In Praise of Caring Physicians

Yesterday, Brigid amazed me when we had on one of her Blues Clues tapes. In the video, Steve sings the birthday candle dance. Brigid stood in front of the TV and "sang" the birthday candle dance, doing the movements that go along with it. The song ends, "Blow out the candle" and you drop to the floor. She blew and dropped. It was the cutest thing. Of course, a monkey can learn something with enough repetition, and Brigid certainly watches Blues Clues enough to be a trained monkey. But it was so cute.

Saturday we had guests at the lake. We had invited my now-retired obstetrician and his wife to come up for the weekend. Duane's an avid kayaker and talked to Jack about kayaking often. I suggested that he and Sharon come up for an afternoon and stay for dinner. It was a wonderful visit but the guys never got to kayak because it rained all day long! We had a good time catching up, however, because we hadn't seen him since he retired a few months after Brigid was born. I had known Sharon for years when I covered the Beekmantown School Board on which she sat as a member. It was fun to introduce the girls to the man who delivered them. And Brigid captivated with her antics once she overcame her shyness (after about all of a minute or two). They're the parents of two grown daughters, and Duane told us when one of his girls asked him many years before if he had ever wanted boys instead of girls, he said, "If we had wanted boys, we would have had boys." That seemed pretty sensible to me. To Jack he said (when Patricia was born), "There's a special bathroom in Heaven for the father of two girls." I told Sharon that on that same early morning when Patricia was born, when Duane came to the hospital to deliver her at 2:20 a.m. on his vacation after having just returned from Quebec City even though there was another doctor from his practice on call, I said, "Tell Sharon thank you!" When Brigid was born, he stayed at the hospital all day even though his on-call shift ended at 8 that morning and she was born at 8:26 p.m. He will always mean the world to me because he cared enough to be there for me, and Sharon will always be special because she allowed him to.