Labor and delivery

Labor and delivery—what a ward. It’s the happiest and saddest place in the hospital. When things go right, a new person is welcomed into the world. When things go wrong, lives are devastated. Always, always, two healthy lives are at stake, hanging in the balance. Anything can happen to either at any moment. For the patient and her family, it’s one of the biggest days of their lives. For the physician, it’s another stressful, restless day or night.

I am not a mother. I do, however, have 27 years of personal experience with a mother’s love—my own. For 27 years, I have been on the receiving end of pure, undying, unconditional, unrequited, undeserved love—this is a mother’s love. I am awed, humbled, perplexed, overwhelmed by this love. If God’s love is more than a mother’s—and I know it is—my mind cannot even begin to fathom it. A topic for another time.

Flashback to a couple months ago. As a treat after two stress-filled weeks of labor and delivery, I treated myself to a pedicure to soothe my raw, blistered feet. The pedicurist, a friendly young woman with a heavy Vietnamese accent and perfect English, chatted me up. She asked me what I was reading, where I lived, where my family was from. I put my Case Files down and decided to have a human conversation for a change. I asked her where she lived, where she was from. She had arrived in Orange County just 9 months ago with her husband and two children, 4 and 5 years old. Why did she come, I wondered? She had a good job back in Vietnam, she told me. She was manager of a department of a prominent software company. I asked her why she didn’t apply for a similar job here? I did, she said. They’re not hiring people with no work experience. Apparently, her Vietnamese corporate experience didn’t count. So she went to beauty school and started doing pedicures and manicures full-time, 6 days a week. But again, I asked, if her family was doing so well in Vietnam, why did they give it all up to come here and start over? The education is better here, she said. I lost my opportunity, but my kids will find theirs here.

I wondered if her kids, who were probably now waiting for her to come home for dinner, could ever fully grasp what she had given up for them. Would they ever work hard enough at school to do justice to her sacrifice? To make her days full of scrubbing strangers’ calluses and painting flowers on their toes worth it? How could they possibly understand?

And what about me? Sure, my parents came to this country with residency positions already secured, ready to be molded into surgeons. They forged a new path purely for themselves, not for their parents or children. But sacrifices come in different packages that are no more and no less poignant for their differences. The force behind them is one and the same.

My mother always used to tell me that I could never love her the way she loves me. That it was virtually impossible for me to reciprocate her love. That I would only understand it when I had my own children. I hated hearing this, and always vowed that she was wrong. I couldn’t bear the thought of her being right, because the imbalance seemed so unfair. But after 27 years, I have come to realize that as much as it shames me to admit it, she’s right. A mother’s love is inexplicable, unmatched; deep and complex yet, at the same time, simple and naked.

I guess that’s one of the things that amazes me the most about labor and delivery. The raw humanity of hope, expectation, joy, love and pain are all mixed up together in those moments of laboring. There is the mother who in excruciating pain screams "voy a matar a mi bebe!"--(i'm going to kill my child!)--and is, minutes later, cooing happily at her newborn as we suture an angry perineal tear. The pregnant teenager who comes to the ER pathetic, crying and vomiting, and leaves days later, proud and strong, body language transformed by her ordeal. It's a mother's love: exquisitely simple and impenetrably deep, and bears testament to the incredible relationship between parent and child.

Brief musings on a weekend off

It’s a gorgeous sunny So Cal day today. The air is sweet and there’s a slight breeze. It’s perfect tennis weather, reminding me of the old summer days when I would wake up in the morning, swing my racket bag over my shoulder and mentally prepare myself for a day on the courts. It’s been years since my last official tennis match, but I still can’t step on a court without remembering the sweat, the nerves, the excitement, the churning stomach.

These days I get my kicks not with topsin, angles and deftly placed serves (or so I liked to think), but with battling disease. Now it’s a pager, a stethoscope and a scalpel (on a good OR day) replacing my racket. Now I fidget by popping my pager in and out of its holder on my hip rather than rearrange my strings between points. The smell of a fresh can of tennis balls is replaced by the odor of cauterized flesh. But the sweat, joy, devastation and nerves are all too familiar, and after years of being holed up with basic science textbooks, I revel in the nostalgia.