I met Amy Rock before I met my own mother.

An older woman came to the doorway of my Bowdoin College athletic office in 1988.

“Are you Peter Slovenski?” she asked.

“Yes, I am,” I admitted.

“I think I delivered you,” she said.

That’s not something you hear every day.

“Let me call my mother and find out,” I said.

I picked up the phone and called my mother.

“Mom, do you remember the name of the doctor who delivered me?” I asked. My mother had six children so she had to think about it.

“Amy Rock delivered you.”

I put the phone aside, and asked: “Are you Amy Rock?”

“Yes, I am,” she nodded.

People in Brunswick knew Amy as a feisty and athletic senior citizen. But in Lewiston, she was known as an obstetrician who delivered 10,000 babies.

Amy was a regular swimmer at the Bowdoin College pool, and whenever we met in the lobby I would tell other swimmers of our unique relationship.

“Did you know Amy was the doctor who delivered me in 1955? She was the best obstetrician in Lewiston,” I said. Amy would wave the compliment away and shake her head.

“He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” She didn’t like attention or praise. So I started telling people the other side of the story.

“Did you know Amy delivered me in Central Maine General Hospital? She delivered 10,000 babies,” I explained, “and she always says I was the best baby she ever delivered.”

Amy would shake her head and say, “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” She was kind of spare in her praise of others too.

But I persisted in introducing myself as the best baby she ever delivered. She often encouraged me by saying, “He was all right.” Or, “I didn’t say you were the best; I said you were one of the 10,000 best.”

Amy was born in 1910 in Melrose, Mass. Her father abandoned the family in 1917. Amy’s childhood was an exhausting series of jobs and responsibilities helping her single mother through difficult times. Amy’s life made her a little hard, but it made her tough and resourceful, too.

Amy was a tenacious and intelligent student. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1932 and the New York University medical school in 1939.

While working as a resident at Bellevue Hospital in New York, she met a surgical resident named Daniel Rock. “For our first dates, we rode the Staten Island ferry,” she remembered. “It was a cheap date cause neither of us had any money.” They were married in 1944.

“How did you end up in Lewiston?” I asked.

“We started looking in Connecticut. We found plenty of openings for surgeons and obstetricians, but they wouldn’t hire us. There was a lot of anti-Semitism back then,” she reflected.

“They never said it, but we could tell. They would make an excuse about why they couldn’t hire us once they found out Dan was Jewish.”

“There was a shortage of doctors, and the shortage got worse as you went north. When we got to Lewiston,” she recalled, “the shortage was so severe they didn’t care about anything else. We both started working at Central Maine General Hospital in 1945.”

Just in time for the baby boom.

Amy and Dan were highly respected doctors in Lewiston. They spent summers in Harpswell, and eventually retired there.

Dan loved the ocean and also loved woodworking. He used his retirement to complete improvements on their old Cape Cod house on the point. He died in 1995.

Amy lived by herself all the way through age 94. She reminded me of a fearless character in a Victorian novel. Her last years were spent facing New England’s dark nights and cold winters alone, a few yards from the surf and tides. She loved it. In a life that mixed tenacity with the majestic forces of nature, she was as hard and indomitable as the Maine coast.

She grew up as the oldest daughter of a single mother, and then put herself through college and medical school. She worked her way relentlessly through anti-Semitism and 10,000 deliveries. She didn’t want or need any help near the end. Her standards of self-reliance and courage were heroic.

This proud, independent and tough woman fell and broke her hip in the locker room on Oct. 25. Her swimming friends wanted to go with her in the ambulance, but she wouldn’t let them. “I’d rather go alone,” she told them.

She had a debilitating heart attack on Nov. 17. “I don’t want any artificial support of any kind,” she had advised her family in advance. If there was any way to prolong her life on support systems, she wouldn’t allow it. She died on Nov. 22. There won’t be a memorial service. She didn’t want one.

She never liked praise or attention, but I would like to say that Amy had a beautiful role in the lives of 10,000 people in Maine. I’m proud to say I was one of the 10,000 best babies she ever delivered.

Peter Slovenski is the track coach at Bowdoin College and author of “Old School America.”