Birthdates. As part of a profession involving bringing babies in the world, I am always amazed by the strangness of requests. This pertains of course mostly to births which can be planned i.e. CS dates.
The old superstitions of avoiding Friday the 13th as birth date for one. Those of the ancient chinese beliefs avoid anything with combinations of "4" which is a homonym for "death" in the spoken chinese tongue. Then there is the avoidance of dates which coincident with other relatives or friends birthdays or worse, the anniversary death of another relative or friend.
A recent request took me by surprise. A request not to have a CS on September 11th. Very odd I thought. "I would prefer September 13th", she said. I thought about this for a moment and decided to probe furthe and asked her reasons for this decision. She looked incredulous at me at first and then said, "the world trade centre bombing of course occured on this day." "Did you lose a relative or friend at the world trade centre bombing?" "No, no, I just don't want my child's birthday associated with September 11th."
Wow, I had to bite my tongue to stem the laughter. This patient was neither american nor knew any one associated with the bombing in New York. Of course, this is a new form of superstition and astounding ignorance. Lots of other massacres have occurred through out the various dates in history. December 7th...bombing in Pearl Harbour, August 6th and 9th (A-bomb in Hiroshima and then Nagasaki), February 14th (St. Valentine's Day massacre)....etc.
For interest, September 13th 1759 was the battle for Quebec on the plains of Abraham where General Wolfe defeated the Marquis Montcalm. Hence giving the English control over Canada. I wonder where my patient with the September 13th request and who is French Canadian would have thought of this revelation.
September 13th 1942 was the start of the Battle of Stalingard, one of the bloodiest human conflicts ever. Over 800 000 Axis soldiers and over 500 000 Russian troops lost their lives in the 5 month battle. The battle was a major turning out in the outcome of WWII. This number does not include the wounded or the civilians killed. Kind of makes the events at the World Trade Centre pale in comparsion.
