On Fatherhood and Ebola

My daughter was born amidst the worst Ebola outbreak inhuman history.  Throughout Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Nigeria the Ebola virus is wreaking havoc.  It spreads through contact with bodily fluids.  It can cause you to bleed out of every hole in your body.  It has a mortality rate of 60-90%.  It has killed an estimated 700 people, including 60 healthcare workers.  There is no cure. It recently made it to Lagos, Nigeria - the largest city in Africa and a major hub for international travel.  Public health infrastructure in the region is shoddy at best and health officials are having trouble containing spread of the infection.  It’s already an epidemic and it’s looking to get a lot worse.  This was the world my daughter, Audrey, was born into.

However, be it through Providence or just luck, she was born in Texas to two parents who have never even been to the region.  Insulated by geography and a strong public health infrastructure in the United States, I do not have to worry about her contracting the virus.  And yet, I sort of do. 

So I am a 1^st year pediatric resident at a large children’s hospital in Texas.  Along with my MD, I have a master’s degree in public health and so have a reasonable understanding of epidemiology and infectious disease response systems.  Intellectually, I know the minuscule  risk of her ever contracting the disease and yet emotionally, I still feel unease.

To understand my feeling of unease, I first want to understand all these new parental feelings I’m experiencing. 

We’ll start here: I am really, really, really fond of my baby.  She wiggles around, farts, eats, and makes weird grunting noises when she feeds.  And it’s incredible.  I love her.  The interesting thing to me is that, prior to her existence, I did not feel this feeling (I felt abstract love for a future, possible child, but not specific love for this child).  So my love for her and this feeling I have came into existence with her existence.  Moreover, my love for her did not take from feeling of love toward anybody else in my life.  So the new measure of love was added to the love I already feel for everyone else in my life.  Therefore, I can conclude my love for my daughter is both new to my socio-emotional identity AND added to my previous amount of felt love.  Or we can say I feel both a new type of love and more love than I have felt before in my life. 

Furthermore, I love her and feel a strong aversion for her discomfort.  We’ll call this feeling risk (a negative feeling from understanding there is potential for her to experience discomfort).  We can treat this feeling the same way we treated love above.  So this feeling of risk is both new to me AND makes me feel more risk than I have ever felt before. 

This is the problem: with love comes risk. I realized this first when I got married.  When it was just me by myself, although I didn’t want harm to come to me, I did not feel as much of this feeling of risk.  For example if I was an action hero, the super villain would have no one he could threaten to throw in a pool of badger-sharks (barks) if I did not surrender (this is just for the sake of example, of course I would maybe surrender for you mom…).  When I married Rachel (wife), all the sudden I had this really valuable externality, and I started feeling unease over situations I had not previously.  Here's a more real life example: I’ve desired to be a missionary doctor for a long time, but getting married has made me rethink the kind of contexts we might look to live in.  Because of my love for my wife, this new feeling of risk was added to my life. 

Now I have a little, wiggly girl that I am responsible for.  Now the feeling of risk is huge! Greater in magnitude and in power than I’ve ever felt in my whole life. 

Which brings me back to Ebola.  Yes, we are many degrees of separation from the virus.  Yes, the chances of her catching it are tiny.  And yet I love her, and therefore I want what’s best for her.  Moreover, I love her, and therefore I do not want what’s bad for her.  She was born into a world where Ebola runs rampant, and wars are multiplying.  I don’t want her to experience these things.  I don’t even want her to face the CHANCE of experiencing these things.  And yet I love her and cannot imagine her not being here.  In this present world.  With me. I wouldn’t have it any other way. 

Such is the odd intellectual-emotional tension, the strange cognitive dissonance, of love.  My feeling love means my feeling risk.  It’s the steep ridge of an emotional mountain all parents walk.  I suppose I am just beginning to step out onto it.  

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Welcome to the blog.  As I said, I’m a 1^st year resident Pediatrician. More importantly, I'm husband to an incredible wife and dad to an incredible daughter.  Here I hope to periodically discuss both the science and experience of being a parent.   Along the way I hope to include my non-expert interests in theology, politics, philosophy, current events, 90s cartoons, and dude stuff.  I like to think of this as a scientifically-based mommy blog for bros – meaning there will be no Pinterest references ever.