In the wee small hours of March 4, 1997, a 10 pound, 8 ounce baby boy named Christopher was delivered by his mother into my gloved hands. Earlier that evening I witnessed two Cesarean sections and assisted at three other vaginal births. I was fourteen.
I had joined the Explorers program as a way to look into a profession as a physician, and did three rotations: oncology, neonatology, and obstetrics/gynecology. I was initially planning to do a pediatrics rotation at the end but instead extended my OB/GYN rotation because it was so great.
My oncology rotation was, not unsurprisingly, very emotionally difficult. The oncologist I shadowed was the kindest of men, good with his patients and a truly caring physician. I attended appointments of people in remission and people who were newly diagnosed, mostly elderly, and I sat with a myriad of patients while they received chemotherapy. Since I shadowed him once a week on the same day, I really got to know the patients with whom we were working, which I loved. However, the first time a patient wasn’t there because they had passed away in the intervening time since my last visit, I knew that oncology wasn’t for me. I just kept thinking about that patient’s family – he always showed me pictures of his grandchildren and told me stories about how great his kids were, so I knew there were many heartbroken people out there. And he was only one of the many patients I had gotten to know. It was just too hard.
So after spending time dealing with cancer, I decided to go to the other extreme: helping to heal babies. I worked with a neonatologist in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Most of the babies we worked with were born prematurely or were multiples, or both. There was one little girl named Amber who had weighed less than a pound at birth; I was there when her parents were told that she was breathing on her own without any supplemental oxygen: pure joy. There was a set of triplets, and I was there when their parents were told they could take two of them home: bittersweet. And then there was a little guy who wasn’t doing well at all and I was there when the doctor recommended to his parents that he be taken off of life support: horrific. I am choking up even now just writing about it. Being part of telling parents that their son was going to die? It was one of the worst moments of my life. But it was an important one, too, because (as my supervising physician explained) joy and heartbreak come in equal measure in medicine. If the kind of heartbreak in neonatology was not something I could handle, then I needed to look elsewhere.
For my next rotation I looked for middle ground: obstetrics and gynecology fit the bill. And what I found astounded me. I loved it. From routine well-woman exams and Pap smears to ultrasounds and pregnancy checkups, everything about it was fascinating to me. That was just the day-to-day stuff, too. Once Dr. D. took me over to the hospital for surgeries and deliveries, I was done for. I thought the whole blood thing was going to be an issue but it really wasn’t at all. Except maybe for while I was watching my first Cesarean and the anesthesiologist told me I looked pale and I should probably sit down (although I maintain he just didn’t know I was that pale all the time). But every day after watching surgeries and assisting with deliveries, I pretty much ran on adrenaline for the next 24 hours. There was nothing about it that I didn’t adore. After shadowing Dr. D., and doing an internship with him during my senior year, I thought anything related to obstetrics or gynecology was super interesting; when I had an ovarian dermoid cyst removed in an emergency surgery years later, I was genuinely upset that they’d already sent the cyst to the lab without me getting to see it first, and my surgeon thought I was weird.
And it all started sixteen years ago today. Sixteen years of delighting in the unbelievable power of women and their miraculous bodies. Sixteen years and one hundred births so far (if I count Eli’s birth – his was lucky #100).
These days I don’t do any medical stuff anymore while I’m helping a woman in labor. I don’t monitor contractions (except with a stopwatch); I don’t do perineal stretching; I don’t read ultrasounds; I don’t do any postpartum stitching; I don’t catch babies. But each and every time I’m in a delivery room, even though I’m a support person and not a caregiver, I belong there. I have been blessed to find my calling and to be able to pursue it. There aren’t many people who can say that; I am forever grateful that I am one of them.
I’m especially grateful to Dr. D. for allowing me to fully participate in what he did and for taking the time to explain each and every thing so thoroughly. He has a very non-interventionist philosophy and many of the things he taught me (like birth without unnecessary intervention, delayed cord clamping and allowing different pushing positions) I just assumed were standard practice for OB/GYNs, but they weren’t – and aren’t. But his philosophy was ahead of its time.
He taught me so many things, from the importance of learning about obstetrics and gynecology to what a cancerous uterus looks like, from the importance of walking quickly when in a hospital to how to tell if a lump in a breast is fluid-filled or not. I can honestly say that I am who I am today because he took a chance on a high school freshman with a tremendous phobia of blood and showed me how to provide quality care to women even if – and perhaps especially if – there is blood involved.
I’m also grateful to Christopher’s mother for allowing me – a baby myself – to catch her baby and trusting me to not drop him, and to Christopher’s father for trying so desperately (albeit unsuccessfully) to hide his terror upon learning that I’d be catching the baby and for not kicking me in the face every time I went near his laboring wife. I hope that wherever they are today, as they hand over the car keys to their baby boy, that they remember his birth with fondness and pride and not a single regret.
The other person I am grateful to today is my friend Jesse. March 4 is his birthday, and in 1997, he let me go on and on to him about the glory and wonder of childbirth (“I thought I didn’t like blood, but there was so much blood and it didn’t bother me at all. Like, it was everywhere, and all over the floor, and all over me, but I didn’t care…”) without ever mentioning that I had forgotten it was his birthday. He didn’t even make faces at me or say, “How nice. Now please stop telling me about birth – I am a fifteen-year-old GUY. You’ll notice I said fifteen, because you may recall that today is my birthday…” He didn’t spoil my giddiness and listened with his whole heart to me talk about myself on a day that should have been about him. And when I remembered later that afternoon, he accepted my fervent apology and birthday wishes without a hint of rancor.
I really miss him.