Beep. Beep. Beep….
I stood in the operating room during Cory’s organ-donation surgery, watching the monitor as his blood pressure dropped and his pulse faded. I was a second-year medical student, just beginning my trauma-surgery rotation in an urban hospital. I remember that day as a series of blinks, each one a snapshot of moments that still linger.
Here’s how it began:
A Blink Between Love and Loss Read More »
My first experience with healthcare and disability came when my youngest daughter was born. I knew something, besides her obvious club foot, was amiss. The pediatrician arrived. “Why doesn’t she flinch and fling her arms back?” I asked as I leaned her back to latch onto my breast. “She’s fine,” he said.
He looked in her mouth and noted her high, arched palate. “Your palate is high, too,” he assured me. “It is?” I thought.
“She’s jaundiced,” he said, noting her yellow eyes and skin. “Very common,” he added. “She has the same color eyes and skin as you.”
“Doesn’t that make me jaundiced, too?” I thought.
Alike in Disability Read More »
In early February 2020, my husband and I checked into a quaint condo in New Orleans’ French Quarter. We needed a break from our usual lives: My husband worked as a psychiatrist, listening to his patients’ stories of trauma and pain; he was exhausted. I too am a physician; I felt burned out by my administrative job, where I was regularly yelled at and insulted by other physicians.
We hadn’t been coping well. Every evening we sat in front of the television to numb ourselves and quiet the stress enough to go to bed and fall asleep.
My work as a physician often centers around helping mitigate trauma held by my patients. Recently I realized that my work also revolves around helping my patients manage their longing.
People long so deeply, and for so much. They go through countless medical procedures for a chance to become parents. They trial numerous medications and lifestyle changes to lose weight, feel less pain, or sleep through the night. They yearn for relief from the panic and depression that prevents them from leaving the house, working, and making friends. They pray that their cancer will stay in remission amid traumatic memories that resurface with each test and scan. They long to affirm their gender identity – to look in the mirror and see themselves as they feel inside and be fully embraced by their loved ones and society.
On his birthday, my father tries
to eat osso buco with its tiny marrow-spoon.
He scrapes at the shank, a felled tree trunk
on his plate, raises the shreds to his lips
until we cry out, watching them spread
over the table like shame.
I work in three public hospitals. Each has its own mandatory training process. I completed the hand hygiene modules at two of them and submitted those certifications to the third. I was told that the training is site-specific, that I’d need to also do the training at the third hospital.
At first, I felt frustrated. How can hand hygiene be site specific? Is my flu vaccination site specific?
Then I realized my feelings ran deeper than frustration. They spoke of longing.
I came to this work to help people.
My hope is to be supported by a system that enables care rather than obstructs it.
When I was a young, idealistic premedical student, I inadvertently became a medical voluntourist—an often dismissive term for someone who combines vacationing with rendering short-term volunteer aid.
Picture a bright-eyed American student headed for a foreign country in the hope of contributing to saving lives. My group traveled through a jungle to get to a location that the director of this study-abroad opportunity had described as a remote village, with a patient who needed a house call. Pure excitement, angst, and joy bubbled from us throughout the trek—but nothing prepared us for what we would inadvertently do.
An Inadvertent Medical Voluntourist Read More »
I wonder if there is anyone alive who does not suffer from a case of acute longing every now and then. I used to think that once I reached a certain age, or a certain level of maturity, or a certain financial condition, I would be rid of such feelings. I realize now that there is no such milestone. Longing does not ever retire.
I started writing poetry seriously during COVID, but my relationship with writing began much earlier. I remember writing my first poem when I was ten years old, about the sun being the biggest ball of fire: a bold metaphor, I thought. I showed it to an adult at school—who laughed and said that it was juvenile. That only Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Tagore were worthy of being called poets. That everyone else was plainly pretending.
From Longing to Belonging Read More »
In 2006, my dad was determined to attend the funeral when his last living brother died. The problem was, Daddy, eighty-two at the time, suffered from cognitive impairment bad enough that for months I’d been trying to get him to move to my home in Tennessee. This trip he was intent on taking would have required a cross-country flight from North Carolina to California—maneuvering through airports, finding a hotel and driving unfamiliar roads in a rental car.
“Daddy, you can’t go out there alone,” I said, wedging the phone between my jaw and shoulder to free my hands for folding laundry.
“Well, why not?”
