Opinion | How New Motherhood Changed Me as a Doctor

The family looked toward me, curious, clearly eager for a story that had nothing to do with illness. Happy to oblige, I explained that the fries weren’t for me. They were for my baby. With that, the tone in the room shifted. Someone jumped in. Fries for a baby! How old? Someone else asked if she liked the fries, and I had to admit that the entire plan had been a bit of a disappointment. Of course it was, my patient’s wife weighed in. Babies don’t need to eat sweet potato fries. They should just eat the entire potato. Did I not know how to cook a potato? Suddenly the entire group was offering advice. Recipes for babies. The best way to cook a potato when you’re in a rush (microwave first, then oven). The foods you should never give babies. The challenges of first-time motherhood.

And stories about their own children. About my patient as a grandfather — his elaborate pranks, the way he would always cry on holidays when the family was together. And then they were all laughing, about the foolishness of the sweet potatoes, about the jokes my patient would pull, and for a moment I saw them as they were outside this room, as they used to be when they had their own young children, when everything was possible.

When I left, I wondered for a moment whether I had shared too much, laughed a bit too loudly in a room where a man was dying. But then I heard them behind me, still chuckling as they traded stories, grasping at moments of levity. I could not bring the person they loved back to them. I could not stop his inexorable slide toward death. But I could connect with them through a silly story about my baby and maybe a reminder — however small — that there is life even in loss.

That night, I returned home too late for dinner with the baby. It had been a hard day in the unit with a mother whose adult child had suffered a catastrophic brain injury years earlier and would never wake up. It is impossible for me not to think of my own child in those moments, to feel that chill that goes through me as I am reminded, once again, of how quickly good fortune can change.

When I arrived home, my daughter was already in the bath, splashing about and babbling with her bath toys. I washed my hands, scrubbing away the layers of the day, and then I scooped her up from her bath, warm and beautiful and gentle in her baby bath towel. When I kissed her, I thought of the mother in the unit, I thought of the family holding vigil at the bedside, and then she giggled. And the hospital faded away and I was with her, in that moment.