Assume the Position: Memoirs of an Obstetrician Gynecologist (20 page)

     Our daughter loved the theater arts, so no surprise that she majored in this field in college, then headed to LA for fame, fortune, hard work, and waitressing.  While I considered the operating room my theater, I would never be caught on a real stage with real lights shining on me as she did.  Stage fright personified would be how best to describe it for me.   Although one on one, I do at times have a sense of the dramatic in me, as she quickly points out to me at times:  “And you wonder where I got it from” is how she puts it.  She played the piano and sang a beautiful love song to her husband on their wedding day in front of the crowd.   Today she is an actress with a steady salaried full time position in theater doing what she loves.  For us, we couldn’t be more proud of her for pursuing her dreams, and for producing a great grandson for us, the first of more, we hope.

     We took a respite for a while from the baby making business to get a handle on our changing and expanding lives. We moved into a larger home after a few years in a residential neighborhood with good primary schools, and decided to keep our kids in the public school system, a decision we never regretted.  Our sense of it was that if they were smart, capable students, they would shine no matter where they were, which proved to be true.  The kids participated in all kinds of after school and weekend activities which we attended regularly.  T Ball, boys’ baseball and girl’s softball games, swim meets, gymnastics and ice skating lessons, piano recitals, tennis, children’s theater performances, lacrosse, etc.

      In the early days before cell phones I carried a beeper that meant that it just went off, with no text message. So I would have to drive to a pay phone, call the answering service, then call the patient or the hospital, and return to the event whenever possible, only to go through the whole process all over again, sometimes minutes later.  One can understand then how excited I was when the first Motorola cell phone came out, for which I paid $2000.  I would have paid more just so I could sit and watch a baseball game at the field in peace.

     As it is with all children, so too was our youngest son Zachary a gift, or as he calls himself a “walk in the park”, compared to his older siblings.  By now we were experienced and at ease with parenting, and perhaps that had something to do with his personality.  But I just think he was a sweet kid from day one.  He was also very observant, and learned quickly what would get him in trouble just by watching his older siblings, both of whom adored him.  He enjoyed life, his home life, his siblings, his dogs, and his friends.  He had boundless energy that often bounced off the walls, resulting in calls from school, most of which got overlooked by his teachers because he was cute. As for his friends who were most important to him, here are their comments about his Dad “I was always very proud of the fact that my dad was a doctor, but when I explained to my friends what he did, it was often greeted with the predictable ‘Eww, your dad looks at vagina’s all day?’”   As hormones started to change a bit, their responses inevitably migrated to: ‘Cooool, your dad looks at vagina’s all day!’ Fortunately for me, I usually held the ultimate trump card against potential bullying since it was often their mom’s vaginas I was looking at in my office.

     As to what home life was like after a long day of work, his memories include:  “After a long day at the hospital, he often came home and jumped in to the kitchen, sometimes still in his scrubs, to help mom with dinner and dishes before retiring to the couch.  There, he would soon pass out from exhaustion while Jason, Katie and I took advantage of the situation and tortuously tickled his feet or plugged his nose to stop the snoring.”  Kids! 

     We certainly disrupted his emotional life in the summer between 8
th
and 9
th
grade, when we decided to sell our home in Phoenix after I retired and move away from all that he knew to the small mountain community of Telluride.  He was angry at us, and depressed for most of his first year in high school, although we knew it was a good move for him because not only was it a better high school, but also he would get individual attention in small classrooms, more so than had he stayed at his large high school in Central Phoenix. There were definite advantages for our son, however, in being the new guy on the block in a small class that had pretty much known each other since grade school.  It didn’t take long for girls to find him, or for him to make life friends.  He missed his lacrosse terribly, so his Mom took it upon herself to start what has turned out to be a very successful youth lacrosse program at Telluride high school that has long outlasted us there, a program that initially faced long odds of succeeding yet is thriving today. But my wife persisted because she knew how important it was for him.  He learned how to ice skate, not a huge sport in Phoenix as one might imagine, but eventually he skated well for the local high school ice hockey team.  He found his way onto the stage at the local opera house performing in school plays. In one he even dressed as a woman and belted out songs to the community.  When he graduated, he took some pride in being able to say he made it through high school without ever finishing a book cover to cover, which although perhaps true, certainly didn’t hold him back.  He pursued a successful undergraduate degree in Advertising in the Big Ten, has been gainfully employed in Chicago ever since, and is now well on his way to getting an MBA at night school while working during the day.  In the end, the move was a good one for him, as even he will now admit.

     I asked him for his thoughts about what it was like for him to grow up the son of an OB GYN physician.  He got to know me from a unique perspective, both at the end of my career and at the beginning of the next phase of my life.  “My dad has always said the reason he went in to Obstetrics was because it is one of the few medical practices that dealt primarily with happy occasions.  For the most part, childbirth is a joyous time for women and the overwhelming expectation is that all will go well and a healthy child will be welcomed in to the world.  However, when things go wrong, the delicate balance of life can be immediately shifted from elation to tragedy.  That fear must be a high motivator for all obstetricians, and, for my dad, I believe it metastasized to a pursuit of perfection and intense attention to detail; qualities that span far beyond his work.  He dedicated countless hours to preparing for all scenarios in a profession that leaves little margin for error; it must have been nearly impossible to turn off that part of his brain. Unless we had escaped to the mountains of Telluride, when my dad was practicing, he was never really able to build a clear buffer between his occupation and the rest of his life.  For better or worse, being an OBGYN doc defined him. No one will ever accuse my dad of being overly in-tune with his feelings, and I would deduce that the decades protecting himself from the nastier side of medicine greatly contribute to that.  Because there was always potential for tragedy and heartbreak in the medical profession, I imagine many docs perfect the ability to remove emotion from harsh situations.  I’m sure my dad put up a huge emotional shield at work; if he hadn’t, there likely would have been great potential for the dark-side of obstetrics to completely decimate his mental well-being. With that said, I’m sure many doctors deal with similar situations in far more destructive ways. Fortunately, there are many redeeming qualities he needed in the OR that translated positively to parenting.  Confidence, composure and the ability to clearly articulate any situation likely came in handy when dealing with three wily children.”

     He was right.  Compartmentalizing emotions and feelings was a necessary evil of being a physician.  Although I rarely showed it, I felt emotions every waking hour of every day.  It was impossible not to when exposed to raw emotions from patients every day.  There was a fine line to walk, honed after years of experience, between being empathetic and able to help patients through their given situation in life, and coming home daily an emotional, exhausted wreck.  I had my own family and life to be a part of, and I needed to keep myself in a zone where I could be a committed, loving parent and husband, and put the emotional trauma of the day somewhere else.  For my wife, a very emotional being, it required a lifelong effort to help me get in touch with my emotions; an effort that is ongoing to this day.  I am still working at it!

     From the time before our first son was born, my wife and I were dog people. We eventually wound up with the miniature Schnauzer breed.  When my family was spending the summer in Telluride Colorado and I was commuting back and forth to Phoenix, I took the occasion to see some newborn Schnauzer puppies.  But which one to choose?   I sat in the back yard of the breeder’s house and just watched them play.  The first one that came up to me, crawled up on my lap and licked my nose was the eventual winner.  Rosie, as she came to be called, chose me first.

     Several years later, when my children were young teenagers, we decided to mate Rosie with another purebred miniature Schnauzer, Sonny.  Sonny and his handler came over to our backyard on the appointed day as we all sat around the kitchen table to watch the big event.  For most of the first hour they danced around each other with no contact, until finally the handler went out and told Sonny to get to work.  He listened.  My kids called it rape, but it did result in a successful pregnancy for Rosie. It also gave us the opportunity to talk about sex, sexually transmitted diseases, and contraception.  After all, why not take advantage of the opportunity!  Several weeks later I took a pregnant Rosie into my office, laid her on her back for about ten seconds while I performed a quick ultrasound.  It looked like we were going to have a litter of six.

     We spent weeks preparing a delivery room for her in a small bathroom next to our bedroom where she slept in her dog bed.  I had string to tie the umbilical cords, hemostats to prevent bleeding after the cords were cut, towels, scissors, and anything else I could think of.  I had never assisted a dog in labor or birth, but I felt appropriately credentialed to carry it off.  One early morning my wife and I were awakened early to a strange noise. We jumped out of bed to go see what Rosie was up to.  When we opened the bathroom door, there she was sitting in her doggie bed surrounded by six nursing puppies.  There was not a drop of blood or placenta to be found anywhere.  She had a look of exhaustion, satisfaction and pride on her face.  I was dumbfounded.  How was it that a dog could do this on her own, deliver sextuplets, with an obstetrician in the next room, not awaken me or ask for help? What was it that I had been doing incorrectly all these years?   The puppies were the cutest and we loved them to death for the next two months.  We kept one, Lucy, who went on to live with us for the next 15 years.

     I delivered so many babies in a rapidly growing Phoenix, Arizona that I developed a strong desire for anonymity and privacy.  It was hard to go anywhere without a big ‘hello’ from someone and a  “do you remember when you delivered…” which I rarely did.  It was always difficult for me to go to the Price Club because it seemed everyone who worked there or shopped there was a patient.  So I began to seek out Nature more and take family trips and vacations to remote out of the way places where I could go unrecognized.   Once when skiing in Show Low, Arizona on the Apache reservation, we stopped to fill the car with gas in one of the most out of the way places anyone could ever be.  As the tank was filling I draped myself over the hood of the car and caught a few rays of sun before the long drive home.  ‘Hi Doc!!” came a loud shout of recognition and a big wave from someone driving by on the highway.  I was found once again!

     I was known as one of the few physicians in Arizona who didn’t golf.  Frankly, I didn’t have the time and preferred any down time with my family.  I was constantly driving back and forth to the hospital for deliveries, day and night, although it was only a short five-minute drive.  Vacation time was always a welcome respite.  Because we had a group practice and covered for each other when we were gone it was relatively easy to get away and leave the office behind.  After my wife and I had seen the Grand Canyon for the first time we both agreed that the only way to really appreciate it was from the Colorado River way down in the depths of the Canyon.

We signed up way in advance for a River Rafting trip since there was a wait and only so many people per year were allowed on the River.  When we got the call we had two kids at the time.  My parents had since retired to Arizona (they found out where Arizona was and loved it). We left the two little ones with them for eight days and disappeared into the depths of the Canyon with no way of communication to or from the outside world.  My parents never forgave us for that, accusing us of abandoning our children.  “And what would you do if something happened to them while you were down there?” my mother queried.  I told her we would find out about it when we came back.  Besides, it was much more likely something would happen to us than to them.  She wasn’t reassured. But there are just some things you only get to do once in life!