply keeping going.