January 2024
None of My Mom Friends Are Dying
Editor’s Note: This piece was awarded an honorable mention in the Pulse writing contest, “On Being Different.”
I’m squarely in the middle of my friends, in terms of when we became “mom friends.” However, one aspect sets me apart: None of my mom friends are dying.
None had excruciating pain during pregnancy, unrelenting constipation or unexplained blood in their stool. None went septic five days postpartum or were ultimately diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer with liver, lung and peritoneal metastases. None are parenting a two-year-old, knowing that they might not see him turn three.
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Total Immersion
Winter 1979
After my first ever transatlantic flight, my plane touches down at Kingston Airport, Jamaica. As we taxi towards the gate, I think back on the events leading up to this moment.
Earlier this year, I’d resolved to leave my native Scotland. Two years out of medical school, having done my internship and three stints as a locum in several specialties, I still had no idea for my future. I wrote to hospitals from Singapore to Mauritius to the island of St. Helena, asking about openings for a junior doctor. Medicine was my ticket into the world, to adventure, to finding my path in life.
“ACCEPTED FOR JOB STOP START IMMEDIATELY STOP,” said the telegram from the University of West Indies Hospital in Jamaica.
Healing from COVID’s Collective Trauma
On the first anniversary of COVID, I watched the trees remember how to hope, pushing out new buds, celadon haze on bare branches against the grey March sky. Daffodil spears of dark green shot up, their eagerness piercing the stiff brown magnolia leaves scattered on the awakening earth. The bluebirds returned, unbidden.
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Not Me!
Three years, nine months, and thirteen days: That’s how long it had been since the shutdown, since the first time I was exposed to this mysterious, dreaded disease, which I’d never gotten. I was exposed at least three times that I know of in 2020, before we had a vaccine. And I’d never gotten it.
That First COVID Shot
When COVID immunizations first became available in Florida, I was up three nights in a row scheduling shots for elderly members of my tiny church’s congregation. I knew they would not be able to cope with the technology to schedule their own shots online. And even if they could, none would have the patience and persistence to keep entering their data each time the portal failed.
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Better Safe than Sorry
When it came time to schedule my fourth COVID booster, I procrastinated. I’d experienced extremely negative reactions to the first two vaccines and the three previous boosters: chills, fever, aches, nausea, weakness. Dealing with those symptoms again did not appeal to me.
But then I remembered what happened to my paternal grandfather and to my beloved father—and I made the first available appointment to get the new booster.
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Code Switching: Gravel Against Stone
Editor’s Note: This piece was awarded an honorable mention in the Pulse writing contest, “On Being Different.”
As a medical student, I have a habit of lowering my voice an extra octave when I speak with patients, preceptors or even my own primary-care physician. I like to imagine my voice as gravel grinding against stone, my raspy “whiskey voice” melting away any hint of my queer identity.
In these moments, I’m keenly aware of the way I walk and stand, the firmness of my handshake and the content of the small talk I make. There are no lights, no curtains or stage, but I am nonetheless performing.
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January More Voices: COVID Redux
Dear Pulse readers,
That’s my COVID test from a couple of weeks back. After I’d dodged the virus for three years, it finally caught up with me–disabusing me of any notion that I was somehow more robust, more careful or perhaps cleverer than everyone else who’d come down with COVID.
COVID made me feel crummy–achy, feverish and tired–and without any desire to eat.
My doctor prescribed Paxlovid, and I took it.
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