My job as a family physician in small-town British Columbia is a dream come true. It’s also nearly impossible to do.
Drip, drip, drip. I watch the saline flow through the plastic tubing into my arm. The baby gives a reassuring kick just before another contraction hits. There is concern for possible placenta accreta, a condition where the placenta, instead of implanting nicely against the uterine wall, sends its tendrils deep into the uterus like a murderous weed. My C-section is scheduled for tomorrow morning, but this baby—my fourth—clearly wants to put its own stamp of approval on its birthday, which has fallen in January of 2022, in the middle of British Columbia’s first Omicron surge.
I don’t deliver babies myself, but as a family doctor, I learned how to do it in medical school and residency. I know that things don’t always turn out well. I glance at my husband, who’s catching a brief nap on the chair beside me. It’s been a tough few years, and the thought of something going wrong today, leaving him to explain things to our three little girls, makes me swallow hard before the next contraction comes.
I work in a small town in British Columbia, the same town where I was born and grew up, where my dad was born, and where my mom’s dad was born, in a tent, before his family’s homesteader cabin was built almost a century ago. My two younger sisters and I grew up in a three-room cabin with no electricity or phone, as it was far too expensive to get hydro poles up the old logging road that was our driveway. We turned on the generator to operate our tiny black-and-white TV only on important occasions, like when the Canucks made a run for the Stanley Cup in ’94. Otherwise, we had books and the forest to keep us busy. My parents worked hard as a shipwright and a bookkeeper, but our weekends were always full of camping and hiking in the backcountry.
