My grandmother Ruth had a gruff smoker’s voice and a cold demeanor, but she loved me. In my earliest memory of her, she's chain smoking in a rocking chair on the backyard deck, slightly bitter that she had been exiled from the living room. She was tough, and she passed away when I was 10. In my final memory of her, I am (poorly) attempting a Bach partita on my violin over her hospital bed. She was in a coma, but her arm lifted for a brief moment. At the time I thought I had miraculously woken her up, and my parents let me believe it.
My dad was born in 1942 in a small coal mining town in rural Pennsylvania. It was the sort of time and place in which little boys went hunting rabbits with long rifles for dinner, and little girls learned how to make lye soap. My grandma and grandpa were the two town doctors, save for a third who doubled as a dentist (and was well-known for hitting the whiskey bottle while performing extractions). She went to medical school in the 1930s—the only woman in her class, and one of the first to ever be admitted. And she was a damn good doctor.
She delivered every baby in that town. Her role as the town obstetrician turned problematic when my dad’s father went away to war while my grandma was late in her pregnancy. When her contractions began, she got in the car to make the long drive through the mountains to the nearest doctor in the neighboring town. It was winter and it was a long, icy drive, and her contractions began to speed up. She knew that she wasn’t going to make it. She pulled over the car and delivered my father by herself.
To be fair, I’ve had to fill in a few unknowns, because my father didn’t even know about it until relatively late in life and she wasn’t generous with the details. She was such a badass that she didn’t even go around bragging about it. If it had been me, I would have absolutely told everyone I met that I was such an incredible human that I delivered my own baby in the backseat of a car in sub-zero temperatures and drove back home bleeding and nursing an infant (no big deal). I'm bragging about it right now on her behalf.
My father’s father passed away at a young age due to a brain aneurysm. My grandma continued to run the business by herself in the attic of their house. She never turned away a patient in need, whether or not they could afford medical care. She raised five children, kept a clean house, made breakfast, lunch, and dinner for her family, performed surgery on injured coal miners, often without payment, and I’m certain she put up with a whole lot of sexist nonsense. The woman was a superhero, I’m sure of it.
This story is my submission to #WomanPower - read all about it here!