***ED BABY STAT***

It was around 130AM. My pager rang off with one of my more dreaded and more chaotic calls somewhere partway through the second half of my fellowship – the ER needed help, we didn’t know how bad, but they were calling. Two of the nurse practitioners I was working with that night along with our NICU nurses and a respiratory therapist sprinted down the stairs, unsure of what was going on, hoping it was just a baby accidentally born at home that needed an evaluation and admission… We ran into the ER, as my Attending that night was busy upstairs in the midst of another code, and were met by the Pediatric Emergency Medicine Fellow, “Hey, they’ve been doing CPR on a baby born at home, it’s very premature, we don’t know how much… They’re coming.” We braced ourselves and at 136AM after I quickly tried to brief our team on the uncertainty racing in, a small human was carried in by EMS and laid down on the radiant warmer…

*****

In 2013, I left California forever in pursuit of training to become a Physician. That journey took me far away from my home state and to new adventures throughout the country but also through eclectic opportunities in cultural immersion and learning, beyond what I needed to know to be a Doctor. But, one big thing, I really loved to do before New Orleans whisked me away was something that seems quirky to some, random to others, but obvious to my close friends growing up: Country Line Dancing!

Growing up, my best friend Anthony lived during his college years less than 100 yards from a country bar in Davis, California. After I graduated college and before I left for medical school, I would spend many nights over the course of a few years staying over and going line dancing. I think it’s very very important that everyone keeps up a hobby outside of family and career, especially those of us that have become entirely consumed by things like Medicine. Alas, despite my preconceived notion of Louisiana and then Texas for my Residency training, once I left California, it was surprisingly hard to find places to enjoy this hobby, and so, just like that, It stopped. Very sad.

In 2023, ten years later, I wandered back to Fellowship Training, and this blog began it’s transformation beyond the simple idea of myself as a Nomad/Locum Tenens, and grew to where it is now. All of a sudden, I found myself one morning waking up in Kansas City, Missouri. Woah.

Well, it turns out the Midwest is a great place for country line dancing! I discovered there wasn’t just one but two really large country halls that dwarfed the places i went dancing growing up, and in October of 2023, I competed in my first Country Line Dance competition. And, while I didn’t win, being a runner up for the finalist round amongst a whole crowd of competitors averaging 10 years younger than myself, wasn’t too bad of a feeling. The music changed afterwards to open music, and a song came on that I hadn’t danced to since California, in 2013. My eyes closed for a second, and opened up to my legs sliding across the dance floor, not missing a beat – it was as if the last decade was a dream, and I could feel my body fall back into a trance. Without thinking, a left-right-left, quarter-turn, sailor step, all sprung out at once, as if unleashed from a cage… I was dancing, and it was like I had never stopped.

One night, on the dance floor after working a long 24 hour shift and taking a “post-call” nap, I joined my group of “regulars” now back out on the dance floor – something that has become a weekly occurrence, schedule permitting. When the music changed, so did we, jumping back out onto the dance floor, excited and full of electricity, and an old dance we hadn’t done in some time popped back up… Not a single one of us stopped, not a single body couldn’t remember every single movement.

The idea of “muscle memory” has always fascinated me. The idea that parts of the fibers that make up our bodies that don’t have a ready conscious for us to tap into, can so quickly acquiesce to feelings we once shared with them. Certainly it’s our subconscious that has stored memories deep into our hippocampus and then extrapolated them back to multiple regions of our brain to work on autopilot. I am fascinated by the moments of pause I feel if I am in the middle of a routine task i have done thousands of times, such as tie a neck tie, to think about what i’m doing, only to immediately forget how to do it. Yet, letting go of my thought process and trusting my body to perform the action, ends up in a perfect double winsor. We all form memories subconsciously, but the concept of “active learning” or directed focus at memory storage, creates stronger and more pungent connections we can draw upon later. But, to connect this with how a muscle creates a memory, always feels magical, mystical and frankly, not-scientific. I have consciously not sought out understanding of why this happens, because I enjoy the magic.

*****

At 136AM a small 6-700 gram baby was placed down on the warmer, at 138AM, I had him intubated. I don’t remember what went through my head at that moment. I don’t remember the conscious decisions and thought I had into the process, but I knew to trust myself, to trust my gut and not overthink my feelings, and slide into “muscle memory.”

So when you become worried about something, or start to overthink something you’ve done a million times, I believe it is the best time to let go. It is the best time to tell yourself, “it’s just like riding a bike,” even if you don’t know how to ride a bike… Because, somewhere, deep in your psyche, or buried in the synapses of your brain, or somehow magically intertwined with the actin and myosin molecular chains that create muscle contractions, is “muscle memory.“