Friday, October 17, 2008

Happy Birthday, FTS

Future Trauma Surgeon is 16 today.

She was born via C-Section because she was a footling breech. My water broke, I went to the hospital, her heart tones were good but the OB doc had a hunch she'd flipped so he did an U/S and he was right - she'd flipped and had her head up against my ribs.

Having a C-Section with an epidural was a very strange sensation. I could feel them rummaging around in there, and felt her weight lifted out of me when she was born.

She was a tiny wee thing, just 6lbs 12oz. She had big eyes and a scruffy little mop of fair hair. She was well for the first 6 weeks, and then got sick. We went home to England, and thanks to the sllooooooooow moving NHS, she spent a lot of her first year in a hospital with nephritis - she had a duplicated collecting system on her right kidney that had a different drain rate than the main kidney and it got infected. All the time. Porfessor Moriquand at Addenbrooke's performed a partial right nephrectomy 6 days before her first birthday and she hasn't had any issues since then - except for a big scar on her side, which doesn't bother her.

She's smart; smarter than I could ever hope to be. She's an Honor and High Honor roll student, and she knows what she wants to be. One of my proudest moments was when she came to college with me and we went down to the cadaver lab. She didn't flinch, and before I knew it she was in the abdominal cavity, identifying organs. 15 years old, poking around in a dead guys guts like it wasn't anything gross or gory or macarbe. Spectacular.

Happy birthday, Future Trauma Surgeon. There is no doubt in my mind that one day soon (for me, anyway. I know it seems like a long way off for you right now) you WILL be known as 'Doctor' and you WILL achieve your goal.

I love you, and I am incredibly proud to not only know you, but to call you my daughter. Happy Birthday, chickie.

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