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An extraordinary thing happened last night. I called my friend Weifang to see if she was still scheduled to defend her dissertation on August 30th. She says to me, "Oh! Good timing! We are preparing to leave for the hospital." She'd been in labor all day and was putting it off. I said, "well, shouldn't you get off the phone and go???" She was completely nonchalant, "oh, I don't want to go to the hospital, so I'll talk for a while." So for twenty minutes we chat, and I find out she's postponed her defense until November. Finally I say again, "Are you sure you don't want to go?" She relented, "Yes, probably I should. My husband wants me to go."
It's the closest I've ever been to being present at someone's birth. And even with all that distance between DC and New York, I was nervous as hell. I could hardly sleep, thinking of her giving birth.