A 4mo baby in a hospital room suffers respiratory distress, and at this point. has no pulse. The whole room is bustling, everyone has a job to do and they are not necessarily rushing but still working swiftly because seconds matter.
The heart rhythm eventually degrades to asystole, and the trauma specialist starts doing chest compressions. She uses only two fingers on the baby's chest, which is not bigger than her whole hand; his body seems so fragile, especially now. She barely exerts any pressure, and it would almost be an effortless routine were it not for the circumstances. But she is sweating, completely focused on what she is doing and does her job with precision, even while she has to glance at her watch to keep from losing sense of time as her own heart starts to beat faster.
I'm wracking my brain trying to find an adverb that describes the nuance of this situation perfectly in one word, but nothing I've come up with has given me that "Oh I got it!" you get after the word that was on the tip of your tongue comes to mind. (In my case it's been at the back of my head for a few days...)
I included extended context that (almost) evoked this word in my head in the hopes that it succeeds in someone else's but to put it as determinately as I can, I guess it would mean gently, or carefully controlling one's actions so as not to damage something easily broken, but intently and purposefully.
For other situations, it could be used to describe how someone would work on restoring an irreplaceable work of art, or a bomb technician working to deactivate an explosive device, but not, for example, someone being careful not to make a sound as she sneaks back into the house and upstairs to her room after coming home late to avoid being detected by her parents.
Some words that keep popping up in my head are:
tenderly
gingerly
meticulously
precisely
attentively
tenuously
tentatively
Some of these are sorta what I'm looking for, but I feel like theres a better one, and some of these only capture part of the meaning of what I'm trying to say.
P.S. I am almost sure the word I'm thinking of exists, but, and this is a problem I keep running into recently, it might not be an English word 😬. I'm bilingual, but I've lost proficiency in my mother language over years of its disuse, and now, sometimes I have this "word/idiom on the tip of my tongue that would perfectly capture the meaning of whatever" moment that would be resolved maybe the next week, but only for me to find that I had been thinking of a word/idiom in Korean that doesn't have a perfect English equivalent. So sorry if this is the case and I am wasting your time, but any help would be appreciated.
