Birth Day : A Pediatrician Explores the Science, the History, and the Wonder of Childbirth

by SLOAN, MARK MD

• ISBN13: 9780345502865
• ISBN10: 0345502868
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-03-24
• Publisher: Ballantine Books

Summary

I delivered twenty babies in the summer of 1977. I was hardly more than a baby myself, just turned twenty-four and starting my third year of medical school." from Birth Day So began Mark Sloan's three-decades-long exploration of the wonders and oddities of human childbirth. Pediatrician, husband, and father, the author has attended nearly three thousand births since that long-ago summer, encountering everything from routine deliveries to tense labor-room dramas. In Birth Day, Sloan draws on his personal and professional experience to weave the strands of memoir, history, science, and culture into a fascinatingand often funnytapestry of this fundamental human passage. Birth Day takes the reader on a remarkable journey, from the dawn of human history to the quiet efficiency of a modern operating room; from Aristotle and Julius Caesar to a trailblazing, cross-dressing British army surgeon; from a recent past filled with the horrors of childbirth gone wrong to a present day, in which every pregnancy is expected to end happily. Some of Birth Day's many topics include The evolution of human childbirthor, why do gorillas have it so easy? The first five minutes of lifescuba divers, astronauts, and the amazing adaptations that transform a fetus into an air-breathing, out-in-the-world baby Cesarean sectiona look at its origins, its future, and how it came to be the most frequently performed operation in American hospitals Pain and politicsthe age-old quest for painless childbirth, starring Adam and Eve, Queen Victoria, a nineteenth-century medical brawl, and the rise of today's "epidural monoculture" Daddiesraging paternal hormones, hidden anxieties, and the emotional evolution of men (including the author, his father, and grandfather) as they approach fatherhood The five senses at birthdoes light enter the womb? how loud is it in there? what is a newborn baby searching for with those first anxious glances? A tour of the newborn bodyspringy skulls, hairy ears, innies and outies, the advantages (and disadvantages) of looking like your father, and why the United States is one of the world's most circumcised nations Delightfully instructive and entertaining, Birth Dayoffers a fresh, sometimes irreverent take on a universally familiar topic. Warm, reassuring, and packed with stories from the author's work and life, this unique book is one pediatrician's meditation on the hiding-in-plain-sight marvels of human birth.

Author Biography

Mark Sloan, M.D., has been a pediatrician and a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics for more than twenty-five years. He is one of the highest-rated pediatricians (by patients and peers) in Kaiser Permanente’s Northern California region. His writing has appeared in the Chicago Tribune and San Francisco Chronicle, among other publications. He lives in Santa Rosa, California, with his wife and two teenage children, who continue to provide him with a wealth of practical pediatric experience.

Excerpts

Chapter One

Twenty Babies: An Unexpectedly Quick Introduction to Vaginal Birth


I delivered twenty babies in the summer of 1977. I was hardly more than a baby myself, just turned twenty-four and starting my third year of medical school. At that point I was toying with the idea of becoming a family practitioner or a general surgeon. Babies didn’t much figure into my future.

This is how my obstetrics rotation was supposed to work: a medical student was typically paired with an intern, who in turn was under the direct supervision of a senior resident. The senior resident did the complicated cases—forceps deliveries, cesarean sections, and such—while the intern handled the routine vaginal births. My role as a medical student was more or less like Cinderella’s in her pre-princess days: do the dirty work, like IV starts and blood draws, and stay in the shadows to avoid the wrath of the overworked intern and resident. A “good” student—one with the sense to do his work quietly while openly admiring the skills of his elders—could expect the chance to deliver an uncomplicated baby or two as his reward.

Two things conspired to make this particular rotation different. The first was that it was early July, a traditionally scary time to have a baby in a large teaching hospital, since the interns are only a week out of medical school and generally have less experience delivering babies than the women whose babies they’re delivering. The second thing was that, for reasons I can’t recall, the OB resident staff was a few bodies short of a full complement. This meant that the interns and residents had to cover many more patients than usual, which didn’t leave them much time for supervising green medical students embarking on their first hospital rotation.

And so one sweltering Chicago morning I stood in my crinkly white coat before Mitch, a stocky, gruff senior resident with a startled head of jet-black hair and a permanent dusting of cigarette ash down the front of his scrubs. We were in the hallway outside the maternity ward. Gurneys with moaning women aboard rattled by like Model Ts on an assembly line, pushed by a corps of tough-looking nurses. Mitch had paused between a C-section and a vaginal birth to give me my orders: I was to join Ben, a brand-new intern from a tony private medical school, on what Mitch called the “firing line”—a row of wheeled labor beds separated by unadorned canvas curtains.

Mitch clamped his hand on my upper arm like a bailiff leading a felon into court and marched me through the labor room’s swinging doors to Bed 4, where a tiny nurse with Popeyesque forearms was helping a hugely pregnant woman out of a wheelchair.

“Okay, you had some OB training in your physical assessment class, right?” Mitch asked. No, I told him, I hadn’t. My physical assessment class had been at the veterans’ hospital down the street. There, I had watched men with terminal lung cancer chain-smoke cigarettes through their tracheostomy tubes, had seen others who had lost limbs to diabetes or D-Day land mines, and had personally examined what a senior resident described as the case of the year—a cabdriver who got scurvy (scurvy!) from a decades-long diet of plain White Castle hamburgers and Coke, period. Not only had I not seen a baby born at the VA, I told Mitch, I hadn’t seen a single female patient. The woman climbing onto the bed in front of us would be the first woman I had ever touched with medical intent.

Mitch scratched the stubble on his cheek. “Well, you’ve read about childbirth, haven’t you?” I said that I had. Just the night before, in fact: half a chapter, with diagrams. Took me twenty minutes.

“No problem, then.” He slapped me on the back. “Just sit there”—he motioned me to a rolling

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Excerpted from Birth Day: A Pediatrician Explores the Science, the History, and the Wonder of Childbirth by Mark Sloan
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