Magic in the Web of It

• Adoption
• Mothers
• Mother-child relations

We give up a lot to do this job. Medicine's a vocation, really. Calling it a job doesn't address the sacrifices we make. How often do we miss meals, miss sleep, or miss our families for patients? Sometimes our dedication to medicine causes us to lose our families entirely. Why, then, do we do it? We do it because medicine gives us something in return. Occasionally, that something is extraordinary. That something happened to me.

In the fall of my third year of medical school, I had the opportunity to do a rural medicine clerkship in Valentine, Nebraska, a small ranching community in the northwest corner of the state. Students who had previously worked with the doctors in Valentine each had a story to tell—everything from manic tourists to farmers kicked by a surly bovine. What would my story be?

After one week in Valentine, I had no stories to tell. The days were relatively mundane conglomerations of …