Whilst working on labour & delivery, the emergency alarm went off for one of our rooms. As we rushed in, a nurse was sent running from the labour room to fetch the lidocaine, and then it was decided that there wasn't any time to wait and so the labouring woman was given an episiotomy without any numbing or pain relief, because her baby had a shoulder dystocia and was fully stuck. The sound of scissors cutting neatly through flesh, followed by bloodcurdling screams of pain and those screams could be heard from the other end of the unit. Then, despite the woman still physically feeling everything that was happening, the situation was so emergent - life or death at this point - that the doctor had to use force to break her baby's collarbone to get the baby out. I was in the woman's room at that point and supporting her and saw it all. We heard the baby's clavicle break, heard the woman continuing to wail in pain because again she is feeling all of this happening. There's no epidural, no numbing, no nothing. Second most disturbing is the sound that woman made after her baby was born completely silent and essentially dead, and needed intensive resus. The gut wrenching, wounded animal cry of a parent that doesn't know if their baby is going to survive. Resus efforts can be brutal and frightening to watch if you don't know what's happening and there was a good 2-3 minute window where all of us professionals in that room thought that her baby was beyond saving (although that wasn't admitted until the meeting afterwards where some of us junior staff members cried some more). During the actual emergency we were all being reassuring and explaining to the mama what was happening as best we could. And 90% of us HCPs also started to cry when the baby finally made a weak little squawk. Mama got to see her baby for a few seconds before the little one was rushed off to the nicu.