Latest Voices

The personal question patients used to ask me was “Are you pregnant?” Recently, a patient inquired, after sharing that his wife had started menopausal hormonal therapy, “Do you also take this?”

I have indeed started what I call my Menopause Trifecta: an estrogen patch, a progesterone pill, and a testosterone gel. Estrogen made me miserable during puberty; helped me become a mother of two children; and drove cyclical cravings, cramps, and crying. But my ovaries no longer produce estrogen. My “childbearing potential” is gone. Unused menstrual supplies gather dust in a cabinet.

The chart said that she came into the Emergency Department after an overdose. An older woman, disheveled, who had been found down on the ground. She had a history of schizophrenia and not taking her meds. The Emergency Department stabilized her and then admitted her to psychiatry. On paper, she was like so many other homeless patients: chronic psychosis and layers of trauma buried under ICD codes that adorned her chart.

I was in a good mood. I had just been dismissed early from my shift at the hospital, and I looked forward to an empty house where I could eat lunch, watch reality TV recaps, and take a nap in peace. The sun shone brightly as I drove down the freeway, which was surprisingly free of the infamous Miami traffic. I love my fourth year, I thought to myself. The upperclassmen weren’t kidding when they said that the fourth year of med school is the best. Nothing beat being free from the obligation to study for exams after a long

“Nice clean cut,” the resident marveled as he examined my wound.

“Sabatier,” I responded with pride.

Back in those days, we lived in a cramped tenement apartment with a shabby, dark kitchen. But at least our low rent gave us enough financial wiggle room to slowly build up a decent batterie de cuisine. It was one of our early acquisitions, a pricey knife, that had sent me to the emergency room.

A son is studying eight hours away from his rural home in Bangladesh. He’s at university, building a name for himself, paving a path not trod by his forefathers. He meets peers who have known only cities. He hones his formal Bengali, shedding his informal dialect. In a nationwide civil service exam, he ranks in the top percentile and earns a coveted merit placement. He leaves behind the swampy farmlands of his youth to forge networks in the big city.

The nation is still rebuilding two decades after its Liberation War, infamously referred to as a bottomless basket case. One

Two years ago, I received diagnosis that I’m still grieving from and struggling to accept. After an endoscopy and colonoscopy to determine the cause of my anemia at age sixty, I was told I had celiac disease. Somehow after sixty years, my gene for celiac was activated, and now I had to make drastic, lifelong changes.

My husband and I took care of my mom for five years, when she had Alzheimer’s. She could get lost walking out the door, which is why I was always her shadow. But I felt lost too: whom was I dealing with, hour by hour, day by day, due to the changes in her Alzheimer’s-riddled brain. I felt lost and confused by our new puzzling reality.

One thing that helped me cope was humor. Sometimes my mother would say something funny, like when she wanted to tell someone that she had pounded the pavement after college, looking for an accounting

There were three of us in the same high school class who chose to study medicine. We passed our admission exams together, and celebrated the fact with a hearty meal and a generous libation of red wine, a once-in-a-lifetime event. We were already making plans for future specialties and career prospects.

Then one of the three collapsed suddenly at home and died of a previously undetected heart problem. That was in the twentieth year of our lives, the third of our studies. Our trio became a duet.