"He's gorgeous," I say to a first-time mom.
"I bet you say that to all the parents," she replies, wryly.
"I do, but it's also true," I admit.
"I agree with her," says the OB, who is fixing a tear. "They're all so stinking cute!"
COVID-19 has upended the end of residency, which was supposed to consist of a couple weeks of night shifts and inpatient pediatrics interspersed with electives and history of medicine conferences. Instead, for the last 6 weeks, I have either been quarantined at home for my protection or else working at the women's hospital, attending high-risk births as the pediatrician who checks out the newborn baby. For this reason, my life hasn't been all that terribly different under COVID. When I'm home, I keep myself busy writing and studying (and tuning in to live-streamed lectures), and when I'm at work, the women's hospital functions much like it always has, since people still have babies in the middle of a pandemic. We are not entirely sure why adults _seem to be_ having fewer heart attacks and strokes than before, but some awestruck relatives will still take flash photographs while you resuscitate a blue baby...
I am not a fan of the long hours and the uncertain schedule (example: 5 hours of waiting, followed by 5 babies born within 30 minutes). But I do like being a cheerleader for new parents, reassuring them that their babies are cute despite the blood, meconium, cranial molding or swelling, extra digits, and/or weird swelling in the groin that is either a hernia or a lipoma but either way is really just cosmetic, and General Surgery can take it off when the baby is old enough for anesthesia in a couple of months. I enjoy announcing the baby's weight, since everyone has a guess (and sometimes money riding on it). And I particularly like introducing babies to their fathers. Although I have a good relationship with my own father, I think it's a cultural thing I have unfortunately absorbed that suggests it's unusual for dads to be emotionally invested in their children. Which may be why
the video of Anderson Cooper choking up while announcing the birth of his son, Wyatt, got me right in the feels this week.
Anyway, I had already completed this required rotation a year and a half ago and wasn't expected to be back, which is why there was no head shot to go on the whiteboard for tracking which procedures we had done. So I drew my own "COVID portrait," hospital-issued paper mask and all. But I had to "break quarantine" to document it: the blur in the bottom left corner is the edge of the plastic bag around my cellphone. It's not very environmentally friendly, but I've been using one a day to reduce the burden of germs on my phone. When I get home from the hospital I remove the bag and clean my phone with an alcohol wipe. Then it just has "home germs" on it.
Next week we will resume something that approximates our "normal" schedules, although patient volumes are expected to remain low, and some visits will take place via video chat rather than in person. It is all so similar, yet different, a caricature of what used to be.
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