My response to emergencies is fair

On the way home we took the old Route 24 from the train station over several hills through a small woods. It was raining and we were nestled in with bags of bagels, eager to fry up some latkes for the family Hanukkah party.

A woman on a cell phone stood beside her car, flagging us down. As we passed I could see beyond her in the woods, a belly-up SUV in the brush. I screamed to my dad, "Stop the car, stop, we have to stop!" and he skidded to a halt at the bottom of the valley. We jumped out and scrambled back up the hill avoiding the black iced roads in favor of the slushy embankment.

I was afraid that when I arrived I wouldn't be able to do anything, for lack of coolheadedness and equipment, or worse, in a situation beyond anyone's ability to help. The woman on the phone begged off as we approached; she had an infant in the car. I was afraid of what we'd see beneath the SUV, but as with all horrific accidents, it was impossible to look away.

The rear passenger door was open and my sister's boyfriend and I peered in. A man was crawling toward us, apparently unharmed. He was older, and this terrified me more, as I thought of his brittle old-man bones that could easily break from a slip in the tub. I half-sobbed, "Was there anyone else in the car?" to which he replied merrily, "Good question! No." I begged him to stay still, to hold his neck still, but by this point he'd made great progress in his scramble and those precautions seemed futile. So we assisted him out into a thorn bush.

Remarkably his legs held and he seemed unscathed. He rested a moment in the crevice of the car's open door as we steadied him. He was elated to have met us and I circled my hand around his waist, expecting to find a warm red patch somewhere. Impossibly, there was none. I looked him over incredulously and my sister's boyfriend shouted that smoke was coming from the hood. We supported the man between us and traipsed up the embankment, where the uphill-bound rubberneckers were being forced to turn around, their tires spinning futilely. My knees were shaking and my eyes were full of tears.

Umbrellas were retrieved from the trunk, and we made jokes in the freezing rain. "I see you're from Florida... welcome to the Northeast!" I confessed that I was a labor and delivery nurse and completely unable to help a non-pregnant person.

Finally a cop came. When he asked the man if he was hurt, he replied, "No, I'm okay. But my legs hurt and my shoulder hurts and I feel a little woozy." I saw then that his shoulder was askew. There was still no ambulance so we helped him to sit in the police car where he'd be warm and off his feet.

In that moment I wanted to take care of him forever. I wanted to put a collar on him, a blanket, to see the x-ray results, to put him in a gown and to check him over for bruises. Instead of adrenalin I felt overwhelmed by empathy. I wanted to take him home after that and feed him and to listen to his long old person stories about the war and love and how much better it was "back then." Instead we bade him good-luck and feel well and shut him in with the heat and the police officer.

As we skittered back toward the car we saw he had driven directly through a roadside memorial. A Mary statue lay face-down in the snow. I thought to turn it over, but left it in the snow instead, the hulk of the car beyond serving as enough of a reminder of danger and tragedy on that site.

By then it was long past when we should have arrived at home. I called home and could hear mom's throat constricting her "hello;" she'd heard the town siren go off and feared that it had been us.

This semester

I'm practicing my knots on the A and attracting the interest of 11 year old girls who miss summer camp lanyards.
A yogurt-soaked tampon cures most feminine discomforts
I've made some tough-looking butchers blush.
Dressing forceps are the ideal tool for unclogging the drain.
New Yorkers never bat an eye in coffee shops when I settle in with a croissant and a cappuccino and pour over photos of herpes and condylomas.
My Spanish is still pathetic unless it relates to sex, childbirth or menstruation, at which point it's pretty adequate.
A pregnant woman in the market looked at me and rubbed her belly and smiled as though she knew.

It's not what it sounds like

Dear Butcher,
I am studying to be a midwife. We are learning suturing, which is traditionally practiced on pigs feet. However, since the purpose of learning is to ultimately be able to repair vaginal tears or episiotomies after childbirth, I was wondering if we might obtain some pig's vaginas for practice? Do you think this would work? I don't really know anything about pig anatomy as it compares to human anatomy. I'm not sure if this part is generally discarded or turned into a hot dog, but we'd obviously pay whatever the going rate is for pig vaginas. Uterus and ovaries needn't be attached.

Thanks!

*An actual email I sent to a few city butchers that seem to do the real work on the premises. Nobody's responded yet.

Dream babies

A new wave of baby dreams has been gestating in my sleep. In one I could feel the stirrings of the small person stretching newly formed limbs in my belly. A few nights later I was contentedly breastfeeding and gazing into my newborn's blue-black baby eyes.

My IUD is still safely in place, my period showed up promptly as ever with the full moon, and if I had any doubts, I could even use my home speculum to examine the vascularity of my cervix the viscosity of its secretions. Despite the evidence, I still feel like I could be pregnant and also like I wouldn't necessarily mind.

I know it's very ordinary to dream about work. Yet when work involves listening through a belly for a heartbeat over a curve of a back beside the flutter of a fist, or cooing over a swaddled strollered bundle, it's hard to tell where the work influence on my dreaming ends and the biological urges begin.

Queens

At my clinical site, most of the women are Hispanic. I haven't spoken Spanish since high school, despite, like most Americans having regular need of it. But that was because I never tried speaking in Queens. Queens is full of grit and guts. I listen in awe as the Chinese grocery vendors hawk exotic fruits in broken Spanish, as women work to find the words in English to learn their lab results.

Somehow, in my eagerness to speak to them, to ask how their babies are moving, if they have any questions or pains, the Spanish seeps in from memories of high school workbooks and group project skits. Before I know it, a deluge floods in and I can conduct entire visits in Spanish and I cannot get enough. I'm listening to language podcasts on the subway, reading Spanish patient information sheets to learn the vocab for mammography and types of contraception. I'm eavesdropping immigrants' conversations. I no longer care about conjugation; hearing Spanglish made me realize that I shouldn't let the fear of being wrong silence me.

There are a fair number of Indian women too, swathing their bellies beneath exquisite saris. Their husbands do a lot of the speaking, asking us about terrible pains and morning sickness as their incongruously fat and contented wives smile silently. Sometimes when I pull the curtain, they speak to me in perfectly adequate expressions and I sense that women can understand each other in many ways men will never know.

Some Arab women come as well, including one just recently who wore the black burka from head to toe. I couldn't tell if she was happy or sad about it, but I found it somehow intimate and revelatory that when she pulled it up so I could check the baby, I saw she wore leopard-print pants underneath.

Maybe it's just the hormones talking

Maybe it's just the hormones talking.
Or maybe they've just loosened my tongue.
Because now I'm saying all the things the well-balanced me kept in all month,
I'm shouting the total of one month's added-up aggravations,
Crying passionately over 4 week's worth of minor hurts and injustices.
My fury flecked with exhilaration.

The gear

As the semester begins, I am enjoying watching my little apartment fill with the accouterments of a midwife. In addition to the textbooks on pelvic anatomy and prenatal care, there is a life-size bony pelvis model, two types of intrauterine devices with clear plastic uteruses for insertion practice, my own speculum and hand mirror, a cytobrush. Later in the semester I get a soft pelvis and birthing doll, a fetoscope, and lots more books. I covet a submersible doppler for assessing the fetal heart rate in a tub.