Des Moines, Iowa

You could feel the surprise and excitement. Not just because medical history had been made with the birth of the first known surviving septuplets, but because of the people who sat down behind the two desk signs -- "Dr. Paula Mahone" and "Dr. Karen Drake."

Not only were the two medical celebrities women, they were African-Americans. And they weren't in New York or Washington or Boston. They were in Des Moines, Iowa.

At a news conference at Des Moines' Iowa Methodist Medical Center, a couple of hundred national and local media representatives sat in a small auditorium watching doctors and hospital officials seat themselves at a long table on stage. The media had been told that after the births, the doctors who had delivered the McCaughey septuplets would meet with the media to tell what happened in the delivery and how babies and mother were doing.

The waiting reporters were expecting White males. Instead, they were introduced to Mahone and Drake, M.D.s, the obstetricians who handled the Caesarean-section delivery -- two African Americans who made history in Iowa, a state with one of the least diverse populations in the nation.

Having had little previous exposure to cameras, cameramen, sound experts, microphones, booms, lights, and reporters, the two doctors who sub-specialize in high-risk obstetric cases answered questions with the eloquence of television-anchor persons. And they did it with humor and grace, and a lack of pretention rare among physicians.

So who are Mahone and Drake, and how did they get to Iowa?

First, they're best friends and partners in a booming medical practice. Additionally, they happen to be the among the most respected physicians in their community -- and now, perhaps, in the nation.

Mahone, thirty-nine, grew up the oldest of three children in Youngstown, Ohio. She went to medical school at the Medical College of Ohio in Toledo. She later trained at Emory University in Atlanta and the University of Rochester in New York. She was recruited to Des Moines in 1993.

Two years later. Mahone helped recruit Drake to Iowa Methodist. Drake, forty, had received her medical degree at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Afterward, Drake trained at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and other hospitals in the Bronx, New York.

Dr. Irwin Merkatz, professor and department chairman at Albert Einstein, remembers Drake as a dedicated, hard-working doctor, well liked by col

Dr. Jim Woods, director of maternal-fetal medicine at the University of Rochester, said he remembered how self-confident Mahone had been ,a self-confidence which, he said, Mahone had probably relayed to the family of Bobbi McCaughey, the septuplets' mother.

Mahone, however, has said it was McCaughey's confidence and faith that made her believe the highly unlikely goal of successfully delivering all seven babies could be achieved.

Mahone, like the McCaugheys, is an active Baptist, but she said she developed a spiritual bond with her patient that "was much deeper than church affiliation." And seeing McCaughey "week after week defying the odds" during her pregnancy, said Mahone, "it was easy to get behind her and think, `Maybe this is going to happen.'"

During the delivery of the septuplets, Mahone, assisted by Drake, had made the huge, vertical incision in the Carlisle, Iowa, mother. She cut through the abdomen, then the uterus, and calmly lifted out one baby after another, right down to McCaughey's pelvis, where the baby nicknamed "Hercules" appeared to be holding up his six brothers and sisters. The infants greeted the delivery team, and father Kenny McCaughey, at the rate of about one a minute.

"This one's Natalie," Kenny McCaughey pronounced as the two-pound, ten-ounce infant was removed through the incision.

"God is great," said Drake. She would repeat those words of praise after the birth of each child.

The babies ranged in weight from 2 pounds, 5 ounces to 3 pounds, 4 ounces, all in the appropriate range for 30 weeks of pregnancy. And a little more than a week after their births, all of them were doing well, off ventilator support, and receiving tube feedings.

But if few people who work with and know Mahone and Drake were surprised they were able to help McCaughey bring the babies to term and pull off this spectacular delivery, many were shocked with the ease with which the two have accommodated the hungry and sometimes demanding media. And no one was more surprised, or delighted, than members of the media themselves.

Said Michelle Parker, a Black reporter for television station KCCI in Des Moines: "I was proud."

Lovell Beaulieu, an African-American an editorial writer for The Des Moines Register, wrote: "The images we get of African-American women are often stereotypical. We see hip. We see anger. We see dependency. We see everything from the gorgeous models to the gangsta-like wannabes. We see the Women's NBA parading their stars -- most of them black -- before cameras as though they're braced to rip out somebody's lungs. We see brawn, but rarely do we see brilliance.

"Here are two people," he continued, "whom I will forever use as examples to my Black friends around the country -- in both the media and other professions -- who awkwardly ask time after time, `Are there Black people in Iowa?"'

© Copyright 1997 by DiverseEducation.com
© Copyright 2007 by DiverseEducation.com

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