This story takes place at a time in my life when things were pretty much as good as I ever could've hoped them to be, and yet I still managed to make such a colossal mistake I risked throwing everything away. Let me explain...
My wife, Andrea, and I met in undergrad our senior year, started dating, and got married three years later. She had always wanted to be a writer, while I've been predestined to be a doctor my entire life. My father was an obstetrician, and while he always told me that when I grew up I could be any KIND of doctor I wanted, the idea of me pursuing a non-medical career would've been grounds for estrangement. At the time, I thought he was just looking out for me and my future, but now that I'm older and have a child of my own, I fully realized how fucked up it actually was.
But that's water under the bridge, as I ended up following his plan to a T and barely ever pushed back or rebelled. In fact, despite being supposedly free to choose whatever medical field I wanted, I ended up following in his footsteps and also became an obstetrician. I did take a slightly different approach and pursue a dual OB/GYN background, mainly so I could have more flexibility, but in the end I was basically following his career path, more or less. For those of you who aren't familiar with the specific fields, an obstetrician deals solely with pregnancy, meaning pregnant women and delivering babies. A gynecologist deals with women's health, and specifically with non-pregnant women. So despite seeming like there's an obvious overlap between the two, there is also a clear separation.
In choosing my field (or fields), I knew there would always be some level of joking and comments from friends and even strangers that came with it. Even growing up, my friends would make jokes all the time about my dad being a gynecologist, even though ironically he wasn't (again, he was solely an obstetrician). But since I've gone down this career path as well, I've already heard every comment in the book. Most often, it's people asking me how I ended up an OB/GYN, and it's usually accompanied with some skepticism where I can't help but feel like I need to prove that I'm not simply perverted. Thankfully, I've always had the very succinct explanation that I was following in my father's footsteps, and that almost always suffices.
I've had numerous friends, some of whom I'm really close with, and some whom I barely know, express their extreme jealously and explain how much they'd love to just examine pussy all day long. They'll ask me all sorts of questions about what it's like, what goes on during a checkup, and how women usually react to different parts of the exam. For the most part, I'll try to humor them without going into too much detail. Obviously, HIPAA is a huge concern and I would never divulge anything I wasn't legally allowed to, but that really only covers information about specific people. Regardless, when we're having a conversation like this, without fail they'll always ask if I ever get sexually aroused during an exam, and if not, how do I manage to suppress that? My answer is always the same, and it's that I'm 100% focused on making sure my patient is healthy and getting the care she needs, and letting anything sexual get in the way of that would be a huge failing on my part. So I just don't let it happen.
Now that's what I tell them, and it's somewhat true, I guess. I absolutely do take the health of my patients to be the single most critical aspect of any time I spend examining them. But there's no way I can honestly say there isn't sometimes a sexual aspect to it as well. To put it simply, I love female anatomy. I love everything about it, and there's no doubt my fascination with it at least partially contributed to me choosing the field of gynecology. I love looking at vaginas. I love feeling them. I even love their smell. And while I would never admit this out loud, not even to my wife, I take extreme pleasure it doing my job everyday because I get to help people and make sure they're healthy, but ALSO because I get to be up close and personal with one of the most beautiful things in the world, female genitalia.
I knew this when I chose to become a gynecologist, and I've know this ever since. But where do I draw the line between enjoying my job, and enjoying my job TOO much? Like I said, I've never discussed the pleasure I get from doing my job with anyone else, most likely because deep down I know I'm in the wrong. But I debate internally all the time whether or not I'm actually doing something immoral, and it's something I really struggle with. I'll try to rationalize that as long as it's not overtly sexual, then there's nothing wrong with it. But is it even possible to admire a beautiful woman spread-eagled in front of you and not have it be sexual? I don't think anyone would ever buy that. I know I would never have sex with a patient, and I know I would never perform an act during an exam that wasn't medically warranted, so if that's the case, then how could I be acting immorally? But even if I never do those two things, there's still a third way where I could cause huge potential harm, and it's exactly what I explained to my friends when they asked. The biggest harm of all would be getting distracted and not doing my job correctly. And so, often times I'll tell myself that as long as I focus and make absolutely sure I'm giving the utmost care and attention to the medical aspects of the exam, then any extracurricular enjoyment I get out of it is harmless. At least that's what I tell myself, but I'm definitely too chicken-shit to ever try to explain that to another human being.
So that's a quick peek inside my head as to how I ended up in the medical profession that I did. As to how I ended up WHERE I did, that has to do with a move we made shortly after our son Trent was born. Andrea and I had held off having kids for awhile, but once we started approaching thirty, we decided it was time. We ended up getting pregnant relatively quickly and Andrea gave birth to our son right after she hit the big 3-0. It didn't take long in our new role as parents before we realized just how big an endeavor raising a child was. I was working full-time, and pretty long hours at that, and Andrea was really struggling, especially with the loneliness. So after reevaluating our life and what needed to be done, we decided to up and move to Andrea's hometown in Oklahoma, where her parents still lived. She wanted to have Trent's grandparents be a big part of his life, and in her eyes there was no one better suited to give us a much-needed hand in raising him than her own two parents. I certainly wasn't going to say no, as it seemed like a great solution for everyone involved.
So we up and relocated to a very rural part of Oklahoma. First off, it was quite a culture shock for someone like me who had lived exclusively in urban or suburban areas his whole life. But on top of that, it meant I was likely to end up starting my own practice. There happened to be a need for a gynecologist in the area, and so while I had spent the majority of my working career thus far on the OB side of OB/GYN, this move was presenting me with an opportunity to switch to the other half. I decided that the opportunity made sense, and so I dove right in and started my own gynecological practice right in town.