A Good Birth by Anne Lyerly

Author:Anne Lyerly
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101609040
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2013-07-04T00:00:00+00:00

Connectedness to Health Care Professionals

I’ll admit, I’m friends—good friends—with some of the women who were once my patients. Making friends with patients is one of those things in medicine that feels and is often considered taboo. There are obvious reasons for this when romance is involved, but even when it’s not, cautions are raised about whether the imbalance of power and knowledge between doctors and patients makes their friendship impossible. I’ve always done my best to level the field on both counts, and have come to the conclusion that I’ve learned much more from the women I’ve cared for than they ever could have learned from me. I’m not sure whether that justifies my crossing fine lines, but it does make me feel that the eschewing of friendship where it’s arisen would be harder still to justify.

Emotions can overwhelm when it comes to birth, and just to function we doctors find ways to stiffen our upper lip—something I came to appreciate in the midst of the first birth I witnessed in medical school, during a pediatrics rotation. I was a student in the neonatal intensive care unit, and the pediatrics team was called to a woman’s birth in which meconium (dark green staining of amniotic fluid) had appeared, indicating that the baby was stressed in labor. The team’s job was to ensure that the child didn’t inhale the offending fluid with its first breath; my job as the quivering med student was to transport the baby from the birthing table to the nearby pediatricians. I was told to stand at the foot of the bed and hold my arms out straight in front of me, upon which a green cloth and (moments later) the slippery newborn were placed. But in the moments I saw the baby’s head emerge and felt its weight in my arms, my eyes filled up with tears and I could hardly see where to walk. “This,” I thought, “is not going to work. I’ve got to toughen up.”

Of course, I wasn’t connected in any way to the woman giving birth—I didn’t even know her name. But as I started to get to know my patients, negotiating—and, perhaps more to the point, containing the emotions that birth evokes—seemed critical to professional comportment, and I did my best for a while, figuring out at least how to contain tears.

I discovered, however, that it’s not so black-and-white. If the detached but competent physician is accepted as the norm in some areas of medicine, patients tell us that birth is a place in which closer connections are key. As mother of two Liz put it, “There’s a major difference in your relationship with your doctor between having some sort of illness and having this major life experience. It’s kind of like an intimate thing.”

I’m not sure I think that birth is as exceptional as Liz describes—medicine is full of intimacies. In surgery, we dip our hands into patients’ bodies; in diagnosing and treating medical illness, no doubt we touch bodies and lives and become a part of them.

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