When
I taught English, my students and I read Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672).
A Puritan and a mother, she was also America's first published poet.
Her syntax and use of unfamiliar allusions sound old-fashioned to
our modern ears, and her reliance on Christian faith can prove
difficult for secular readers to understand. But I loved teaching
Bradstreet. Her poems always proved to be more than they appeared.
In
"Before the Birth of One of Her Children," Bradstreet addresses her
husband about an upcoming birth: "How soon, my Dear, death may
my steps attend/How soon't may be thy lot to lose thy friend" (7-8).1
She counsels him that if she dies in childbirth, he should marry
again, but "if thou love thyself, or loved’st me, . . . protect
[our children] from step dame's injury" (23-24).
At
first reading, this fear of death-by-childbirth seems overwrought, but
read in context of 17th-century realities, Bradstreet's entreaty to
her husband is moving: the notion that pregnancy does not also foreshadow
death is a 20th-century idea, and even now a luxury only the
developed world can afford. Maternal and infant mortality in
Bradstreet's day was high, and enough to make delivery of even the
most wanted baby an occasion filled with dread. In this context,
Bradstreet's pleas to her husband are not melodramatic: they are a
frank assessment of what the couple faced when pregnancy represented
not just beginning a new life, but the possibility of death.
Once
my students understood this connection between pregnancy and death,
we unpacked other particulars of Bradstreet's life. We learned that
because she had eight children—and a heart weakened by
rheumatic fever as a child—she faced death eight times. We
calculated that eight births meant eight pregnancies and that eight
pregnancies meant she spent 72 months, or six years, of her life
pregnant. Eight births also correlates with nursing eight babies,
and in a time when women breastfed for about 18 months or until the
birth of their next infant, this means Bradstreet spent 154 months
or almost 13 years of her life lactating. Moreover, these numbers
only reflect babies she carried to term. Bradstreet likely lost
additional pregnancies to miscarriage. But even if we only count
births we know about, these numbers mean that America's first
published poet composed while dedicating 19 years of her
life—some concurrently—to work surrounding childbearing.
Having
sorted through these details, my students and I read Bradstreet
again, and even to our 20th-century ears, she made more sense. As
poet and critic Adrienne Rich argues, "to have written . . . the
first good poems in America, while rearing eight children,
frequently lying sick, keeping house on the edge of the wilderness,
was to have managed a poet's range and extension within confines as
severe as any American poet has confronted."1
No kidding.
I
have been thinking about Bradstreet a lot lately, not because I am a
mother or a Puritan, but because she understands something about the
commingling of birth and death, and because doing the mathematics of
her life is helping me make sense of my own. Two and a half weeks
ago, or about 18 days ago, I finished a residency in emergency
medicine and started a new life as an ED doctor. This reality is as
complicated for me as the fact that Bradstreet bore eight children.
As I have concluded the process that turned me into a physician, I
am struggling to comprehend the math of my own life, and to
understand what I have lost—and gained—along the way.
When
I finished residency on 30 June 2007, I had been working at becoming
a physician for nine years. This includes two years of pre-med, four
of medical school, and three of residency. Medical training has
taken up my 30s and consumed almost a decade.
In
addition to time spent, there have been other costs. The most
obvious of these are financial. I emptied my savings of $35 000
to pay for pre-med, and then the real spending began: I owe lenders
about $150 000 in student loan debt. After consolidating my
loans at an interest rate of 4.375%, I will owe $813.40 a month for
the next 30 years, or until I am 71 years old. My loan money went
for tuition but also bought groceries and paid rent. What loans did
not cover went on credit cards, leaving me with balances too
embarrassing to reveal in print.
Other
losses hurt more than money. Deciding to go to medical school meant
leaving a beloved teaching job at Bentley College in Waltham,
Massachusetts, so I could return to college and accumulate
prerequisites. It also meant leaving friends. On the Saturday
morning I moved, neighbors gathered at my Cambridge apartment and
helped me pack. My mother and I then drove to my office, where I
loaded books into a moving van and began the process of trading one
life and career for another.
But
the process of accumulating losses had just begun, and over time,
the list of important and mundane things lost grew longer. I missed
weddings, Christmases, and too many dinner parties to count. Church
services, time to exercise or to hear a favorite band play, all went
by the wayside in the name of medicine. So did weekends, meals eaten
with a fork, all my size eight—and then size
ten—clothes, and sleep. Yes, lots of sleep. By my conservative
reckoning, I have lost more than 200 nights of sleep in the last
nine years, a number that includes only time spent in the hospital
taking care of patients, not all-nighters pulled studying for exams.
Of these 200 sleepless nights, more than 50 were spent on 30-hour
in-hospital shifts, where going to work on Monday meant not going
home and not going to sleep until Tuesday afternoon—only to do
it over again every fourth day until the end of the month. Nights
away from home also represent time lost for family and personal
relationships.
Not
surprisingly, when I think too long about these losses, I feel
bitter and self-pitying—feelings that make me wonder if the
last nine years were a mistake. This is when I start doing math in
the other direction, to remind myself there are also things I have
gained. I have gotten a medical education,
I say, and start counting what that means: at 15 to 25 patients per
emergency department shift, I have seen about 7500 patients. This
represents 7500 opportunities to learn from another human being, and
to try to provide some help. These numbers also represent opportunities
to do procedures. According to my procedure log, I have placed 24
chest tubes, reduced 13 dislocated shoulders, performed 25 spinal
taps, and intubated 109 patients. I have performed 45 trauma and
more than 139 medical resuscitations. This, in turn, has given me
the sad responsibility of telling two families a month that someone
they love just died—and giving at least as many people the
news that a family member has been resuscitated and is now in ICU.
At the same time, I have looked at more sore throats, done more
vaginal examinations, and sutured more limbs than I can count.
I
recognize that these numbers mean I have gotten the "medical education"
I call to mind in dark moments, so I add the numbers up regularly to
remind myself it is a blessing that for the rest of my life I get to
do a job that I love and be paid well enough to make a living. But
because I have experienced loss, when doing this math, I still
wonder if I come out ahead. I say this not because I am ungrateful
for my education, but because I did not go to medical school to have
a good income, or even to become a doctor with a capital D. Whatever
money or prestige comes with my job means little to me: however sexy
placing a chest tube or intubating someone looks on television,
these skills alone do not make up for missing my nieces' birthday
parties and having to calendar, months ahead, chances to make love
with my husband.
These
realities lead me to look for other ways to make sense of the last
nine years, and answers come in a list of experiences that are less
quantifiable, but still real. Often they have to do with patients:
the Native American woman who called the spirit of her dead daughter
into the ED to heal an ailing loved one (and ended up healing me);
the drunk trauma patient who at the top of his lungs forbade us to
cut off his pants because "I’ve got a really small penis
and don't want anyone to know"; and the parents of a dead baby
we had not been able to resuscitate who allowed me to cradle their
infant daughter while we all grieved.
Other
gains have nothing to do with medicine but are equally important.
When I started medical school, I thought there was light and dark,
day and night. I knew something about the way shadows fell in the
evening and how that was different from the way light looked at
dawn, but I had not yet had enough sleepless nights, or worked
enough days in a row without seeing the sun, to know that indoor,
fluorescent light looks different in the day than at night and that
a peek at outside, ambient light on even the cloudiest February day
can be something beautiful to behold. I did not know the difference
between not sleeping at all and getting 20 minutes of sleep or that
what I called "insomnia" prior to medical school meant I
had not slept well—not that I actually had not slept at all. I
did not know how precious an afternoon off could be after a night
on-call or how dear it could feel to climb into bed at the end of a
shift with a loved one—or even a dog.
To
be honest, until medical school, I did not know what life and death
and suffering really meant. Until I paid my $150 000, I had not
known that dead bodies are genuinely cold
or that the fluids that come from living bodies—blood, vomit,
feces, urine—are always warm. I had not yet had the humbling experience
of telling someone that a family member had just died or felt the
impotence of knowing there was nothing I could do to help the
patient or spare the family its grief. In short, until I was a good
long way into all that debt and sleep deprivation, I had not
understood very well what it meant to be human. Maybe not even what
it meant to be alive.
Anne
Bradstreet opens "Before the Birth of One of Her Children" with
these lines:
All
things within this fading world hath end,
Adversity
doth still our joys attend;
No
ties so strong, no friends so dear and sweet,
But
with death's parting blow is sure to meet.
The
sentence past is most irrevocable,
A
common thing, yet oh, inevitable.
As
I look at the last nine years and ponder the "inevitably" of
death and the "irrevocab[ility]" of "adversity" attending
"joys," I realize I have been miscalculating the math of
Bradstreet's life—and my own. Thousands of dollars poorer and
many sleepless nights more tired, I wonder if the important
calculation in Bradstreet's life is not how she managed to write
"the first good poems in America" while "keeping
house on the edge of the wilderness," but how carrying,
bearing, and nursing eight children enabled her to do so. Rather
than being a heroic figure scratching out time from child-rearing
activities to write, I am coming to believe that Bradstreet simply
lived. I also suspect that the gains and losses of her
life—"confines as severe as any American poet has
confronted"—are the very things that generated her
"range and extension" and left us with poetry still good
enough to be read today.
When
I think about Bradstreet now, I try to stop counting the months she
spent lactating and hours she spent delivering babies and look at
the big picture. I see her at a hearth with a ladle bent into a pot
and her foot rocking a baby in a cradle. She may be pregnant or
maybe not, but there is always a pen, nearby. For this Anne
Bradstreet, to live was not to
account but simply to experience and, when she had time, to set it
down. This woman understood something in 17th-century America that I
am just beginning to comprehend today: that life is not a zero-sum
game. A gain in one column does not necessitate a loss in another,
and winning does not correlate with being debt-free or having the
fewest losses in the final tally at the end of life. Rather, all
losses are gains. All gains have corresponding losses. This is not
harsh or bleak or cruel. This is being human. This is life.
Sometimes you are talented enough to write it down.
And
sometimes you are lucky enough to read what a wiser writer had to
say about it 329 years ago.
Acknowledgment: This essay is dedicated, with
gratitude, to everyone in the emergency department at the Nebraska
Medical Center.