Chapter 23: Ariel Tranh, M.D.

Dr. Tranh was the colleague of Dr. Russo, who accepted Lara as a new patient based on his referral. The night before their appointment, Ariel studied Russo’s report, along with the other material Russo had obtained for her from Lana’s lawyer, including the obstetrics report and the abstract of medical records, and finally a copy of the medical center’s response to the Joint Commission complaints.

Fortunately, Ariel was a rapid reader. But some of the content brought her up short. She stopped and re-read some paragraphs, disbelieving what she saw.

“It’s been forever since my obstetrics training, but, reviewing this is making me furious. They fired all their nurses in the department? For whistleblowing? No wonder Phil Russo wanted me to see Lara. What a nightmare.”

First Appointment

“Thank you for seeing me, Dr. Tranh.”

“Lara, I always accept referrals from Phil Russo. As far as I’m concerned, his judgement I respect* more than anyone else I know in our line of work. He’s sent me some written materials about you, but I would really like to hear the whole story from your perspective.

“With your new baby, you live alone, or with other adults? Let’s start with that, and tell me about the baby’s father.”

“Ah, OK. Well, for years now, I’ve been working with a woman my age named Celia. Jointly, she and I run a Human Resources department. One day, at a barbecue, I met her husband, Davis. It was like a bomb went off in my head, because he is impossibly gorgeous. And, because he knew a lot about me from Celia, and she and I are very similar in our looks and our bodies, he was smitten with me as well.

So, we started socializing with each other, and very quickly, and with Celia’s participation, our relationship became intimate. That is, sexual. We found out quickly that Davis was fully able to make love, uh, screw both of us, one after the other, and leave us both fully satisfied. He’s just, well, amazing that way.

Celia and I aren’t intimately attracted to each other, so one of us waits while the other climaxes.* Sometimes she goes first, other times she goes second.

“It seemed like, in just a few days, they further welcomed me into their home to live permanently. We all share a big king-sized bed for fun and for sleeping. So I’m part of a polyamorous triad, for a long time now.

“Apparently Celia is infertile, but Davis has good little swimmers. Once we figured out a way for my situation and security to be properly established, I agreed to be the mother of a child for the three of us to raise, and soon I was pregnant.

“Like any woman expecting her first baby, I read everything I could find about labor and delivery. On the internet mixed in with practical advice there’s all kinds of birthing fashions and fads. Mothers are coaxed to have drug free deliveries, use midwives or doulas instead of doctors, home births, water births, and so on. Hell, there’s probably some idiot pushing gluten-free births.”

Lara didn’t really sound amused. More, grim and bitter.

“Nobody talks realistically about how incredibly painful trying to push an eight pound baby out of your body can be. Like I just said, you’re pressured to have a ‘natural’ childbirth, and the experience is somehow romanticized.

“I guess most women manage to endure the process and then go back and do it again, to have a sibling for the first born. A great many of them even do it without drugs. Unbelievable.

“MY labor was HORRIFIC. Like many (most?) women, I asked for anesthesia, an ‘epidural’ they call it, after nine or ten hours of severe contractions. It didn’t work, or they didn’t do it right, or something.

“It was by far the worst experience of my life. Nurses, doctors, they all just left me. I got weaker, and weaker. Every few minutes, I would convulse with an intense contraction. More awful hours of useless pain passed.

“I thought of women’s graves, those who died in childbirth, with little skeletons discovered inside the pelvis bones of those grown women’s remains. I was not going to live, my baby’s dead little body was going to be stuck inside my corpse, forever.