“You know what they say, Dr. Chew—every day above ground is a good day.”
My next patient, for whom this is a mantra, is in the waiting room when I duck out for an overdue bathroom break. Her bleached blonde hair is tangled, her jeans tight and faded, her face mashed like a boxer 20 years her senior. Her gray eyes vigilantly scan the crowded room.
A physician can relate to a self-harming teenager–and has the scars to prove it.
Borderlines — Joo-Inn Chew Read More »
Editor’s Note: This piece was awarded second place in the Pulse writing contest, “On Being Different.”
When I started as an intern at a regional Australian hospital in the late Nineties, there was a patient—let’s call her Laura—who was notorious among the emergency-department staff.
Laura had sliced up much of her available skin over the years and had moved on to swallowing cutlery and razor blades. She’d had numerous operations to remove the silverware in her stomach, and countless sutures to stitch up the lacerations atop the old scars on her limbs and trunk. Over and over she would be discharged, only to turn up again with yet another macabre self-mutilation.
Each time, the surgical and emergency teams rolled their eyes and gritted their teeth.
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