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The Genesis of Forgetfulness: A Poet’s Journey
“The poet’s job is to translate unspeakable things on to the page…” – Roger Robinson
In the beginning, the Lebanese civil war barely seeped through the ceiling of our living room. It didn’t shatter windows or infiltrate through cracked walls. It became a slow fixture at our dinner table, nibbled on Mama’s delicately wrapped grape leaves, inhaled Father’s unfiltered cigarettes, listened to my older brother practice scale after scale on the upright piano and sat on the Persian carpet with my younger brother to rearrange his Matchbox cars. In our Armenian family of five, the war felt mute—a sixth character without words, an unobtrusive intruder who was given permanent residency.
Bella’s Not a Girl Anymore
For more than thirty years, I’ve practiced general pediatrics and adolescent medicine with a private group practice in New Rochelle, just north of New York City.
Today I saw an adolescent girl for a checkup. Before this, I had seen her for a sick visit or two, but I didn’t know her all that well. She was accompanied by her father, whom I was meeting for the first time.
I started the checkup, as I always do, by asking if they had any special concerns.
Blacker Than Bald Eagles
Editor’s Note: This piece was awarded an honorable mention in the Pulse writing contest, “On Being Different.”
In the 1990s, having grown up in Texas and spent the summer before college playing semiprofessional basketball in Australia, I went to medical school at Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara, in Mexico.
While there, I experienced a striking and unexpected sense of safety. Although the people there normally never see Black people, they treated me differently from the way Black people are treated in the US.
Teachings
“It’s not like what they taught you.”
It is the winter of 2013. I am a second-year family-medicine resident, with big ideas and small experience. Brian is a staff physician, maybe three or four years into practice—years that might as well be decades. The two of us huddle in one corner of the little airport departure lounge in Sioux Lookout, Ontario.
A Weird Fit for Medicine
Editor’s Note: This piece was awarded an honorable mention in the Pulse writing contest, “On Being Different.”
Whenever the most recent piece of anti-LGBTQ legislation passes, the silence is a familiar song.
In November of 2022, we had the Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs—soon to be followed by a nonstop onslaught of legislative attacks on the LGBTQ communities’ right to exist. After each one, the silence blared.
I remember walking into work the day after the Club Q shooting. As I met my co-residents for 6:00 am patient sign-out, I felt weighed down, needing to will myself to focus. I was greeted with the usual smiles, heard the usual laughter, listened to the usual small talk.
Finding Freedom in Difference
Editor’s Note: This piece was awarded third place in the Pulse writing contest, “On Being Different.”
It was 3:00 am on my third night shift out of five, in a busy inner-city hospital in Sydney.
Having just reviewed six suicidal patients back to back, I felt tired and frustrated.
If I have to see another suicidal patient tonight…Why don’t they go and be suicidal somewhere else? I wondered wearily, then felt ashamed at the adversarial division I’d created: patient vs. doctor, them against me.
The Judgment of Solomon
As a cancer doctor, I’m no stranger to asking patients with a life-threatening malignancy about their wishes. My question generally goes something like this: “Going forward, do you want to pursue intensive treatment, or forgo it in favor of enjoying the time that remains to you, with relief for your symptoms as needed?”
Asking this question is an intrinsic part of my job. But when I found myself having to ask it of a family member, I felt shaken. This was different.
Borderlines
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.
Music and Medicine
It’s the end of a long day on Internal Medicine Ward H (“Hey” in Hebrew) at Soroka Medical Center, in the desert city of Be’er Sheva, Israel.
I’m a third-year medical student at the Medical School for International Health at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and this is the floor I’ve been assigned to for my six-week internal-medicine clerkship—my very first clinical rotation.
My fellow students and I wrap up our responsibilities for the day and head to the student room to gather our things. Stowing my stethoscope and notebook in my bag, I exchange it for my guitar, sitting in a dusty corner.