I still had two years of medical school. I'll tell you a story, which I've told many people. My first rotation was on the obstetrics ward and when I checked in, the nurse took me aside and said, 'Dr Fischbach' – she had a smile on her face because she knew I must be a wise-guy scientist who didn't know anything about medicine – she said, 'I'm going to assign you a patient and follow her closely. Take her blood pressure every few minutes and listen to the fetal heart with an otoscope more frequently and if you can't hear the fetal heart or if the blood pressure goes up above 180, I want you to get down to the nurses' station and get me right away.'

So, I did that every five minutes and I thought I was pretty good at it. This patient was manic and crazy and screaming, cursing her husband for putting her in this position. Crawling up the walls, I had to make her lie down many times. And suddenly she became quiet, and I could not hear the fetal heart, so I screamed outside the door and ran down and got the nurse. She walked back calmly, and she looked at me and then looked at the bed and threw back the covers and said, 'Dr Fischbach, you're listening in the wrong place.' And there was the baby out in the bed, between the mother's legs. I'll never forget that moment. The woman, of course, was very calm. My chief job was to wheel her into the emergency room so we could cut the umbilical cord. I begged them to fail me and let me off that rotation, but they wouldn't do it. That was the beginning of my clinical experience, which turned out to be terrific and when I did leave medicine finally, I missed it.