< Previous page
Next page >

It crushed her when the doctors said they wanted to keep her overnight, at least, and maybe through the weekend. Her contractions were too frequent, and they lasted for up to a minute each. Aside from the concerns about Anna's prospects, the doctors worried about Susan. If she progressed into labor, her uterus could rupture along the incision. If that happened, she might need an emergency hysterectomy.

"I don't know which comes first, the anxiety or the contractions," she said. "There's so much to be worried about."

Finally, though, the new medicine began to stabilize Susan's contractions, and she was discharged the next day. On her way out, Susan bumped into Chescheir, who offered a beeper number and encouragement to call at any time.

Susan hoped she wouldn't need it, and she and Jason really wished they could finish out the pregnancy seeing local doctors, driving to local hospitals. But after some discussion, the couple decided they needed to settle on one doctor, one with special expertise.

Chescheir had that expertise.

Just months before Anna was diagnosed with spina bifida, Chescheir had begun learning Vanderbilt's fetal surgery. The medical school at UNC-CH aspired to become the fourth hospital in the nation performing the surgery. And so Chescheir was tapped to join a small, elite group of surgeons with the skill.

She was the perfect doctor for the Williamsons.

Honing a specialty

Nancy Chescheir became a doctor almost accidentally. She started out at UNC in 1973, studying to be a marine biologist. Then, to pay her tuition, she got a job scrubbing petri dishes in a lab where scientists were studying brown lung disease. By year's end, she was performing experiments and decided to pursue medical school.

She hadn't exactly built up her resume to that end, though, and was rejected, so she spent another year grooming herself by volunteering in a hospital emergency department and working in cancer research at the Environmental Protection Agency in Research Triangle Park.

In 1978, she was accepted to the medical school at UNC. The summer between her second and third years, she worked in a rural hospital and witnessed a scene that decided her career.

"There were 10 births that summer," Chescheir recalled, "and the doctors made it to only two of them. The eight that they couldn't quite make it to didn't have insurance. And I literally heard, during one of the deliveries, the doctor tell the mother to 'get [her] ass on the table.' And so I became interested in women's health."

She graduated, did her residencies and pursued obstetrics. With the boom in ultrasound and other scanning technologies in the 1980s, Chescheir honed a specialty in fetal diagnosis.

On the staff at the UNC medical school, Chescheir advanced up the administrative ladder, eventually becoming associate dean of curriculum. She also cultivated a devoted following of patients, delivering ordinary babies and extraordinary babies alike. Patients loved her confidence, her candor, her ability to engage in their dramas as a main character, not a distant narrator.

She hung a metal wreath by the door of her office to display all the proud new-parent photographs; it overflowed.

A quest for UNC

By the time Chescheir met the Williamsons, a series of events had converged to bring UNC and Vanderbilt together in a relationship based on mutual need.

For their part, the Vanderbilt surgeons -- Drs. Joseph Bruner and Noel Tulipan -- were eager to build greater acceptance of their in utero procedure, which was widely regarded as experimental. So they put the word out that they were willing to train other doctors.

< Previous page
Next page >