"And Aubrey was her name. We tripped the light and danced together to the moon......"

                                                                                                                                                     David Gates and Bread

Sometimes you need to travel a long way to get where you need to be.

I will tell you what I am not. I am not a fertility specialist. In fact, with few exceptions, I am against fertility drugs.  In the case of families who want more than anything to have children and can't seem to get pregnant, I am very pro-adoption.

I think that messing with nature (God's will-- if you want), can be dangerous and heartbreaking. If a set of quads erupts naturally-- I will do anything and everything in my power to save them and prepare them and their parents for as natural and healthy of a life as possible. But planting these kinds of multiples can be dangerous and heart-wrenching.

I will tell you what I am: A neonatologist specializing in multiples.

Some have said I'm in the wrong business. I have entirely the wrong attitude.

Which brings me to the crux of this narrative. I assisted Jean Goodwin this morning in delivering her fertility treated quints at twenty-five weeks. The first two were stillborn, the next two shared all of three pounds and had respiratory issues, and the only boy among the five was born with serious congenital heart defects. He will likely die very soon. The parents-- well, the mom almost died giving birth. Her organs shut down and other complications but as a whole, they were unprepared for the almost inevitable deaths associated with this kind of delivery. Jean, in typical 'plow-ahead Jean fashion',  had prepared them for five live births.

I despise her for that. And she's twice my age and has twice my experience, and I still despise the attitude that allows her to lie to her patients, give them inconclusive information and false hopes. The stats show the truth. A full ninety percent of these babies don't make it,- to put it in layman's terms. They have serious complications and remain impaired for life.

For her part, even though I am more educated and have had extreme success in the four years of my practice, she ignores my services until the very last second and then calls me in as a last ditch effort to pick up the pieces.

Hence, I am driving home to Malibu from USC, with a tick in my cheek, and a rip-roaring headache and random thoughts about Jean and the quints.

I yanked at my hair in mounting frustration.

Blast it all! Today I'd held five little bodies, so fragile, so weak, so unfair!

I pulled my yellow VW Beetle into my whopping huge three car garage, in my plush million dollar beach front home and jerked to a stop. (I say this in the most self-deprecating manner possible, ashamed for having all this, when they, the parents of my quints, have so little!) My head found my fists clenched on the squishy black steering wheel and I pounded against it several times. Senseless.... senseless.... senseless....

Tears came. They flooded the backs of my eyes and I squeezed the tired eyelids shut, angrily forcing the thoughts away. 

Not that sweet little blue-veined forehead, the tick of tiny blood vessels, the hopelessness of Junior's condition. He already looked blue. The hyperplastic heart defect (hole in the left side of his heart) wasn't currently large enough to be instantly fatal, but--

It would kill him.

And killing him, would take a piece of me with him.

*****