The Doctor Really Thought She Might Have Killed Him, Given The Chance

"I heard this from an old client who was an obstetrician. He was telling me stories about when he used to deliver babies at people's' homes way back in the day.

He was telling me about his son and I asked if he delivered his own son. He said yes and told me the most amazing, heartbreaking, and heartwarming story.

In the late '40s, the town ambulance/hearse/taxi pulls up at his little independent practice out in the boonies of Illinois. A volunteer firefighter comes in and says they have a lady in labor and they won't make it to the hospital which is over an hour away. He tells them to bring her in. He delivers the baby and mom passes out. They clean her up. They clean up the baby. And all seems normal.

Mom wakes up and the doctor comes in to give her the baby. She starts screaming, 'Get it away from me!'

He's all confused and can't figure out what's going on. She keeps flailing around and screaming that she doesn't want to look at 'it.'

The doc takes the baby out and comes back. She's calmer but still looks frantic or terrified. He talks to her and she just stares at him like he's got nine heads. He finally asks, 'Well, what do you want me to do with your son?'

The mom stays silent for a long time and as he's getting up to leave, she quietly says, 'Can you get rid of him?'

The doc asks what she means. She says, 'You know. Maybe just make him go to sleep so he won't wake up.'

He said it took everything for him to not lose his temper right then and there. He went off on a tangent about how much he loved his work working with all the new mothers in all these little towns full of 'salt of the earth' people with great family values. On and on about how happy it made him bringing life into the world and this woman wanted him to murder her baby.

He asked why and she ends up saying that her husband is in the military and its not his baby. She couldn't let him find out. He kind of understood her rationale for not letting her husband know, but murder? So he suggested family, an orphanage, and other options back then. She said no to all of them because she 'couldn't risk this coming back to haunt her.'

He told her he'd see what he could do and he let her rest. The next day, he tried to talk to her again and she was just more adamant about 'making it sleep.' She said she wanted to hold her baby. He refused since he thought she'd try to kill him herself. She went nuts.

In the end, he sent her home and told her that he'd given the baby to his brother who was a pastor and was unable to have children. He promised he'd never tell anyone (even the kid) who she was.

Then he said he 'taught her a lesson.' If she ever found herself pregnant again, she would come to him whether it was her husband's or not. If he ever found out she went elsewhere, he'd tell everyone the story. He said he did this because he was afraid she'd get knocked up and kill the next one. And he knew he'd find out if she went elsewhere because he was the only baby doctor for five towns around and knew other docs at the hospitals.

She never had any other kids (as far as the doc knew - and he said he did check up on her once or twice with his colleagues). Supposedly, she died from an overdose a few years later.

The doctor and his wife raised that baby as their own son (his wife wasn't able to have kids - the pastor brother was BS just to make her think he'd already given the baby away). He eventually told his son a very watered down version of the story when the kid was older. The kid ended up becoming a plastic surgeon and has like 9 kids of his own. He's doing very well, he's very happy, and he probably never would have had a shot had that small-town fireman tried to press on to the hospital and wound up delivering the kid in the middle of nowhere. He was convinced she would have delivered and then smothered the baby by the time they got to the hospital."