Just Do It!

I used to love to write...maybe it was because I was younger, less jaded, and so passionate about things I thought I knew a lot about; maybe it was because it organized the myriad of thoughts buzzing around my over-occupied mind; and a little, well maybe just a little more than a little, a few people, including one very special professor, told me I did it rather well. For the past couple of years though, I have done very little writing. Burnt-out maybe? Overloaded with work and stressful life changes? Probably.

Then I met my friend C.

C. is a young woman almost half my age, but more my equal than anyone my own age I know. A woman with a passion for many of the things I also love, a woman with an amazing future, and a huge contribution to make to the world that I'm looking forward to watching unfold.

C. and I run loosely in the same circles...but they're circles that I mostly float around the periphery of because for the past three years I've immersed myself in my job and my home-life; I managed to keep abreast of what was going on in the field by lurking on chatboards and email lists, occasionally posting to them, and the occasional email or telephone call to or from friends and colleagues I had for too long neglected in my tunnel-visioned life.

It's taken me most of my life to come to the conclusion that there are very few coincidences. I always used to hate it when people would say "Everything Happens for a Reason". Bullshit (sorry, but that's the way I always internally responded to that drivel); I mean, the world can be a pretty rotten place. People we love die, friends drift away, marriages fall apart...does someone want to give me a reason this happened?????, I would think (or say outright if the mood struck), when something particularly horrible happened to me or a friend or aquaintence....; but what I've slowly come to believe is, that no matter how painful a life event may be, no matter how purposeless it seems, if we're emotionally healthy enough to ride it out, we can eventually give meaning to that pain. So, I still don't believe that "Everything Happens for a Reason"...but I do believe I can learn from whatever happens to me, good or bad...if I give it enough time for the pain to dissipate a little, for the emotional wounds to heal a little, for the scars of cynicism and disappointment to soften a little...and if I just quit struggling to figure out "why" something has happened, and to just accept that it has, and accept that this is going to hurt...maybe for a long time...but I will somehow get through it.

So how in the world does that philosophical soliloquy relate to meeting C., and how does meeting C. relate to my deciding to start writing again, by just putting something, anything, down on paper (or the computer)? Well, it's a long story; but I'm going to try to give you (whoever the "you" is that I'm writing to...I'm still a little ambivalent about blogs...more about that in my next post) the "Readers Digest" version...

Eighteen (eighteeen!...God, how did that happen?) years ago the first big tragedy (maybe the only one, because I tend to overdramatize a lot) of my life occurred. My firstborn infant son died at the age of three weeks after surgery to correct a heart defect. At the time, I though I'd absolutely die from the pain of that loss; but I didn't. And as I slowly emerged from the days and weeks of grief I crawled through in the months after his death, I began realize I had been given a gift from this precious "lost" child. I had loved being pregnant. I was overwhelmed with the sheer power of giving birth to him; I was overwhelmed with the immediate love I felt as I cradled him close and kissed his little face; he made me realize just how much I would love being a mother; and, as time went on, I found my my other calling...one that I might have ignored had I not crossed paths with this precious little soul.

At the time, I was a 30-year old mid-level manager at an insurance company, teaching mostly 20-somethings how to process medical claims. I had done fairly well for myself, but I was bored...B-O-R-E-D. I had gotten away from my initial goal of going to medical school, and, I was getting a lot of "rubs" from my superiors about how "smart" and "talented" I was,; so I, with overinflated ego, decided to go back to college on a premedical track. I got pregnant at the end of my first year, three weeks before I was to sit for the MCATS. Early pregnancy and I did not get along too well, I was exhausted most of the time, so I decided to sit out the testing until after the baby was born. After all, I was planning to quit my job and return to school full time then, and would have lots of flexibility (because...babies couldn't take up that much time, now could they?...Oh, the ignorance of youth). Well, second trimester things felt a lot better, I reveled in decorating the nursery, buying all manner of "crucial" baby equipment, embraced my growing belly and the attention of prospective grandparents, and friends who doted on me with showers, casseroles, and offers to clean my house during my "confinement"; and then Jonathan came tumbling into the world, and after a beautiful birth, and wonderful first two days of life, he tumbled into the pediatric intensive care surgical unit of our local children's hospital, and I began, for the first time in my life, to become an adult...and I was only on the first step, having had that extended adolescence that we children of the Seventies are so famous for.

Well, despite the utter mental and emotional chaos of those three weeks of Jonathan's life, I was aware enough to notice what was going on around the pediatric SICU. The nurses were incredible. I was fascinated watching them manipulate the lines and monitors, start IVs, change dressings, comfort the babies, comfort their families, interpret test results, act fast when a baby was starting to fail, and have everything prepared when the attending surgeons would strut through giving orders for things the nurses had already anticipated. These men and women were hands on. Each morning the residents would shuffle through, examine all of the babies, make copius notes on charts, and take their daily beating from the attendings. The ones who seemed to fare better were the ones who treated the nurses with respect. The nurses would give them tips on how to survive the grilling, educate them on what was going with each complicated case. The ones who dismissed the nurses with that "Me Doctor, You Nurse" attitude got nada...and they were the ones who got tortured the most during morning rounds by the attendings. Each morning and each evening they would glide through the unit and disappear again, leaving the nurses in charge of the precious little souls; and I came to realize that, if I got into medical school and went through with it, I would always regret it. I was a nurse at heart. Ok, so I don't make nearly as much money, or get nearly the respect that a physician gets; but I love what I do, and that's what counts.

So, three years, two babies, and one marriage later I went back to school...managed to claw my way into and through the college of nursing, and at the ripe old age of 40 I graduated with my BSN. During school I found my "niche" in courses that dealt with women's issues, and I was introduced to the profession of midwifery. I got involved with the local direct entry midwives in town, and through them met many women who were involved in one way or the other in caring for childbearing women. When I graduated, I went to work as soon as I could in Labor and Delivery, hoping to return to school someday to get a Master's in Nurse Midwifery; as I became immersed in trying to survive as a new nurse, and a newly single mother, I drifted away from daily contact with my college community, but I kept in touch with them over the phone and internet; and every now and then I'd see a post from a doula named C., and they were always thoughtful, insightful posts. Several years after that, I walked into work one night on the new unit I had just started on two months before, and the Charge nurse handed me a chart , rolled her eye and deadpanned "Birthplan. Doula. You're the "Earthy-Birthy" type, they're all yours. Let me know when they're ready for their C-section", snickered, and walked away. I muttered and bitched all the way down the hall, walked into the room expecting to see the usual arrangement of I.V, epidural pump, beeping monitors and sleeping laboring mother, but instead I saw a beautiful young woman sitting on a low "birth stool", arms wrapped around her husband who was kneeling in front of her, and a slender young woman with short, sandy hair, down on her haunches behind the woman, talking softly into her ear, massaging her back, encouraging her, reassuring her husband, and soothing her lovingly through every powerful contraction that swelled through her body. C. literally loved that woman and her husband through a long and painful labor, to its triumphant climax of the birth of a precious baby girl who went immediately to the breast, latched on securely and stayed there with C.'s gentle, confident, non-intrusive assistance. No IV. No epidural. A laboring mother that moved, moaned and swayed through her birth. A baby that went to the breast as if she had been doing it all her life (she had!). I was overwhelmed. After three years of working Labor and Delivery, I was finally beginning to accept what was in the beginning to me, a stunning and disappointing conglomeration of elective inductions, scheduled cesareans, and medically managed "painless" via almost universal use of the epidural, births. I had long since decided that becoming a Nurse Midwife was out of the question, because you couldn't buy a position as one in this major-medical-school-physician-controlled city, and I couldn't move to another city or state, thanks, unless I were willing to give up custody of my two sons to their father. I wasn't. In three years, this was the very first unmedicated, "natural" birth I had seen! C-section, my ass! Take that, Charge-nurse biotch!

So, I had become pretty disillusioned with the world of birthing as accomplished in the 21st century. But when I met C., that began to change. She and I soon discovered, during the course of this lovely birth, that we were indeed the same women who had corresponded sporadically on an email list related to birthing issues. We planned to meet for lunch to get to know each other better, and that lunch turned in to a three-hour gabfest that would have gone on for hours more had we both not needed to get back to our "real lives". Our friendship has grown over the past year (two years?) facilitated by late-night phone calls to discuss one or the other's frustration with some of the outrageous behaviors of certain physicians, nurses, and yes, even midwives, long, "talky" lunches where we shared our lives and passion for our work, our kids (my teen boys, her pre schoolers and teen stepdaughters), my remarriage, her enrollment in college, and her realization that she was "smart" (make that brilliant), her evolution to wanting to study nurse midwifery to, "Hell, I don't want to take orders, I want to give them...the right ones...and I don't want to give up my patients if they truly need high-risk care or a c-section...I'll go to medical school!" And she will, I'm convinced of it. She's gonna be a true, "Midwife with a Knife". And I want to be the first person on her staff (if I don't croak first). C. has refreshed my hope that birth can be more than a darkened labor room that becomes a garishly lit sub-surgical suite with its beeping monitors and pumps. She's reignited my passion; She's given me tips on how to get babies to turn from posterior to anterior and avoid an almost certain c-section for their mother; she's helped me reframe some of my observations of women during labor; she's introduced me to other women involved in the field, she's referred me to books, blogs, and all manner of information that I suck up like water. C. and I are never at a loss for words when we get together.

And C. has a blog. So, I decided, well, if she has time for a blog, what with school, work, husband and kids, then maybe I should start one...that would at least get me writing again, even in an amateurish way. I've got to kick this "block" I've let fester for far too long...and, as whoever might torture themselves by wading their way through this first psuedopsychotic ramble of mine might notice, I think you can agree...

It worked.