NARRATIVE ESSAYS
Meher Baba Loves Me John J. Frey III, MD (Fam Med 2013;45(7):507-8.)
I
n the South, a good story can be enjoyed as much on the second and third telling as on the first. My Midwestern friends, on the other hand, always say “You have told that one before.” I am going to tell this one because it makes me happy and because it gets better with the telling again, and because it is true. In 1972, I was a senior resident in Miami and, like all other senior residents, was deciding about a place to move with my family and wondering about the direction my life would take. One day, Jeff, an intern, came up to me and said that he was going to do a home delivery and wanted to know whether I would help. He knew that I had trained in Chicago and had spent time at the Chicago Maternity Center as a medical student, doing home deliveries with nurse midwives. Like many who had spent time at the Maternity Center, the experience transformed me. How could I not be transformed sitting in apartments throughout the city with women in labor, talking with their families, drinking coffee and eating in their kitchens, then help deliver babies into their arms surrounded by families and friends. I spent 8 hours, one long night, playing dominoes with a Puerto Rican family, losing for the whole 8 hours, until just before the woman began the second stage of labor when my winning streak had gotten me back to even. “A good omen,” the father said. FAMILY MEDICINE
I told Jeff it would be a big risk, if, as residents, we did a home delivery that was not part of the residency program. I really liked delivering babies, though, and when he said that if we didn’t do it, the father would, I gave in. Jeff would do the prenatal care, and we would plan on being at the house together for the delivery. I told Jeff that we couldn’t mention to anyone that we were going to do this. I was a resident. It was the early 1970s. I didn’t know much about malpractice claims. In the end, we got one of the pediatric faculty to come along in case there were any difficulties with the baby. The three of us would attend the birth. Our plan went well. The family was part of a commune living in a big two-story stucco house in the Coconut Grove section of Miami. They were very sweet people who were kind to us and swore not to tell anyone about these doctors who were surreptitiously helping with Debbie’s delivery. On occasion, we would be invited over for group dinners, which consisted of vegetarian food from a variety of cultures. The couple having the baby was excited. I felt that I was stepping out of the doctoring life into something different, and I was enjoying it. Jeff called one morning in July that Debbie had gone into labor and wanted us to go over to the house. July in South Florida can be humid, and the big pink house was “natural” with no air conditioning and lots of
big trees all around for shade. She was in early labor, and we talked through things with the family, gave them phone numbers to call if things got active, and went on about our lives. Later in the afternoon, the husband called to let us know that things had picked up and so we went over, with our delivery pack, and settled in for the night. Of course the night began with another vegetarian spread, this time a Korean one made by the Korean-American wife of one of the members of the commune. Debbie labored in a big room on the second-floor porch overlooking a back yard shaded by the enormous banyan trees that grew all over South Florida in those days. Their tendrils fell from the branches to the bare ground beneath them like some exotic curtain. Things had gone well, progress was being made, the head was engaging, and I began to let people know that she was almost complete, and we could start pushing. At that point, the father mentioned that he would be doing a videotape of the delivery. A videotape in 1972 was a major undertaking. The technology was not tiny handheld digital cameras but a full-blown half-inch tape video camera with a tripod, lights, and lots of wires—the whole thing.
From the Department of Family Medicine, University of Wisconsin.
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It was, as they say, a real production, and I was an assistant director. All during labor, the music in the bedroom was a soothing mantra of breaking waves and repeating sound. As labor got more active, they changed the music to classical guitar. As the tempo picked up, so did the pushing. The second stage was remarkably controlled and as we got close to the baby crowning, the music changed to a piece of music I had always loved, the Concierto De Aran Juez by Rodrigo. As the strings and guitar built to a climax in one of my favorite parts of the Concierto, the head appeared and rotated, and then the baby girl came out nicely. As I was about to hand her to her mom, I looked out the window at the morning sun in gold and red shining through the banyan trees. I stood there for a moment, my ears full of exhilarating music, watching the sparkling sun bouncing around the room, holding a baby whose first connection with this world was in this wondrous place. I have carried that image in my mind, now, for 40 years. They named the baby Dawn, for obvious and very good reasons. Jeff continued to care for the family. I moved on to looking for a job. When I got back from a trip a few months later, the commune invited us over for dinner again to thank us. The baby’s father gave my wife a set of African beads, and Bill De la Vega, an artist who lived in the house, gave me a poster. He had done a sketch of Meher Baba, a guru
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of the 1960s who preached peace and love and whose smiling face on the poster was surrounded by flowers and words that said, “Don’t worry. Be happy. Meher Baba loves you.” I didn’t know much about Meher Baba, and I don’t know much more now, but looking at the poster on my wall makes me happy, partly because of Baba’s smiling face and partly in my remembering the circumstances in which his visage came into my life. I put Bill’s poster on the wall of every office I have worked in. A colleague once dared me to put it up in the office when I chaired our department. It was a bet he was destined to lose. I got a call from Jeff a few years ago that he had heard that Bill, the man who gave me the poster, was dying of cancer and gave me a phone number where I could call him. When I finally reached him, I told him that, even though we hadn’t spoken for almost 30 years, he and his gift were always with me and thanked him for those times of remembered happiness. I said that I hoped he would be comfortable and that if Meher Baba loved me, he must certainly love Bill, along with many others of us in Bill’s life. In our lives in medicine, mixed with the times of heartbreak and loneliness, times of happiness and comfort stand out in memory. Medicine has been both less than and more than I had hoped it would be. I thought I would become more patient as I got older but found out that
it is the contrary. My disappointment at the difficulties my patients must face in a country without a functional health system makes me feel even more frustrated than I did 40 years ago when I thought a new system was just around the corner. Society threatens to put distance between me and the reasons I chose medicine and teaching as a career. And, of course for many reasons, delivering babies has changed as well. But I always carry enormous gratitude for patients who let me enter into their lives as an invited guest. Even when doctoring seems most difficult, patients carry us along with small gestures of thanks, like the poster from Debbie’s delivery. Someone once wrote that “The person who forgets nothing never experiences the joy of remembering.” I look at Meher Baba, who I assume still loves me, and remember the music, the sunlight in the trees, the beginning, and the innocence that we all shared about the next things and the things that would come after that. And the baby who was the focus of all these intertwining lives and stories? I googled her and found, as I might have predicted, that she is in the movie business. After all, I played a bit part in her first film, under those banyan trees, that incredible morning so long ago. CORRESPONDENCE: Address correspondence to Dr Frey, University of Wisconsin, Department of Family Medicine, 1100 Delaplaine Street, Madison, WI 53715. 608-238-6308.
[email protected].
FAMILY MEDICINE
