Erin's Bio

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Even cough syrup with codeine couldn’t put me to sleep or help me to shake the feeling that something wasn’t quite normal. I was trying so hard to feel well after suffering with a severe upper respiratory infection for several days, one that had already caused me to miss part of my Medicine rotation, and also trying to get myself ready for an induction in three days. I had been to the OB that afternoon and discovered that my blood pressure was up again, not extremely high, but enough to warrant worry and to find cause to get the baby out. Induction was the answer, and after finding that out I felt an immediate surge of relief and a twinge of worry about the rotation. Relief won. I ate a celebratory dinner at Long John Silver’s (awful, I know, but I hadn’t been there since high school) and called everyone under the sun to let them know about the baby. Then I crashed on the couch, feeling vaguely ill and crampy but attributing it to dinner and the fact that my membranes had been stripped to help me along for Thursday. Around 10:30 PM I realized that the cramping was no longer vague and was arriving every 8-10 minutes. The bathtub didn’t help, walking made it worse, and my lower back felt like someone had rammed it with a sledgehammer. I was in labor!

Nesting took over and I cleaned the house until 2 AM, when I woke my husband and told him that it was time to head for the hospital. As I waited for him on the couch, a mixture of anticipation and fear started to take over. I spied a ladybug attached to my quilt on the wall and felt strangely comforted. They are a symbol of good luck, and I had never seen one in this house. Somehow I knew that I would need a lot of luck over the next 24 hours. I was indeed in labor by the time I got to the hospital. Normal, healthy early labor. My membranes were ruptured early that morning. Meconium. A word I was all too familiar with after my OB rotation, but I knew better than to worry too much since it was light. I got the blessed epidural and it didn’t slow things down at all. However, I spiked a fever, then watched the monitor as my baby’s heart rate spiked into the 180’s and stayed there. There is nothing like the sense of fear that I felt, lying in that bed as both a mother and a clinician, watching her heart rate dive into late decelerations and then jump back to tachycardia. Lying there in a room as a patient when I had witnessed births there just a few months earlier. My cervix refused to dilate past 9 cm and there I stayed for four hours, glued to the fetal monitors with IV lines, an epidural, catheter, oxygen, and pulse oximeter coming into or out of me. At some point I started to cry and couldn’t stop. All I wanted was my baby girl, healthy and happy beside me.

It would take surgical intervention to fulfill my wish. After 19 intense hours of labor, Alisa was delivered by Cesarean section at 6:30 that evening with my husband and two of my best med student friends in attendance. I still had to wait a few more agonizing hours to hold and touch her, but never have I felt anything like the rush of love that I felt when I looked at her little face, nursed her, and held her close to me.

I love medicine, true enough, but this little girl takes first place in my life. How I’ll balance my internship, parenthood, marriage, and the rest of my life remains to be seen, but I know far too many women who have done it successfully to give up.

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