Deliver Me: Three Friends, Mothers And Doctors

Allison: I always wanted to be a mom, but I don’t know that anything can truly prepare you for the balancing act of being a doctor and a mom. Obstetrics is definitely not a 9 to 5 job. I didn’t have my kids until I was a little bit older – I had my first when I was 33 and my second at 35 – mostly because I wanted to be financially stable and be able to hire people to help. (laughs)

Becoming a mother was even more challenging than I thought it was going to be. My first son was three months premature, so he was in the hospital for six weeks after birth. That was a really hard time for me.

I was always drawn to women’s health issues, and I found obstetrics so uplifting. I wasn’t interested in those more depressing fields of medicine, where people are always dying from this or that.

I met Alane and Yvonne when I moved to Los Angeles in 1995 to do my residency. They were two of twelve of us in the class, working a total of 100 to 120 hours a week for four years. We were like instant friends. People call us “Charlie’s Angels” because we’re young and there are three of us - an Asian girl, a brunette and a blonde, just like in the movie. (laughs)

We trained at a county hospital, which was like a war zone. We were running from room to room catching babies – we delivered 20 to 30 babies a day, compared to now, where we deliver about 40 per month. It was very much an environment where we had to stick together to survive.