Editor’s note: This story was originally published in 2022. In light of new discussions and developments related to reproductive rights, HuffPost Personal is resharing it.
One morning this past December, I woke up early to listen to judges with lifetime appointments question lawyers in a process that may ultimately rob people of their reproductive freedom. And week after week since then, I continue to hear judges and lawyers and politicians speak on issues they have no business speaking on ― as far away from people and their real lives as voices from another planet.
During these moments, I think of a little girl in an exam room I met many years ago.
She was my patient. She was 11.
It was my first year in practice doing bread-and-butter primary care. Sophia’s mom had brought her in for stomach pain. When I got to her menstrual history, her mom said Sophia had gotten her period but then it had stopped. I reassured her and said sometimes at the start of menstruation, there can be some irregularity and that is not uncommon at all. The mother then left the room and it was just me and Sophia.
She was quiet and soft-spoken — a par-for-the-course, awkward adolescent who was uncomfortable interacting with an adult. She answered my questions with one-word responses and didn’t quite know where to look.
When I left the room, I heard the booming voice in my head of an ER doctor who had trained me: “Don’t be the ass who doesn’t order the pregnancy test.” This was one of her clinical teaching pearls: Many young docs will order the blood tests, the ultrasound, the CT scans, but skip the most obvious, most basic test and spend tens of thousands of dollars to work up a patient when the “diagnosis” is actually pregnancy.
Hence, don’t be the ass who doesn’t order the pregnancy test. So I ordered it.
A few minutes later, our medical assistant came to me, panicked, and handed me a positive test. “Run it again,” I asked her, agape. She ran it again. Positive. “Run it again,” I sputtered — to buy some time and gather my wits and hope by some miracle it would produce a different result. Positive.
She was my patient. She was 11. She was pregnant.
I sat Sophia’s mom down in another room and quietly explained to her that the pregnancy test came back positive.
I had to repeat myself multiple times in various ways for her to comprehend that Sophia was pregnant. Shock, tears, a cellphone call. Soon a breathless dad showed up, followed by a somber…
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