Bartlesville OB

       After arriving in Oklahoma, one of the first things I needed to do was make an appointment with the obstetrician who had been recommended to us and who had already received my medical history from the ob back home.

      I was sitting in the examining room when the doctor walked in, saw me, and with a look of surprise said, “Oh, so you do exist!”

      “Excuse me?”

      “When your file arrived in the mail, I thought my med school buddies were playing a prank on me!”

      “Excuse me?”

      “Come on! Look at this file! You have to admit the names are very strange!”

      I glared at him.

      “First of all, the file says it came from Two naw a da?”

      “Tonawanda – it is a suburb of Buffalo and a Native American word.” Oh my gosh, I thought, how can the man not know how to say Tonawanda – and here we are in the midst of Oklahoma, the state with the highest concentration of Native Americans in the country – does this guy make fun of all of their names?

      “And then the doctor's name – Oxcar Boxcar?”

      “Dr. Aschar – he is from India, and he was wonderful.”

      “And then your name, how do you say it? I'm not even going to try.”

I pronounced my last name – which is was as simple to say as Tonawanda – even though it has a couple more letters and is Italian.

      “Yeah, so you can see why I thought this was all a prank!”

      All I could see was that this guy seemed to think everyone should have as common a name as he did. Okay, I won't put his name in print – but I'll tell anyone who might ask!

      Then he went on to say that we needed to schedule a sonogram to get an updated due date; and after that we can schedule the C-section.

      “No, I was told after Sarah was born that I could have natural delivery for my second child.”

      “Ma'am, you aren't in Buffalo anymore.”

      Clearly.

      “I am not the one who sewed you up after your C-section with your first child. So I do not know how well the surgery was done. Our hospital here in town has a small emergency room. You come in here in labor and your uterus ruptures and you will have to go to the emergency room. Then, if there's a car accident out there somewhere – the ER can't handle both emergencies. So we can't risk a ruptured uterus – we have to schedule a C-section.”

      My brain was spinning.

      “Now if you absolutely have your heart set on natural delivery, this is what you will have to do: when you go into labor, get into your car, drive the fifty miles to Tulsa, check yourself into the hospital there which is bigger, and have another doctor help you with natural childbirth. But you and your ruptured uterus are not coming here!”

      Months later I actually met a woman who went to Tulsa to have her baby, bless her! But I was not that dedicated to natural childbirth or the thought of driving 50 miles while in labor.       So the sonogram was scheduled – the due date was set at December 12^th, a Friday. The doctor asked which Thursday in December did I want to do the surgery? Thursdays were when he did C-sections. I said how about the 18^th, since the baby probably would not adhere to the due date. He said how about December 11^th?

      The receptionist at the obstetrician's office was similar in attitude to the doctor. One day at check-out, she asked what it was like living in a suburb of New York City?

      I said, “I'm from Buffalo.”

      “Isn't all of New York State a suburb of New York City?”

      “Um, Buffalo is 500 miles from New York City.”

      She stared at me as if I had not answered her question.

      A pang of homesickness went through me. Buffalo is connected to New York City, kind of, via the New York Thruway. When you drive on the New York Thruway, you see the most beautiful country scenery you can imagine – farmland, hills, gorges, colors, cows and corn and tractors! Not urban sprawl! Gosh I missed it!

      Another time at checkout, the receptionist looked up from her computer and asked, “Was your maiden name any better than your married name?”

      “How do you mean better?”

      “Well, your married name has so many letters in it!”

      “My married name has eleven letters. My maiden name has only seven letters. But you know what? The fourth letter in my maiden name, the letter smack dab in the middle of the name, is capitalized!”

      The receptionist's eyes got big and she said, “Oh!”

      She probably did not deserve that even though it was a crappy question to ask. And I had promised myself to never say, “Back where I come from” but I sure was thinking it that day, “Back where I come from there are people with with much more difficult names than mine! Some have no vowels in them! And we try, out of respect, to pronounce those names, and we listen as the people correct us, and then we try harder to pronounce them the right way.” And of course, that's an exaggerration – it was not until I myself was the target of this bigotry in the doctor's office in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, that I vowed from that day forward to always treat a person's name with respect.

      When December came along, the C-section was rescheduled for December 4^th – it was more convenient for the doctor. So Amanda was born a week and a day before her due date. She did have a little look of surprise on her face when she emerged – but otherwise Amanda was just fine. So we all survived this adventure – even the doctor and his receptionist.

108 20150418 The Bartlesville OB