I spent the last week juggling day shifts in Labor and Delivery, and evening shifts at the bed of my dad's hospital bed a few hundred yards away in a different hospital. Today is my first day off, and I feel myself strangely missing the anti-septic, hash white lights of the hallways. I walked from the closet where all the med students hung out, back and forth...to triage, to the labor deck, back to our closet. None of this was actually very productive; I wrote notes that no one read, performed physical exams that were probably not done correctly and even if they were, yielded information that was, and in some sense rightly so, valued a distant second to ultrasound and lab tests.

My very first C-section was an odd feeling. I held the retractor as the uterus was opened, slowly at first, and then, without warning, both residents dropped their instruments and started stretching the incision laterally with what seemed to be a brutal force. A purplish tinged head, with hair appeared, and then my hand and the retractor was awash in a gush of warm fluid and blood. I had been cold all day, and now this warm fluid was washing over my gloved hands, while the rightful owner of this blood and fluid lay at the head of the table, awake nonetheless, with her husband at her side, offering comfort.