“ADMIT BABY” flashed on the incubator, and it was the most bewildering thing, because the baby in question had not yet come.
A woman laid in the hospital bed, legs wide, expression unreadable. The moon-dome of her belly rose through her gown. Her husband stood still and quiet to her left. Far more relaxed was the nurse on her other side, who would glance at the vitals monitor and then around the room and occasionally at Mom-to-be, offering her a reassuring smile. Today was to be both ordinary and extraordinary. While the nurse had just come to work her thousandth shift, the couple that entered the room a few hours prior would exit through the same door as a family forever changed. Anticipation and awe burgeoned in me.
“I think she’s a girl,” remarked the nurse. “Because she’s taking her sweet time to get ready in there.” That got a genuine laugh out of Mom.
As contractions began to increase in frequency, the nurse guided Mom with a competence both steady and tender. “Deep breath and then exhale and PUSH,” 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10 three times over and then relax, she directed her, and that is how I breathed too. I had been entrusted with the great task of supporting one of Mom’s legs, and I swore to myself I’d hold that leg as best I could.
With the baby’s first cries, tears of my own welled up and seeped into the edge of my mask. A new voice had made its very first utterance, distressed, guttural, and pure. Soul and spirit and body all pint-sized and frog-like in an instant joined the rest of us in light and air.
Mom, on the other hand, never cried out in the whole course of the labor. I marveled at the epidural which had her laying serene and glowing with her son on her chest in the aftermath while two obstetricians wrangled sutures between her legs. This was the power of anesthesia over a second degree perineal tear and the oxytocin-soaked transcendence of first-time motherhood.
I too could deliver a baby one day, I thought. But would I be wearing a hospital gown or a white coat? Of late, I have become especially captivated by little toes and little focused bright wet eyes and little plush porcelain wrist folds. I am on the cusp of my clinical rotations and what I expect will be a time of sweeping professional and personal transformation; before long, I will be a doctor, a vocation I come into with great joy. Yet at the same time, I find myself more than ever struck by the idea that nurturing a child might provide both parent and young one a glimpse of heaven by the giving and receiving of unconditional love. So parallel dreams burgeon in me, and I worry whether they both have enough space to flourish in full.
I have always found it a bit curious and a bit maddening that people cannot perfectly predict what they will want or what they are meant to do years down the line, and yet prudence demands that we make plans. I think there is beauty, and more than that, necessity in how uncertainty invites us to rise to the occasion with faith. That said, part of me does wish in the narrow-minded doldrums of being premed that I had the foresight to seriously consider what implications a career in medicine might have for motherhood and vice versa. Such concerns might have gotten lost in the looming shadows of the MCAT and what I should eat for lunch the next day.
Not that these paths are incompatible. I cherish the example of the many people who are both physicians and mothers that declare with their lives it is possible to do both. An unsurprising theme recurs in their accounts of their experiences: indeed it is possible, but it requires sacrifice and compromise in good measure. I consider the prospect of following a similar path with a mixture of trepidation and hope. I never regretted my decision to go to medical school for a second. I feel certain it is right for me to be here to grow in my capacity to care well. It just feels complicated.
It’s probably a lie that my desire for family means I will be less of a physician. And it’s probably a lie that if I do have children of my own one day, that my passions for advancing compassion and equity and human rights and respect of the imago dei through medicine must necessarily contract. But to be honest, sometimes I am not sure. One issue is that neither this profession nor this society are set up to support women well through motherhood. We need to do much better.
As of today, though, I am only twenty-two, only in my second year of school, unmarried, and far from having children. I’ll start my clerkships in the new year and learn a ton more about myself and my giftings and callings and weaknesses. I will do my best to fulfill my responsibilities of the moment to the best of my ability, and I will do my best to welcome whatever is to come tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after.
—
After the delivery, I gave the family my earnest congratulations and returned to the doctors’ workstation in a haze. I was sure that I had borne witness to something of the supernatural. So I gushed and gushed, to the residents’ bemusement.
I had never seen a newborn prior to that day, and the fine taper of the child’s skull enthralled me. Everything about him did, but that in particular. How lovely that bones are soft when they need to be soft and hard when they need to be hard.
13 For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
15 My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place,
when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
16 Your eyes saw my unformed body;
all the days ordained for me were written in your book
before one of them came to be.
17 How precious to me are your thoughts, God!
How vast is the sum of them!
18 Were I to count them,
they would outnumber the grains of sand—
when I awake, I am still with you.
—Psalm 139
Carolyn Chow is an MS2 at the Perelman School of Medicine.
Image by Yuchen Chen, an MS2 at the Perelman School of Medicine, and Andy Revels, a CDY6 at the Perelman School of Medicine.
