A lesson in sensitivity is delivered along with a baby

My wife was calling from a photo and video shop on New York’s west side, saying that the labor pains were coming every few minutes.

She rushed home with a new photo printer for the child-to-be’s first pictures and was about to take a bath to see if the pains would go away, as they had on recent nights. Only this time, her water broke. Since my wife and I are both doctors, we live across the street from the hospital. I bolted across the street and took a wheelchair from the hospital lobby. The security guard recognized me and didn’t try to stop me.

As I wheeled my wife across the street, she said she felt the baby coming.

The scene shifted like sequential frames in a movie; a sweep across the unavoidable street bumps and cracks and then the two of us flying through the hospital’s long lobby. The “stat” elevator for emergencies arrived just as we did, and I heard a waiting passenger comment: “She doesn’t look good.”

I wanted to think that, as a physician, I knew better. But I could feel my physician status quickly slipping away and my behavior becoming more like any out-of-control husband when his wife is in trouble.

Eight floors up, in the labor and delivery department, I surged past the nurses’ station with the wheelchair. A clerk tried to stop me, insisting on name, address, Social Security number.

“Not now,” I growled. “We need our obstetrician stat!”

“He’s delivering someone else right now,” came the cool reply.

Although I have worked in this hospital for almost 20 years, I half-expected the responses I was getting. Hundreds of cases per week promoted a matter-of-fact approach among the staff that bordered on insensitive. And how many physicians, when the tables were turned and they or a family member was the patient, had exaggerated the seriousness of the situation to get more attention?

My wife was on the verge of delivering. With the nurses trying to stop me, I quickly wheeled her past the desk to a delivery room. My wife positioned herself on the table while I rushed to find an obstetrician -- any obstetrician. Fortunately, a nurse was helping my wife into a gown and getting her ready.

I grabbed the phone. “This is Dr. Siegel. I need the obstetrics chief of residents to labor and delivery stat.” The chief resident came immediately. She wore an angry look on her face when she saw that a civilian had paged her, and appeared not to care when I informed her that I was a faculty member of the hospital.

I begged this doctor to deliver our child, and she agreed. But the next time I looked she was out of the room. I found out later that she had gone to inform our obstetrician of the situation because hospital rules restrict residents from delivering the child of a private patient.

Alone with my wife, I scanned the room for sterile gloves and considered delivering our child myself. During medical school I had delivered eight babies and, as long as nothing went wrong, delivering a baby involved mostly “catching.”

But just then an older obstetrician whom I’d never seen before ran into the room, donned gloves and gown and, less than five minutes later, delivered a healthy child. For the first time -- this was our third child -- I wasn’t asked to cut the newborn’s umbilical cord. Our own obstetrician came 10 minutes later and delivered the afterbirth.

In the rush of good feeling and apologies, it was easy to forget the confusion and disarray. But in one final insensitive protocol, my wife saw her newborn whisked away without explanation for repeated tests in the middle of the night. Early the next morning, she was told that the baby wasn’t hearing out of one ear. Our pediatrician tried to reassure her that about 10% of babies fail this initial test, usually because of a clogged ear canal or a false reading. Even so, my wife and I were worried.

“Why does the state mandate the test if it isn’t accurate?” my wife asked, but got no answer.

I wondered if our difficulties were some kind of divine punishment for my own professional insensitivities. As a physician in a busy practice, had I really listened to my patients who complained that they weren’t treated in a timely manner? That there were too many forms to fill out? That I had scared them unnecessarily about a possible illness? Patients had good reason to be frightened, and I was getting a glimpse of this now. But regular patients and their families can have it much worse than I did. Even though the chief resident had treated me disdainfully, she had been influenced enough by my rank to participate in our son’s birth. And perhaps it had been professional courtesy that motivated this unknown doctor to rush in to save the day, before our regular obstetrician arrived.

I vowed to learn from this experience, to be more sensitive to the confusion and alienation that healthcare can create. Not usually a man of prayer, I also prayed for my new son.

Two weeks later, in the familiar surroundings of our pediatrician’s office -- reassured by a second, normal hearing test -- we finally felt comfortable with the name we’d chosen for our new son: Samuel, which in Hebrew means “God hears.”

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Dr. Marc Siegel is an associate professor of medicine at New York University’s School of Medicine and the author of a forthcoming book, “False Alarm: The Truth About the Epidemic of Fear.”