This is a busy time of year for baseball fans. The mid-season trade deadline passed on July 31st, although with some finagling teams can continue to execute trades until the end of this month. It’s unnerving if your team loses a good player (as mine did…). It’s exciting if your team picks one up. Either way, at this time of year when the weather is hot and miserable, the season is feeling sluggish, and the postseason lineup is still debatable, the mid-season trade deadline injects a bit of excitement into the game. And, in a strange episode of life imitating sports, I just made a swap of my own.
Yesterday, at 26 weeks and change into my second pregnancy, I switched to a new OB.
That single sentence represents a complex web of emotions for me. It represents the frustration and anger I felt with my old OB. It represents my disappointment at having to reconcile myself to the fact that I was in the wrong hands. It represents the triumph of knowing that I took control of the situation and made the right decision for me and my baby. And it represents the warmth and comfort of a friend who talked through my situation with me, recommended her OB without hesitation, and called her doctor’s office on my behalf to help ensure that I could get an appointment.
Being an adult is not always easy. Actually, more times than not, it’s really difficult – especially if we want to do it well. Confrontation, both of people and of situations, takes courage that can be hard to muster. After the deal-breaker appointment with my old OB I sat with a pit in my stomach for five days without telling a soul as I came to grips with the change I needed to make. I wrestled with myself, working hard to determine if my convictions were rooted in reason or prenatal hormones. And eventually I knew that I had to do something very hard.
The act of leaving my old OB (whom I’d been with for 10 years and 1.5 pregnancies) was easy. I didn’t even have to tell him my reasons if I didn’t want to. All I had to do was sign a piece of paper releasing my records to my new doctor and be on my way. But I didn’t want to do it that way.
My last appointment in his office was with another doctor in his practice (scheduled as such before I’d made the decision to leave). Since my new doctor couldn’t get me in right away, I had to keep that last appointment, knowing that when I went in I likely wouldn’t see my own doctor unless it was in passing. Aware that I might not have the opportunity for a verbal explanation, and fearing that I might dilute my feelings in a face-to-face encounter, I wrote a letter. I hoped to give it to him myself, but he was out of the office and I had to leave it with his receptionist.
In it I told him the reasons for my transition to a new doctor – namely the fact that specific aspects of his treatment of my pregnancy made me question the quality of the care I was getting. I told him in detail what he had done to make me doubt him. And I told him that his actions were entirely preventable. I told him that while I defended him after IEP’s fraught delivery, I didn’t intend to let something go wrong again just because I didn’t have the nerve to abandon a doctor who wasn’t giving me his full attention.
He hasn’t contacted me, and I’m not surprised. Frankly, I don’t need him to. What I need him to do is take my words to heart and consider whether he’s being the kind of doctor his patients deserve. If my departure can solicit that kind of self-evaluation, then it’s worth it to me.
I’ve only had one appointment with her, but so far I like my new OB. She had read my transferred records before seeing me. She listened as I explained the circumstances behind my 26-week switch. She asked pointed and astute questions about IEP’s delivery, and tried to assess (as best she could without having been there) why it was so problematic, and what we might do to prevent similar problems with my next delivery. She was warm. She was kind. She seemed genuinely concerned about what I’d been through to this point. And she seemed committed to giving me a better birth experience with my second delivery than I had with my first.
Being an adult is sometimes hard. Doing it well is frequently hard. But I’ve found in my life that I have more regrets about skirting confrontation than I do about facing it. I have a son to raise. And before too long I’ll have two. I want them to see me be honest and forthright. I want them to see me do things that are hard because they are right. I want them to learn by example what it means not only to be a good adult, but to be a good human being.
No one wants to admit that a doctor they’ve been with for 10 years is asleep at the switch. But I have a family to take care of. And in this case, taking care of my son meant doing something hard even before he is born. I’m sure he doesn’t appreciate it now. But it represents a trend I hope to continue throughout my kids’ lives; a trend that I hope they will appreciate one day, provided I continue to do it right.