Obstetrix(2)

During the expert testimony on HG, I’d looked at the jurors. During voir dire, all the women had been asked if they had children, if they’d been pregnant, if they’d experienced morning sickness themselves. There was an older woman who had four children and two grandchildren who kept looking at me, her face set, and I felt a lurch every time she did, convinced that she was already planning to find me guilty. It wasn’t like what I did was in any sort of doubt.

I was wrong about her. I found this out later, long after the words not guilty had sent shock waves down through my feet. She’d been the one who’d refused to convict me. Who’d held firm until everyone else had come around.

Another interviewer asked about my bedside manner and charting practices, and I was relieved at the change in subject. Then someone else went back to the trial. “You know a lot of the women we care for are from North Dakota…”

“I would be delighted to continue to care for women from North Dakota,” I said. “My quarrel was never with the women of North Dakota.”

“We’ll be in touch,” they finally said, and the woman who’d met me in the lobby walked me out.

Back in my car, I saw I had a text from my father. He still lived in Minot. When I moved to Minnesota, he’d come out to look over some senior housing options close to me, only to suffer a case of extreme sticker shock and go back to Minot and the little postwar bungalow where I’d grown up. And to be fair, his friends were all in Minot—mostly at the VFW post where he hung out almost every afternoon. How’d it go??? his text said. I’d told him about the interview during our weekly chat.

I decided this was too complicated to try to explain by text and called him back. “They’re not going to hire me,” I said.

“Oh, Lizzie,” he said. (Only people who changed my diapers are allowed to call me Lizzie. Mom died in 2012, so at this point that means one person.) “You sound so sure, but you never think people like you.”

“No, it wasn’t that. It was the way they looked at me when we talked about the trial.”

“That came up?”

“Dad. Of course it came up.” I took a long breath and tried to sort out my perennial impostor’s syndrome from my actual impressions of the interview. “They’re going to come up with some reasonable excuse, like that my vibes were off, or I seemed a little cold, but the sad truth is, it’s hard for doctors to admit that I didn’t do anything wrong, and still wound up on trial for something I very definitely did.”

“Doesn’t Minnesota—”

“Abortion is totally legal here! But even here, other doctors want to convince themselves that it wouldn’t have happened to them because they’d have documented their decision-making just a little bit better. Or sought a second opinion, or a third opinion, or talked to the ethics committee, or personally called up the attorney general of North Dakota to drop by the hospital, or who even knows, the point is, they want to believe that this could never happen to them, and that means they need a reason to believe that what happened to me was because I was a bad doctor.”

My voice was getting a little ragged around the edges.

“You’ll find something soon,” my dad said.

“Belleville Options Specialty Clinic probably still wants to hire me,” I said. “The weather might be better.”

“You’d be even farther from home.”

“Minot isn’t home anymore, Dad. Not for me.”

We sat there silently for a minute and I pulled myself together and said, “Well, I basically just called to vent, so thank you.”

“Anytime, Liz.”

“I’ll talk to you Sunday. Love you.”

“Love you too.”

The phone rang within seconds, and I picked up thinking it was my dad calling back, but instead an unfamiliar voice said, “Dr. Gwinn? My name is Sarah Smith. I’m with the Prairie Spring Home Birth Collective. We’re mostly midwives, but we’re looking for an obstetrician to contract with and we heard you were looking for a job.”

This wasn’t anything I’d applied for, but I cleared my throat and sat up straight in my seat. “I am, yes,” I said. “I don’t … you do realize I haven’t ever done home births.”

“Right, right, what we’re looking for is a physician to provide backup in cases where prenatal care gets a little complicated, but not in a way that rules out a home delivery—like if a woman needs a prescription for antibiotics, say.”

Certified nurse-midwives can prescribe antibiotics, which meant this was probably a group of direct-entry midwives. You could get licensure in Minnesota to be a midwife without the nurse training, but I couldn’t remember what sort of training they required for that.

“Where did you get my number?” I asked.

“Your coworker Jennifer in Minot.” Jennifer was one of the labor nurses. I guess it made sense she might be friends with a direct-entry midwifery group. “Why don’t you just come right now?”

“Wait, to interview?”

“I’ll be honest with you, we want to hire someone quickly,” she said. “I was thinking maybe if you came over and chatted, I could reassure you about us, and get just a little bit of a feel for you.…”

“I just finished a job interview,” I said.