David Levene doesn’t know the exact number of babies he’s helped deliver. He just knows that it’s a lot.
Since 1988, Levene said, he has averaged more than 100 deliveries per year, some years trending closer to 150, so he estimates the total to be more than 3,000 – and probably closer to 4,000. He was there when many future friends of his sons, Matthew and Zachary, were born. And at one point he even wondered if he had been part of the entire ConVal offensive line’s introduction to the world.
During his 31 years with Monadnock OBGYN, Levene has seen many special moments for families around the region, while unfortunately having to bear witness to some of the most unforgettable lows. It’s not always easy. These days he’s on call every other day and every other weekend, and he never knows when his beeper is going to buzz. It could happen when he’s sitting in his office just a few floors up from the birthing suite or it could be at 2 a.m. interrupting yet another quality night’s sleep. The calls have happened so many times that Levene could probably make the drive to Monadnock Community Hospital from his Dublin home with his eyes closed.
“You never know when a baby is going to come,” Levene said. “So if you really want a good sleep cycle, obstetrics is not for you.”
Now over the last number of years he’s been helping to deliver the grandchildren of moms he cared for in the early days.
“Women will say, you know you delivered her 25 years ago,” he said. “And sometimes the husband will say hey you delivered me too.”
And it’s a career Levene wouldn’t change for the world, even if obstetrics, let alone practicing medicine, wasn’t what he originally envisioned for his life. In fact, it wasn’t until the middle of his time at the University of Buffalo, somewhere around the end of his sophomore year, beginning of his junior year, that he saw a path leading him into the field. He had a few doctors in his family and “they were the happiest ones,” Levene said.
Levene studied social gerontology at Buffalo, a subfield of gerontology that deals with the social aspects of growing old.
“Which couldn’t be more totally different than obstetrics,” Levene said.
So he applied to a number of medical schools, but kept getting put on waiting lists. Then his father asked about the Medical College of Pennsylvania. On his list, he had marked it down as a woman’s medical facility because historically it had been an all women’s school. But in the late 1960s, it had started to admit men, so Levene applied. The small school only had around 100 students and was still 70 percent women when he went there. Levene took a number of different classes to figure out which field he wanted to pursue, but it was during his rotations that he noticed something.
“Every time I did an OB rotation, they’re laughing, having a great time… enjoying what they’re doing,” Levene said. “Obstetrics really seemed the best choice for me because it’s totally unique. You’re caring for two people at once.”
After graduation, Levene went to California for his general internship, where he met his wife Grisel. And he’s lucky that their relationship eventually led to marriage, since Levene had to cancel their blind date because of car trouble.
As a native of Long Island, Levene always felt the East Coast was where he wanted to be. He had landed in Baltimore for his residency, but had fond memories of New England from his childhood. So he began looking in southern Maine and parts of New Hampshire to begin his career. When the job offer came in Peterborough, it felt like the right fit – even after what could be classified as a challenging start.
“My second night at the hospital, there were five women in labor that I had never met,” Levene said.
But he made it through that night, admittedly with some help, and it’s been quite a journey ever since.
Levene doesn’t know how much longer he’s going to keep doing it, but it’s clear he enjoys the work – sleepless nights and all. In his early days, he earned the nickname Doogie Howser thanks to his younger look and the popular television series about the teenage doctor. But now Levene is the elder statesmen of the practice that is owned by the doctors.
He learned early on his career to “listen, and then listen, listen listen.” And that ability has translated into his life as a backyard birder.
His passion for birds really began during a family trip to Yellowstone National Park.
“We’re hiking up on this bluff, watching a herd of elk that’s being chased by a coyote, and my wife says look,” Levene said.
Thanks to the help of a plastic bird finder, they determined the bird she saw was a western tanager, a medium-sized American songbird colored with beautiful greens, yellows and oranges.
In 2005, during another family getaway to Costa Rica, their guide was a birder and showed the Levene’s many wonderful birds along the way. When he returned home, he had to know about every bird on his road.
“I didn’t even know birding was a hobby,” Levene said. “But I love just walking the road in the morning and seeing who’s around.”
Now his vacations, like the one he recently took to a ranch in Arizona that included a stop to see his son Matthew in Austin, Texas, have birding as a focus. He wanted to see the migration of the golden-cheeked warbler and late March is the time to see it in Texas. Birding also combines one of his other passions: photography.
He always keeps a pair of binoculars in his car and has been known to drive with his window down and the music off in hopes of hearing a new sound. He’s identified around 90 species on his road alone and he will travel a few hours to catch a glimpse of something new. His favorite bird is the alder flycatcher.
“I never get bored with it,” Levene said. “The fun part is hunting down the sound and identifying it.”
Levene keeps a journal of what he’s seen, and has even been known to walk around the hospital parking lot on his breaks with an open ear.
But not all his trips are to find birds. In 2010, Levene took his first mission trip to help the underserved population in Peru, and he later did the same thing in Guatemala.
Then he heard about a trip that pediatrician Adele de Vera was taking to Jamaica and immediately got on board. His first trip came in 2015, he went back in 2016 and 2018, and he is set to return to the island in July. Levene goes to provide much needed care for women, seeing more than 80 patients last year and even provided follow-up instructions once he returned home.
“Last year, I trained my wife to be my assistant,” he said.
As someone who “doesn’t know how to turn it off,” Levene needs to be busy. And since he greatly enjoys the outdoors, Levene has always been into hiking. He has now completed 40 of the 48 4,000-foot peaks in New Hampshire, doing his first one in 1997. He hikes about five to seven mountains a year these days, so sticking with that pace he should be done sometime in 2020.
“The hardest ones are not the tallest ones,” he said.
And when he does decide to hang up his beeper and begin the next phase of his life, Levene will have plenty to keep him busy.
“It’s not like I’m going to retire and do all these things. I’m doing them now and when I have more time, I’ll do more.”