Obstetrics is interesting because it deals with very practical, very everyday sorts of things where people don't have to be sick in order to see you. Pregnant women and newborn babies, contraceptives and vitamins, PMS and psychotic women. In fact, I was reading a list describing PMS symptoms and found myself nodding my head with almost every point. The more I understand myself, the more it feels like I emote like a female, heavy flow or not.
Obstetricians are funny people too. A lot of them curse like surgeons (I mean sailors) and they're very expressive and dramatic. My senior attending had us in the back kitchen one day and was just "shooting the shit" with us students. She's a peppy, robust, energetic grandmother with a salty tongue that talks faster than I can breathe. We were chatting about different specialties in medicine and she told us about why she liked obstetrics and gynecology:
"Say you get this interesting case in internal medicine - a 78 year old lady or something - and you work your ass off to figure out what's wrong with her. You fix it and end up adding another two years to her life. She gets to see her grandson born, spend some time with her family, etc, etc, whatever before she dies. That's great; you just gave her two years that she wouldn't have had and that's a wonderful thing. But when I get a woman in labor with a bad complication - a cord prolapse or something - and I snatch that baby out and save it... I just saved 80 years of potential right there. I deliver another baby that day: 70 years. Hell, I'll even take 60 years. Who knows what that kid will be some day? Maybe I just delivered a Nobel Prize winner. If you're talking about bang for your buck, nothing can beat OB."
And then we had a baby born dead.
And another with shoulder dystocia and a withered arm.
And another with unexpected Down Syndrome.
The attending and I were talking about the baby with the withered arm, the one who barely escaped birth with his life, and she said to me, "You know, if I had just known... if I had just seen what was coming, I would have done anything to save that kid's arm. These guys, the residents, they sometimes forget what we're dealing with. That kid is gonna live with that withered arm for the rest of his life, and I wonder how I'll sleep at night thinking about what I could have done to stop it from happening..." She was silent for a while. I felt uncomfortable.
I have this urge to write something comforting, a little happy ending to these stories so we can all walk away from this entry with warm & fuzzy thoughts in our heads about chubby and smiling babies. But just like that
snap back to reality,
oops! there goes gravity
do not miss your chance to blow, cause
this opportunity comes once in a lifetime.
