Beginnings

Sometimes on a lazy Saturday morning, in addition to enjoying a cup of chocolate-flavored coffee and watching Saturday morning cartoons, I like to look at old family videos and albums, upload sepia-toned photos of ancestors, go through old letters and memorabilia, and reminisce a little bit.

This morning I was thinking about what happened when I was born.  It was a bit of a rough, early-ish birth.  Though I was relatively huge - over three pounds - by modern preemie standards, back in the early '70's in a Third World country, with me gasping for air and needing to be resuscitated on more than one occasion (pulmonary surfactant wouldn't be in clinical use until I was graduating from high school), things felt a little dicey for those involved.  In these VERY fuzzy pictures-of-pictures (above and below) I am already at the "feeder-and-grower" stage.

There's a happy follow-up story.  My mother once had lunch at a restaurant called Cafe Juanita, whose owner had gone into the restaurant business after decades in practice as an OB/gyn.  When the owner saw her name in the reservation book, he rushed to her table and said, "Doctora!" (My mom had been a pediatrician.)  "I was the OB resident who scrubbed in during your C-section!  You had a baby, girl, I remember.  Premature."

"She's now grown, married, with kids of her own," my mother told him.

Of course when I heard this story I had to see him for myself, this man who helped yank me from my mother's open womb on one of his weekends on-call.  On our last trip to the Philippines we visited his charming restaurant and got to meet him.  It was a thrill to think, "Wow, he was there the very first moment my physical being saw the light of day.  In fact, he helped make that moment happen!"

 

Happy long-term follow-up is such a blessing in medicine.  I bet he never thought he'd have his youngest patient - literally a fetus when we first met - come back to say hello!