I Want to Tell You About Noa

"There is no footprint too small to leave an imprint on this world."

I want to tell you about our son, Noa.

He was born and died on October 17, 2017, at just 22 weeks gestation. We lost him to preterm labor. There was nothing we could do.

As you can imagine, we spent a lot of time grieving, questioning what had happened and why. And, as you can also imagine, we never got any real answers.

I remember the hospital visit vividly. I remember my wife, a doctor herself, in unimaginable pain from the contractions. I remember her trying to use her medical training to triage her own care between contractions, desperately trying to find a solution that might save Noa. I remember feeling completely helpless, drowning in a world where I didn’t understand the language.

Donna made so many suggestions—last-ditch efforts, medications that might stop the contractions, even transferring to a hospital with top-tier NICUs that could care for extremely premature babies. But I also remember how callously two of the doctors responded. To them, we were just another miscarriage case. It was as if their main task was to convince these “crazed” parents that there was nothing to be done, and the sooner we delivered our son, the sooner we could begin to let him go.

I remember holding Noa. He barely fit in my hand.

I remember the questions. So many questions. None of which were ever truly answered by the care team. And as if being brushed off wasn’t enough, the final blow came when the doctor caring for us went home without debriefing us or her replacement. So when it came time for us to be discharged, we had to stay in the hospital even longer than necessary, retelling our story to a newly arrived doctor who had no idea what had happened.

Those who know me know I can be incredibly aloof and objective to a fault. And I can say, objectively, that we were not treated humanely during the whole ordeal.

Were we cared for? Technically, yes. Someone was always checking in. But it was also painfully clear that the care team was exasperated with us—frustrated that we weren’t grieving “fast enough,” frustrated that we were still asking questions. They had checked all their boxes for how to manage a case like ours, and they expected us to move on accordingly.

Not only did we lose Noa—we lost something else that day, too. We lost a sense of faith in the healthcare system.

We hope you never experience something like this. But if you are among the many who have been traumatized by the healthcare system, we mourn with you. We see you.

Noa is a big reason why we decided to start a primary care clinic. One of our deepest missions is to restore trust in healthcare—trust that things are being done safely and correctly, by well-trained individuals. But more than that, trust that care is being delivered with integrity and dignity.

I believe Donna has some of the strongest clinical intuition among her peers. But more than that, I believe her greatest gift is her ability to truly see her patients—to embrace their fears, their goals, and their emotions—and reflect that understanding back into their care.