It was no more than a 20 minute span from the time I was rolled into the delivery room to the time Zoey came into the world. In that time I went from a normal person 23 weeks pregnant to a frantic mother with no idea in the world what just happened. In that time at least 8 nurses and one doctor came into the room, one doctor who is still mostly a stranger but will always be very close to my heart.
I don't know what Dr. Peter Drewes likes to do in his spare time, I don't know what his favorite food is, how he came to be where he is today, or where he hopes to be someday. I don't really know anything about him other than the fact that he saved mine and my baby's life in a split second.
He's smart and he obviously studied very meticulously through his years of school. In a moment of crucial decision, he knew exactly how to make a 1 cm cut in my cervix, allowing just enough room for my baby's head, which came out last instead of first, to slip out. Not to mention that before that he knew exactly how to pull her out breach without any more serious damage than some bruises on her teeny legs.
He knew while wheeling me to the OR when I was shaking from cold and shock and who knows what else and sobbing to myself how foolish I had been to run that morning, that he needed to look me in my stranger eyes and tell me with all the firm compassion of a loving father that it wasn't my fault and I needed to stop saying that right now.
He knew what to tell me about the cut to my cervix, a cut he had never had to make in all his years as a delivery doctor and he also knew to tell me that he didn't have the answers, but he was going to help me. So tenderly, so straightforwardly so that even in my wretched and woeful state as my premature baby slept one floor above, I felt calm and trusting.
He of course didn't know what to say when Zoey died two days later. But he knew that he needed to visit me the next morning and hold my hand and tell me, tears in his eyes, how very sincerely sorry he was.
I wrote him a thank you note (how could I not? He saved me and my baby doing something he had only ever read about before) and when I went for my 6 week checkup, he answered all of our scared, worried and exhausted questions. He spoke to us like we were adults but comforted us like we were his own children. He mentioned the note as he was leaving and said, "You will be a great mom."
If I only he knew how much that comment meant to me then and now!
I may have been the first person Dr. Drewes had to make cervical cut for, but I was definitely not the first grieving mother he comforted; nonetheless, he made me and Billy feel like we were his most important priority and not just one on a list of mourning parents. I'm eternally grateful for his knowledge and quick thinking, but was even more impressed and thankful for his sincerity, realism and tenderness. Every doctor should try and be like Dr. Peter Drewes!
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