“Let us see your palms,” my attending said to our patient.
“You, too,” he said to me.
I was in my internal medicine rotation in medical school and my attending was showing us physical exam findings in a patient with cirrhosis.
“Why are this patient’s palms red?” The attending asked.
Estrogen, I was thinking.
“Oh. Yours are also red,” he said to me. “You’re not pregnant, are you?”
“Uhh, no.”
Nope, I was definitely, most certainly pregnant. Very astute clinician. And that’s the story of how I now screen all female patients of childbearing age with a simple “Show me your palms,” and a corresponding redness scale instead of a urine pregnancy test. Just kidding. I’d like to think this story illustrates the tension we might feel when it comes to announcing our pregnancies to our employer, or in my case, medical school.
I did not know anyone else who had been pregnant in medical school. It was a new paradigm for me. There was not anyone I could look to for an example for how to navigate this. I was anxious about how I would be perceived by my fellow colleagues as well as administrators. Would they think I would not be able to handle the rest of medical school? Would they suggest I postpone the rest of my studies and graduate later? Would they be accommodating?
Actually, I was pleasantly surprised by how supportive my administration was. The way I approached this was that I emailed them at first to let them know my big news. They were super happy for me. Then I sat down with them one-on-one to discuss how I wanted the rest of my medical school to play out. It ended up working out great.
Now that my husband and I are ready to have another one, I sincerely wonder how this time will be different now that I am in residency. No doubt it will be hard physically, but I can’t help but think about how it will impact my colleagues. We have a jeopardy system built-in, but I wonder if people would be bitter to know that they might have to cover my ICU month for example.
However, to ease my woes, probably the most useful piece of advice I keep coming back to is knowing that there’s never a good time to have a baby, so live your life. Now that we had our first, a part of me wishes that we had started earlier.
So, for those who had babies in medical school and residency, how was the experience for you? How did your medical school or residency program support you? Do you wish you started earlier or waited until you were done with training?