Page 8 of Anatomy of a Meet Cute
Monica twisted her hands in her lap for a moment, eyes shifting from side to side. “There is a woman who comes into my salon—she is the one who insisted I come in here to ask about my blood pressure. She isn’t a doctor, but she helps deliver babies. She said she’d help me. Does that count?”
“Oh,” Sam said, blinking rapidly as she tried to suppress her panic. There were so many charlatans attempting to profit off pregnant people with limited resources. If this woman had tried to sell Monica magic herbs for stretch marks, Sam might have to find her and wring her neck. Then again, she’d managed to get Monica to come in for a checkup, so she didn’t sound like a total menace. “Is she a nurse? A midwife?” When Monica shook her head, Sam let her brain stretch to the outer fringes of the obstetric-health world. “A doula?”
“Yes! That is the word.”
“That can be a good thing,” Sam said, searching for a diplomatic answer. Doulas had been a part of nearly every culture on the planet until recent history. Western medicine had spent the last seventy years mocking them as backwoods mystics encouraging people to give birth in kiddie-pool death traps. Or the domain of overindulged, rich white women with too much money and not enough sense. But in many parts of the world, doulas were the only care a pregnant person was likely to receive. The question was whether this woman was an actual doula or someone sketchy.
“Tell me more about her. What’s her name? How does she help you?”
Monica took a deep breath, adjusting her posture on the examination table, which had to be getting uncomfortable for her, not that there was much that was comfortable at this stage in her pregnancy. “Kaiya ... Owens. I think it’s Owens. Anyway, she mostly just checks on my stress level, suggests stuff I can do to make myself more comfortable, because I’m feeling so hot and slow, Dr.Holbrook. It takes me forever to get anywhere. My job does not have maternity parking, so I have to hike into the salon,” Monica said, dropping her hands noisily onto the table in exasperation.
“It sounds like Kaiya knows a lot about being a new parent. I’ll have to look her up. And she is right. I know time off can be hard to come by, but please listen to her and continue to see us.” Sam smiled.“Think of me, the nurse-midwife, and Kaiya like your team. Between the three of us, we got you.”
“I can do that.” Monica nodded.
“Good. And don’t feel so bad if you have to miss an appointment that you skip the next one. We want to see you, even if you’re a little late.”
“I’ll be better about coming in, I promise.” Her face didn’t hold any of the fear or reservation that Sam’s other patients had had earlier in the morning.
“In that case, I’ll see you soon. If you have any questions in the interim, you can always call the nurse, and they will track me down. Sound good?”
“Thank you, Dr.Holbrook. It was nice to meet you.”
“Nice to meet you too, Monica. Take care.” Sam smiled as she backed out of the shoebox of an exam room.
She waited for exactly three seconds before looking over her shoulder to find the hallway empty, then hopped from one foot to the other, grinning so hard her eyes were nearly closed as she whispered, “Yes!”
For the first time since she’d started her research fellowship, she felt like she knew what she was doing. Not once today had she had to utter the wordsI don’t knoworlet me checkbefore dashing out of the room to find literally any other medical professional within fifty yards of her. The only upside to the last few weeks of feeling stupid was that Grant—or Dr.Gao, as she should really be calling him—wasn’t around to see her panic and ask questions. That honor belonged to the forever-patient if extremely old-school Dr.Franklin.
Shuffling toward the sky bridge that connected the clinic side of the building, where she saw patients, to the hospital side, where she would help deliver their babies, Sam began turning her visit with Monica over in her head. She wasn’t the only person Sam had met with this morning whose primary form of preparation during pregnancy had come from someone they knew. This week alone she had not one but two patientswho had been asked to stay in the hospital overnight for monitoring due to abnormalities developed between their long-delayed visits. At least with Monica, the doula had enough knowledge to encourage her to see a doctor.
Sam knew it was unreasonable to expect people without sick leave, transit money, or childcare to come into the clinic anywhere between once a month and once a week. If her patients had been wealthy, they would’ve just hired midwives who made house calls or gotten fancy telehealth supplemental medical plans. As it stood, her patients were in no such position. If she could just call a meeting of the doulas, aunties, coworkers with horror stories, birth coaches, and other advice dispensers in the area, so many potential disasters could be avoided. Everyone around the person giving birth would know what problems to look for.
A community meeting would help with the Dr.Google problem too. The literature Sam was reviewing for her still-to-be-decided research agenda made it clear that people were more likely to search the internet and attempt bizarre home remedies to avoid paying to feel stupid in front of a doctor. Which explained the woman Duke had seen in clinic last week with garlic shoved up her—
Sam’s mind hiccuped. Maybe there was a way ... in med school, she’d had an interprofessional where she’d followed around a social worker to understand how they interacted with a client. It had helped her gain a new perspective on patient care. Doulas weren’t doctors or nurses, but they could make house calls, and their sole job was to build trust with the person giving birth, so if she could—
“Yo, Sam, wait up!” Duke called, rounding a corner and jogging toward her, the same exhausted look on his face that she wore. Fellow schedules were notoriously brutal. Going into her fellowship, Sam had thought this was an exaggeration. Turned out generations of doctors were not lying. Even fellows, who in theory should spend less time seeing patients so they could conduct their research, got wrung out to the max.
“Hey, Duke. What’s up?”
“I’ve been looking for you. Got a proposition I think you’ll like.”
“If it is trading chores again because you want to fall asleep before you finish half your beer, the answer is a hard pass,” Sam snarked. Last week she and Jehan had pitched in to cover his chores because Duke had been assigned his first twenty-four-hour shift. The guy was so beat afterward that he barely said thanks before the sounds of ESPN and snoring tried to wake up their downstairs neighbors.
“Ha. Ha. Ha.” Duke’s laugh was flat, although he was still smiling. Twelve-hour days hadn’t broken either of them yet. “I was gonna ask if you would like to join the prestigious SF Central Hoopers. How ’bout it?”
“What?” Sam asked, absently setting a file into the proper slot on the nurses’ station wall.
“The hospital has an entire basketball rec league. I was recently asked to join the Hoopers. Also known as last year’s league champions.”
“If someone wants you on their team, they must be desperate.” Sam snorted. “What are they doing, asking all the Black staff to join just in case one of us is good at basketball?”
“Both of usaregood at basketball.”
“Don’t tell anyone that; otherwise it’ll justify the behavior.”
Duke cackled. “Under any other circumstances, I’d say yes, that is what the teams are doing. But in this one case, no. They asked me because Raphael knew I rode the pine pony in the D-League. Did you ever read the orientation booklet?” he asked, somewhat skeptical.
