“You’re going on vacation?” I practically bolt out of my chair, at least as far as my swollen belly will allow me to move without first crashing into Dr. Goodkin’s desk.
Dr. Goodkin is my obstetrician; a kindly man, a fatherly figure, who has just calmly informed me that he is taking a few needed days off. It is three days before Sukkot. IT IS ALSO TWO DAYS BEFORE MY DUE DATE!
“Don’t panic, honey. I’ll be back, all rested, right after the weekend, ready to deliver your beautiful baby. Besides, there’s nothing cooking yet, so just don’t psych yourself into going into labor before I get back. Enjoy the holiday with your family. Relax. Remember, nobody gives birth on their due date.”
I repeat those words over and over like a prayer during the next two days. Don’t psych yourself…nobody gives birth…. In an unusual burst of energy I decorate our Sukkah three days before the Chag without even waiting for the kids to help. I shop and cook and clean and all the while I echo the mantra, don’t psych yourself.
Though I seem outwardly calm, inside I am a bundle of nerves. I know way too many horror stories about what happens when your doctor is away and some incompetent resident covers for him. My appendix almost burst one stormy New Year’s Day while I waited for the surgeon on call to show up from Connecticut. Besides, after all these years as his patient, Doctor G. knew me so well. He delivered my three other children and recognized my dislike of hospitals and my non-existent threshold for pain. After nine long months he had to be there for me now when I needed him the most. He promised!
“Don’t psych yourself,” is what I repeat once again at 2 a.m. Saturday morning when a bad stomach ache wakes me up from a restless sleep. Probably, just something I ate. I knew I shouldn’t go to sleep right after a heavy Shabbat meal, but I was so tired. And why did I eat the duck that I had already prepared for Sukkot? The holiday wasn’t until Sunday night? I deserved to suffer a little indigestion.
One hour later, I reluctantly tap my husband on the shoulder. “Hon, wake up. You’d better take the kids next door. It looks like some people really do give birth on their due dates.” Ready or not, we were going to have our baby and this time without Dr. Goodkin. “Hope he’s having a great time,” I mutter.
Getting to the hospital on Shabbat has its own set of difficulties. These we successfully surmount. Staying in the hospital on Shabbat, when your labor has stopped and you have no money, and you can’t use the phone and you are not allowed to eat anything but ice chips all day, and your husband is starving because he can eat but he is too embarrassed to tell anyone that he’s starving and he has no money to buy anything, and YES..YOUR DOCTOR IS AWAY, now that is a real challenge!
Finally, an hour before the end of Shabbat, I believe I’m hallucinating. A vision appears before me. A tall, handsome, young, impossibly young man, dressed in a tuxedo(!) strolls casually into my room. I’m sure I must be dreaming because by now we have merely become an annoyance; unwelcome guests who just don’t know when to leave, and no doctor or nurse has poked a head into our room for at least the past three hours.
The vision smiles at me and shakes my husband’s hand. Could he actually be real? I sit up.
“Hi. I’m Dr. Bogner. I’m on call for Dr. Goodkin and I thought I’d better check on you before I head out to my dinner party. Wouldn’t want to have to come back for you in the middle of dessert.” He laughs softly at his own joke. “Why don’t we try to get this show on the road? A little Pitocin should do the trick. Let me just examine you first. See what’s doin’.”
My husband stares at the fellow as though he, too, is wondering if this man is indeed real. Then his face lights up.
“Bogner…Bogner…you know you look so familiar. Don’t I know you from somewhere? Wait, didn’t you go to N.Y.U. as an undergraduate”?
Doctor Bogner removes his hands from my body and looks up.
“Yeah, right, I did. Wait, I know you, man. Weren’t you my lab instructor for Organic Chemistry? Yeah. That’s right. You’re the one that almost failed me, right? I had to do all those reports over. Mr….. Glass, yeah, Wow! Is that really you? Son of a gun!”
They continue to chat about old times as the doctor sets up the Pitocin drip, never once looking at me. Maybe this guy still couldn’t concentrate well. As for me, the pains begin. Now I am breathing rhythmically, trying to block their voices out. Yet I still keep hearing those words…”you almost failed me…failed me,” over and over. I start to say Shema.
A teenager in a tuxedo who couldn’t pass Organic Chemistry was now going to try to deliver my baby! I was positively going to kill someone. First this imbecile, then my husband for ever passing him in the first place, and then most certainly Dr. Goodkin. That is, if please God I ever made it out of here alive!
Well, I guess Dr. Bogner must have matured over the years or perhaps Organic Chemistry has nothing at all to do with Obstetrics. At any rate, the young man in the tuxedo managed to successfully deliver my younger daughter, who is celebrating her birthday this week blissfully unaware of all the drama surrounding her birth. Happy Birthday to my daughter Rachel, who is still always right on time!
Estelle Glass, a Teaneck resident, is a retired educator who is now happily writing her own essays
By Estelle Glass
