Borderline — Joo-Inn Chew
A physician can relate to a self-harming teenager–and she has the scars to prove it.
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April 2024
The Golden Hour
It is autumn in Melbourne. The nights are cool, but the late afternoon holds the glowing sun in the cup of its hand before it sinks behind the rippled sea. This is my favorite time of day—the hour or so before the sun sets, when I walk home under a golden canopy of giant plane trees and watch the sky prepare for night.
Scars and Screams
When I think of scars, my mind drifts back to my rotation in the Burn Unit as an intern in Mumbai, India. We were conducting trials on the use of a plant-based calendula gel on burn dressings. As an intern, I would attend to each patient throughout my entire twelve-hour shift. My patients were young women, some even younger than myself at the time, usually between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, all victims of burns.
Hearing Impaired
“Pick up the phone, Mom,” I said, dashing into the kitchen after answering our landline in the living room.
“Who is it?” she asked.
“Dunno. I can’t understand what they’re saying,” I said.
When she picked up the receiver, the caller—her father—got right to the point: “She can’t hear.”
Many Shades of Different
Editor’s Note: This piece was a finalist in the Pulse writing contest, “On Being Different.”
Having stage IV cancer at twenty-one made me different from my peers.
I was already different: By the eighth grade, due to my mother’s quest for greener pastures, I’d attended twelve schools, many of them outside of the US. I was a Yankee when my family lived in Australia, but also when we lived in Florida. I was a gringa when we lived in Mexico, then in Peru. In places where English was spoken, I stood out because of my accent. In places where Spanish was spoken, although I became quite fluent, I was clearly a foreigner.
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Allowing Medicine to Break My Own Heart
Growing up in a small town as a high achieving oldest daughter, my understanding of scars was purely physical. Skinned knees, a few stitches, and a small crescent moon on my right forearm were my sole casualties.
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Relief
When Mike had been sedated for a few days, I talked with his wife Sue, who shared that Mike would not have wanted to linger like this. Before being sedated, he told her that he hoped to pass within a day or two. It was troubling to Sue that he was lingering like this.
Lessons From My Teachers
In July 2003, a few days after I had started service as inpatient attending pediatric cardiologist at Lutheran General Children’s Hospital, the neonatologists, nurses and I met with Jenni and Tony to discuss their daughter Grace’s health status.
Grace, now two and a half weeks old, had seemed normal at birth. After a few hours, her skin color had turned blue: Her oxygen level was dangerously low. She’d been whisked off to the neonatal intensive-care unit (NICU), where tests showed that her heart function was poor due to high blood pressure in her lungs. Her heart and lungs began to fail, so we’d placed her on a heart-lung machine (ECMO) for sixteen days. Now taken off the machine, she was breathing with the help of a ventilator.
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Too Everything to Fit In — Zainab Jimoh
A student’s hijab, skin color and gender have set her apart ever since a sixth-grade classmate asked, “Where were you on 9/11?”
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Original Scars
My chest tightens, then relaxes, as the tears roll down her face. She gradually bares her soul, revealing the events that led her to my exam room. She may have been born to a mother whose own experience with trauma stunted her ability to be a supportive parent. She may have suffered abuse at the hands of people who were supposed to be trustworthy. Or she may have experienced the loss early on of the primary person in her life who understood her.
