Today, on Father’s Day, KevinMD posted a plug for my new book with an excerpt that is close to my heart, describing my emotions when hearing fetal heart tones with the office Doppler and the flashbacks that brought from my residency training and my first ever delivery – a double footling breech – and from watching my children and my granddaughter in neonatal intensive care.
“Thirty years ago, I saw more births than deaths. Now I only attend departures. For a minute or two that morning, I was again participating, ever so briefly, in the greatest miracle a physician is privileged to be part of.”
A Country Doctor Writes: 
41 years ago as a 3rd year medical imaging student part of my Obs and Gynae training was to watch a birth.
I stood there for 4 hours but it passed like 2 minutes.
One minute there were 5 people in the room and then suddenly 6 when baby popped out.
It was the most incredible experience I have ever had and I actually found myself tearing up.
But you know, I am so conflicted about having new life brought into this world.
All the struggles and challenges life will bring in this increasingly chaotic world and then going through the aging process and eventually facing death and I find that really difficult to reconcile.
I ask myself ‘do we really want to be responsible for putting someone through all that?’
Maybe the initial divine plan originally mapped out for human existence is entirely different to the one we are living and life shouldn’t be such a struggle.
I honestly don’t know.