“Sure, it’s not like I’ve got a busy day.”
The tiny woman with translucent skin smiled up at me from her hospital bed. Finally, I’d successfully recruited another study participant. But, she informed me, “No research should be done without proper introductions.” The woman before me shook off her role as Participant #14 and became simply who she was. Let’s call her Eleanor.
It finally happened. Three years and four months after the pandemic began, I contracted COVID-19.
I wore a mask longer than most anyone I know. I dutifully received all the booster shots. I was headed to Brazil on a family vacation and decided it was time to relinquish the mask. My teenage daughters had been making fun of me for months. I was more worried about dengue, yellow fever, and zika as I slapped mosquitos buzzing around my ankles on my daily walk by the ocean at the idyllic beach resort of Buzios, a several-hour drive from Rio de Janeiro.
My father’s final gift to me was acceptance and an expression of love that I had wanted for many years.
My father had Alzheimer’s disease at eighty-three years old, and my mother was his caretaker. He would wander and escape, and she would have the police bring him home. He would get dressed at 3 a.m. for a day at the beach in January, and she would convince him to stay home. Her health was suffering.
I still have fond memories of my kindergarten teacher, Sister M. Elizabeth Kobierowski at Our Lady of Czestochowa School in South Brooklyn, New York. She was the first of many Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth I would come to know and love during my formative years in our predominantly Polish-American parish. That love would continue well into my teens, when I attended the Bishop McDonnell Memorial High School, also in Brooklyn.
It was just another day at the outpatient plastic surgery clinic where I am training as a medical student. A middle-aged man walked in with multiple scars on the back part of both hands. At first glance, they looked like bite marks. On closer inspection, I saw exposed bone. What was I seeing? This didn’t make sense.
They have pills for everything it seems, but not a chill pill.
When I was young, I would often look up to see my mother’s concerned face outlined in the kitchen window, knocking, beckoning me into the house. “Quickly,” she’d say, leading me to the sink where she immersed my wrists into cold water, while draping a wet hand towel over the back of my neck. This was a normal occurrence for me: getting overheated, face red, white around my lips. “Sit in front of the fan,” my mother would say, as the headache started.
The sign on the door of the hospital gift shop boldly dictates who will be admitted: “No Shoes, No Service,” it says.
“But I’m wearing shoes.” The man’s voice screeches obstinately, the soles of his cutaway tennis shoes flap, and his bare feet slap hard on the linoleum floor as he fumbles the get-well card he’s holding and it goes flying.
I, an underpaid clerk, sigh in disgust. I haven’t encountered a customer like this in some time. His hair is slicked back, his shirt is untucked, his face is partly hidden behind a blue surgical mask.
In the past year, I have attended multiple diversity training sessions that have opened my eyes to understanding health equity, social injustice, and institutionalized racism. Prior to this, I had not fully understood or acknowledged my white privilege. And I did not know how to use that privilege to be an advocate for those who have little to no voice and who can be taken advantage of by the health-care system.
Ms. K was one of the oldest patients I’d met. I wanted to sit and hear her stories, to say, “Tell me more,” the way we learned in medical school. But the equipment sustaining her left no room for a chair to sit in. And COVID had stolen her ability to speak in sentences; she puffed out words two or three at a time before inhaling again. Even so, each word was sharp and spirited and made me smile.
Her face was a rich and deeply wrinkled landscape. Ms. K’s gown hung loosely on her, exposing the silhouettes of her ribs and knobby shoulders. I was surprised when I pulled the layers of blankets back from her feet. In contrast to her thin arms, her legs were thick and smooth, due to the accumulation of fluid as a result of her weakly pumping heart. Her heart had been failing for years, yet she had beaten the odds and thrived.
“And the year 2020 came to an end and they all lived happily ever after.” Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all leave this year behind and be certain of the “happily ever after” part?
I have often wondered at the hype that typically accompanies the end of a year and the beginning of another, especially since the year starts and ends at different times, depending on which calendar we choose to follow. The Jewish New Year and the Chinese New Year do not coincide with the 1st of January, and they do not even occur on the same day each year.
It eventually occurred to me that the meaning we attach to a day or anniversary is what gives it significance, not the day itself. On one occasion during my residency training, I specifically asked to be allowed to deliver a laboring patient’s baby because it was the anniversary of my mother’s passing. I felt that helping to bring a new life into the world on the day when I could have been focusing on death would have a special meaning. I remember looking at an obituary as a child and announcing to my mother that someone had
People cheered the first trucker transporting a huge load of COVID-19 vaccines as he left the Pfizer plant in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The news anchor exclaimed, “This just might be the beginning of the end.” That driver represented one individual in a long chain of workers besides doctors and nurses needed to end the COVID-19 pandemic.
A few days before, an email from the state health commissioner had popped up in my in-box. Its subject line caught my attention: “Urgent: Volunteers Needed for Vaccination Campaign.” To me, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel now that a vaccine is a reality. I felt excited to help and answered the call without hesitation. As an RN who has given hundreds of tetanus injections to ER patients, I have medication administration skills to offer such an effort.
“Doc, can I say just one more thing?”
Every clinician knows this moment—the so-called doorknob moment, when your hand is reaching for the exam-room door, and your patient asks the question that’s been on their mind the whole visit. It’s the issue that’s been nagging them, usually an embarrassing or emotionally laden issue, sometimes both. Every clinician knows better than to walk out on a doorknob moment.
I sit back down. “What’s on your mind?”
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