Sunday, October 31, 2021. Micalyn’s eightieth birthday.
A week ago, I texted my friend Sandy:
I had a reasonable day, but I felt lonely.
It’s so damn frustrating to have lost my best friend, Micalyn. Whenever I think of something I will want to tell her the next time I see her, reality comes crashing down on me.
Before I started my cardiology fellowship, I was warned that the training, while rewarding, would also be tough, demanding and intense. That was true: Learning to read the four different cardiac-imaging modalities, trying to master the art of right-and left-heart catheterization, and juggling the cardiac-care unit, clinic and consults was arduous. Yet, for me, the most challenging part of my fellowship took place in the third month of my first year, when my geriatric pup of eleven years died.
Teddy had been an impulsive addition to my life, during the lowest point of my twenties. A chance visit to a shelter brought me face to face with a scruffy little black dog with crooked lower teeth, passed over by other would-be adopters.
(after Susan Vespoli)
I like to think she stopped searching
for the next hobby, the next career,
the next diagnosis.
That she’s thriving at work and has given up
smoking. I like to think she completes
her interrupted orthodontics
Stephanie passed away this morning.
In an email from her husband, Frank, I learned that I’d lost my dear friend of two decades.
Stephanie was only forty-two. An administrator at a local bank, she was also a devoted wife and the loving mother of three daughters.
What happened to the fish
I ask the receptionist
The plastic seaweed was toxic
She replies with a shrug
So we sit and wait watching
A string of jeweled bubbles rise
To the surface
In the otherwise empty tank
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.
It was a particularly sunny morning, and golden light streamed through the clinic windows. Seated in my preceptor’s office, I scanned her list of patients for the day. As a first-year medical student, I was to do preliminary interviews with some, and I hoped to find a few cases that would offer a chance to test my diagnostic reasoning.
The list held a lot of the usual–medication follow-ups, annual physicals, well-child checks—plus Ernest, a seventy-eight-year-old man who’d come into the emergency room for a urinary-catheter issue. This seemed promising, so I volunteered to see him.
It’s the bright orange color that catches my eye. Nestled in a box under my home office desk, alongside unused breast pads and pumping supplies left over from the birth of my first daughter.
My first, because there should have been a second. A girl.
Time fractured when my first husband died.
There was a before, which no longer existed, and an after, which was unimaginable.
In between, the thinnest–unfathomably thin–line, was the today. The today meant putting one foot in front of the other. One today led to the next today. And finally the year was over.
I find him sitting
in the midst of his fellow residents
in the dining room
that doubles as an activity space.
His eyes are fixed
on the TV screen
that has a photo
One unusually wintery April morning, when I was fifteen, my maternal grandfather (“Nanabhai” to me) passed away.
The phone call came before my sister and I left for school. My father solemnly handed the phone to my mother, who’d been expecting the call, but not this soon. From my seat at the kitchen counter, I watched her expression morph from shock to disbelief to grief. Without hearing a word, I knew what had happened.
“Eleven years ago, I wasn’t as old as I am now—which is a funny thing!” Virginia Mitchell tells me.
She’s dressed as if she picked her clothes using yellow Benjamin Moore paint samples: bright canary shirt, mustard pants, daffodil leather shoes. Last week’s theme was purple, topped off with a violet scarf; another time it was green, accented with a chartreuse ascot.
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