What Amish Women Are Told to Do When the Bleeding Will Not Stop — I Almost Did Not Survive My Own An

The blue cloth was already soaked through. I could feel it in my palm — heavy, warm, the way a cloth gets when it has taken everything it can hold — and I pressed harder anyway, because pressing was the only thing I knew to do. The room smelled of iron and tallow and the particular animal smell of a body working past its own limit. The lantern on the shelf threw orange light across the quilt, across the woman's face, which had gone the gray-white color that I had learned, over 22 years of sitting at these bedsides, to be afraid of. Her husband was standing in the doorway with his hat still on his head. He had run in from the barn and had not thought to remove it. He said, "Is she going to be all right?"