!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!
That spring and summer, I worked furiously on the final draft of our study examining the effect of epidurals on newborn behavior. Since I’d done at least half the exams, as well as the initial draft, and liaison with the doctors involved at Brigham and Women’s, Ed let me pull together all of the threads. I’d read a number of scientific papers by then, but adopting the dry, detached, almost cryptic style proved a challenge. And when it came to the statistics, I simply trusted Heidi when she placed the asterisks next to significant differences in the tables.
Then there were the results. It seemed simple at first. “Motor organization—Infants whose mothers received epidural anesthesia had poorer motor organization than either the analgesic groups or the minimal medication groups.” And, “Responsiveness to External Events—There were no significant differences among these groups on measures of their responsiveness to external events.” I felt quite pleased with that summary, until my first meeting with Ed and Dr. Brazelton.
“Sarah, don’t you think we should include results for each of the 26 assessments on the behavioral scale?” Ed asked.
Barry added, “It should be pretty simple. You did those exams, right? Remind me, how old were the babies?”
Either Lauren or I had examined each newborn at 12 hours of age, not knowing which regimen they had been exposed to. Then again 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, and 10 days after birth, dutifully recording how the babies moved and how they responded to all that poking and prodding, the pinpricks, rattle, light flashes, and foot tickling. I’d left the data with Heidi, who produced a beautifully succinct table summarizing it all.
“Isn’t that enough, what Heidi did?” I asked.
“No,” Ed chuckled. “The reviewers, they’ll expect each of those results to be written out in English, as well as simply listing the numbers in the table.”
Inwardly, I moaned. That afternoon, I sought out Lauren, who had supervised my work, and probably understood the nuances better than anyone.
“I don’t know how to do this! All those exams, and the stats…” I complained to her.
“I know, it was a lot of work. Remember what that was like?”
That question took me back to those frantic days. Over 250 exams in all, some in the middle of the night. Every time I got a call on my beeper that another subject had delivered, I’d drive in to the hospital, head for the nurses’ locker room, change into scrubs, put on a gown, gloves, and a mask, and locate the mother’s room. There, I would re-introduce myself, remind her that I needed to examine her baby, and get to work. Those were some of the happiest moments of my life up to that point.
I had thought newborn babies were little blobs of protoplasm, all waiting to be molded into whatever human they would become. What I quickly learned was that each of us is unique at birth – and probably long before that. Some were chatty, some were quiet. A few were lay-abouts, just waiting for the next feeding, while others constantly moved, kicking, punching, eyes darting to every sound or light. My love for each of those kids grew with each passing day, and I envied their mothers who got to hold them whenever they wanted. Once they left the hospital I got to see them at home, and felt even more warmth and longing.
“Yes, wouldn’t it be great to include all of that emotive work we did,” Lauren said when I shared, almost crying, the dissonance I felt between the actual exams, and the numbers which came out of them. Ignoring those feelings, I felt, was almost a crime.
“People need to know!” I agreed.
“Mothers, women, we already know. Men, the scientists, they’ll tell you it doesn’t matter. I call it the ‘Joe Friday Phenomenon’ – ‘Just the facts, ma’am.’ She laughed, recalling the iconic ‘50s detective show, Dragnet. “You’d better get used to it, Sarah. For the next 5, 6, 7 years, and who know how long after you get that Ph.D., you’re going to be in that world. ‘Mind thy affect’ is my advice.”
Several weeks into my first month at BU, Howard and I sat down to an early dinner, the last food we’d have for 24 hours during Yom Kippur. I was still working at the CDU, as well as struggling to make sense of the rigorous classwork.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” I complained. “Ed and Barry want to get the paper into Pediatrics, and they don’t think the writing is tight enough, and the conclusions are ‘all over the map’ they said.”
“Do you have to re-write the whole thing?”
“Only the results section. It’s got to be both shorter and longer, somehow. Shorter, meaning tighter descriptions of the observations. Longer, because they want to include more of the individual data for each day of life,” I explained.
“Come on, you could do that in your sleep,” he said.
“It’s got to be perfect, Howard. I’m already in BU, so I don’t have to impress them. But I still have to satisfy myself, as well as Dr. Brazelton.”
“Yes, you always have been your own harshest critic.”
I wondered what we was driving at. “What do you mean?”
“Look at us. You’re never satisfied with how you feel, how I act towards you. Always looking for perfection. It’s…sorry, but it drives me crazy sometimes.”
I glared at him. With controlled fury, I said, “I expected so much more from you.”
Now his turn to glower, he asked, “And just what do you mean by that?”
Without hesitation, I started in. “Back in the sixties, back when I first met you, in Chicago, you were going to change the world. Angry, but driven. Now, it seems it’s enough for you to show up at that clinic every day, maybe helping in a small way, but you seem to be just getting by, letting the world happen to you.”
I thought he might defend himself. Instead, he simply said, “Maybe the world changed us, Sarah. Maybe it’s all changed.”
My dismay with the article revision, my anxiety about finally starting school, and my frustration with Howard’s direction came to a head. “I thought we were making something together,” I announced, raising my voice. “But we do things separately, apart, even though we’re supposed to be together.”
Howard seemed puzzled. “Like what?” he asked.
“Like … well, you go to therapy, I go to therapy, don’t you think it might help if we both went together?”
“What! Why? What do we need to talk about? I thought…”
I interrupted, “For starters, we might talk about who ‘we’ are.”
“I thought…”
I didn’t let him finish. “Howard. I’ve said this to you before, you are great to live with. So solicitous, so accommodating, such a good partner, companion. And, right now, you are my best friend. Something’s missing, though, something’s not there, I don’t feel…”
Now it was his turn to interject. “You’re right, you don’t feel. You always try to analyze everything, even when you talk about feeling all mushy seeing those babies. You might start by talking about what you feel with, feel for me.”
I couldn’t, I wouldn’t let him see me tearful, so I left the table, walking outside until sunset. We spent the Day of Atonement as much apart as we could. I worked in anger, re-writing by hand the results section. He immersed himself in conversation at the Temple, then sitting sullenly on the porch.
We woke up next morning to the headlines, “ARABS INVADE ISRAEL AGAIN – Defense posts empty during Yom Kippur”.
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