JAMA | 2019
Driving in the Minivan-Life as a Pediatrician and Parent of a Child With Disabilities.
Abstract
As I drive the family minivan, with hip-hop music blasting against my sanity, I look in the rearview mirror at my daughter snug in her car seat and entranced with the world passing by her window. We head to our fourth medical appointment of the day, and the radio is tuned to the local hip-hop station. The base thumps and vibrates as we roll along, accompanied by the shrill highpitched feedback of her hearing aid mold that is just slightly out of place. My daughter can’t hear—she is deaf. They tell me that she might hear low and loud noises, so our preferred NPR station has been replaced by music with a thrumming base. During my pregnancy with my third daughter, my greatest worry at the time was how we were going to fit all of our kids and their car seats into a single vehicle. It’s laughable now. I was healthy, the unborn baby was healthy, and except for a seemingly minor cold early on, everything went smoothly. We surrendered the last shreds of our former “cool” and young selves, bought the minivan, loaded it with car seats and eagerly waited to meet the final member of our family. My labor progressed quickly, then stopped—the baby, stuck, was successfully repositioned. She was born with the most adorable dimples and wide eyes but with a face swollen and covered with petechiae from her abnormal presentation. We named her Odessa, which