My daughter smiles now. To be fair, she’s smiled since she was a couple of weeks old, but we were never sure if it was because she was dreaming of sheep or farting in her sleep. But she smiles now, with intention; she coos, laughs low, giggle-chuckles, and shrieks with delight. What makes her smile is highly variable and changes daily. A few things work: blowing raspberries, sticking out my tongue, playing her belly like a drum, singing ba-dum ba-dum, and gasping in feigned surprise. She really likes that one. But now I get why people are addicted to babies: because making them smile gives you a temporary high, the skies open up, and the light shines into your small dark frozen heart, and you would do anything to make her smile to feel that high again.
I said to L that the high was akin to chasing the thrill of watching a whale breach. Once you’ve seen a whale from a small boat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and you’ve felt your heart stop and restart. So you keep going on whale watch tours, looking for that feeling again.
Saying that reminded me of the op-ed I never wrote. The one about whale watching teaching us excellent life lessons. So I will include it here as a measure of goodwill on this first day in May.
February through May is Whale Soup season around the Hawaiian islands. Whale soup is not as ominous as it sounds; it just means that the Northern Pacific Humpback whales congregate around Hawaii during their annual migration south from Alaska. They mate in the shallow, warm waters and give birth to their young. My wife and I used to travel to Hawaii every few years for whale soup; like I was saying, once you’ve been on a whale-watching boat in Maui, you never forget it.
I am reminded of this because ten whales washed up on New York and New Jersey's shores earlier this year, and their deaths remained a mystery. ‘Whales’ was trending in the news. But I wondered if there was some wisdom to be gleaned from all the whale-watching expeditions I’ve been on.
Lessons from whale-watching apply to both life and a career in medicine. The first time L and I went to Hawaii together, we sat on the balcony of our rental unit, scanning the water’s surface for clues. We learned from multiple television documentaries about the signs of whales nearby. The most common is the ‘puff,’ little exhalations from the whales’ blowholes that show that they’re just beneath the surface. Others include slick oil spots and frothy areas where the whale just dove deep. For whale-watching, pattern recognition and close observation are key. I like to think that this applies to life and medicine. I was always observant, but a medical career has made me more aware of changes in facial expression or posture, noting the rigidness or softness of an abdomen and seeing the amount of scar tissue adherent between organs in certain diseases. Then I could apply these observations in pattern recognition– if this, then most likely this. But also not being too blinded by the pattern to miss the zebra in a herd of horses.
What else can be gleaned by whale-watching? There is much more beneath the surface than we can see. There are thousands of whales swimming around underneath us, a whole world that is utterly different from our own. But also that when you see a whale’s tail, there’s another fifty feet of whale you don’t see. It invokes the idea that a book is more than its cover; the tip of the iceberg is just the tiniest part. Humans are like that as well. We are so much more than we seem. And being curious about the rest of it may just open up whole new worlds for you.
Female whales are over fifty feet long, and male whales are just a few feet shorter than that. Imagine meeting a whale face to face. And yet, they are called gentle giants because they are known to be the most peaceful of giants. Size is just a number. Honestly, size is just one number in a set of descriptive variables regarding human anatomy. In cancers, for instance, severity is graded by size, location, depth of invasion, and the amount of cell differentiation. Whales need not be feared for their size.
At this point, we have been on many whale-watching tours on both sides of the continent. Most tours tout a ‘money-back’ guarantee; that is, you see a whale or get your money back. Most of the time, we have seen a whale. We might spend 45 minutes getting to the location and then sit around and wait ten minutes to see the whale show up and swim alongside us for five minutes. Patience is rewarded in whale-watching and life. Sometimes you just have to wait and see.
There have been many a time when I thought I’d rather sleep in, sit on the couch, or stay warm by the radiator instead of packing a snack in a backpack and heading out into the cold, the wind, and the wet, to get on a boat and risk sea-sickness, falling off a boat, or dying. But once we got out there, we’ve never regretted it. So the last lesson is that you have to get out there; you can’t experience life from the safety of the shore.
So we jumped in, feet first, and had a baby. Most of this experience has been one that no one can describe from the sidelines. But when she smiles, wow wee. There is so much to show her, so much to teach her, and I can’t wait to see her face when she sees a whale breach for the first time.
Until next time, always go black tie.
May is Mental Health Month, and importantly, Maternal Mental Health Month, which coincides nicely with my next op-ed about post-partum care and maternal mental health in America. Until then, here’s something I’ve read recently that I thought I’d like to share:
THE NINE MONTHS OF PREGNANCY, RANKED FROM WORST TO BEST
by KRISTEN MULROONEY
Lastly, I was always an early adopter. MySpace, Tumblr, Blogger, Blogspot, I’ve had them all. I had a zine before I had a blog. So I jumped on the Substack bandwagon way before it was set to take over Medium and take down TikTok. But I’ve always had trouble with branding because I am interested in so many things. A blog about my opinions on other medical matters only peripherally interests me, and while I could talk about poop all the time, I don’t necessarily want to talk about poop all the time. What do you think? Is there something you’d like to see in this newsletter? More cartoons, more me, less me? But, as Suzanne Koven said, My favorite subject is myself. I am what I know best.