If you lay every baby Dr Solomon Sahhar has ever delivered end to end, they would reach from Altona to Footscray.
The Altona-based obstetrician-gynecologist is celebrating 40 years of practice, during which he has delivered more than 18,000 babies.
Now 70, Dr Sahhar still remembers his first delivery at the old Queen Victoria Hospital.
“We used to live in the hospital for 10 weeks, and they had special quarters there,” he said.
“There was always a speaker there, and when a baby was ready for delivery, they’d call you and you’d have to run down to the labour ward and do it.
“And it was so exciting.
“I never lost that degree of excitement of going to do a delivery and being involved in it.
“Just loved every moment of it, and so I always wanted to do obstetrics.”
Dr Sahhar practiced in London for two years before being offered an associate professor position at a Melbourne teaching hospital.
“I knocked it back,” he said.
“I said, I want to work in the western suburbs where I grew up in the local state school and high school, and I just want to continue working with the people who had no specialist services whatsoever.
“The hospitals didn’t run antenatal clinics at Altona, Williamstown or Werribee, so you’d go see your local doctor, whether specialist or GP, and they would deliver you.
“And there were only two specialists in the whole Werribee, Williamstown and Altona area, and between them they were probably delivering about 2500 babies a year.
“Russell Soppitt, the other obstetrician in the area, and myself were the only two in the whole of the west. We were working day and night. Some days, I would be doing eight babies a day, and I would sleep in the hospital all night and then just go from bed to bed to bed.”
He’s seen many changes during his time, including a discreet horizontal incision replacing a large vertical one for a cesarean section.
“We used to call it ‘the Portsea incision’ to keep the bikinis alive.”
