The Dreaded Question

The journey to residency was full of major changes for us.  It started in the last year of medical school.  During the fourth year of medical-school hopeful young doctors all over the country (and in a few others) go through the dreaded process of Match.  Match sucks.  It is essentially speed dating for doctors in which they hope to be matched with the perfect residency program.  Each doctor interviews at several residency programs, they rank each other, and if the residency wants the doctor & the doctor ranks the residency highest, then a match is made.  Match is announced in March and residency starts by July. 

For us this process was the bane of my existence last year.  Doc had a ton of interview offers.  We decided to cap the speed dating at 12 interviews.  The interviews include an informal dinner followed by a full day of interviews at the hospital.  The most shocking thing we discovered about the process of becoming a pediatrician is that your life is no longer your own, and it is no longer private.  Doctors have no filter, so when sitting at a table full of them I’ve come to expect what are normally deemed inappropriate questions to become common place. 

The most popular question is of course about how many kids we have.  Not “do you have any children?” but “how many children do you have?”  There is nothing more embarrassing than sitting at a table full of the worlds most fertile people (serious we know a pediatrician with 8 kids) and saying that we don’t have any children.  You can see the assumptions go around the table: “must be something wrong with the marriage” or “she must be frigid”.  The question is always followed by my husband or me trying to delicately explain, without going into detail, that we would love to have children but haven’t yet been successful. 

Eventually we used this question to inquire about healthcare and child care options provided by the program.  We would simply respond with, “we are looking forward to starting our family very soon.”  Most of the time this response satisfied people’s curiosity.  There is always the exceptional individual that doesn’t catch on though.  We actually had a doctor inform us that “no one trusts a pediatrician that doesn’t have kids. You need to have them so you can have street cred.”  WOW!  How does one respond to this?  I mean everyone is a child at least once in their lives, so that is some experience.  Childhood is a pretty well documented stage of life; med-school should have illuminated a good deal of process.  Not to mention the moral ambiguity present in having children simply so people will trust you!  Then I started thinking about gynecologists.  No one questions a male gynecologist, but he lacks the body parts and the personal experience of his expertise.  So, a pediatrician that doesn’t have children right out of med-school seems a lot less awkward when compared to a gynecologist that has NEVER had a uterus even after 30 years of practice, right? 

Needless to say, we didn’t rank that program very highly at all!