Last night I was in a patient's room and while I was examining him I heard this conversation through the curtains separating my patient from his roommate:
"Can I help you?"
"Yes! Can you please tell my nurse to bring me some more STD's?"
"What?"
"STD's! I need some more STD's!"
"WHAT?"
"These STDs I have aren't working right. Man, I'd really love some more STDs..."
(For those who don't know, we commonly put these little stocking-y things on people's feet when they're in the hospital to help prevent blood clots. They are called SCD's. They are not the same thing as sexually transmitted diseases.)
Saturday, September 6, 2008
Sunday, August 31, 2008
vigil
It’s 4AM in Albuquerque and, like New Orleanians everywhere, I am not sleeping. These days I’m awake at 4 anyway, to get to the surgery service on time. In the night-dark mornings, I fill up the house with candles instead of electric lights, a small attempt to keep my body in tune with the normal day-night rhythm of the world. Tonight I could’ve slept all I wanted. I’m off tomorrow. But here I am, writing by candlelight in a house that seems as empty and ghostlike as the city my people are slowly and silently vacating.
It’s been awful to be away these last few days, taking surgery call and running in the mountains while my loved ones have been going through the motions of boarding up houses, tucking away important papers, having barbeques to use up what’s in the fridge. I don’t have a TV so I’ve been getting my news from friends and family. They all sound so weary and capable. Right now, at 4 am, if they haven’t done so yet, they are packing, or driving, or they’ve already arrived at the far-flung places they’re going. They are bringing pets and photographs and documents. There is no deliberation, no frenzied stuffing of pillows and kitchen tongs in the backseat while forgetting ATM cards and prescriptions. They know what to bring. They know when to leave. They know where they’re going. They’ve done this before. They know.
There is no carnival aspect to this evacuation, as far as I can tell. In the past, even before Katrina, during the last few days before a hurricane came—or didn’t—there was an almost festive air in the city. People boarding up their houses would decorate the plywood with spray-painted sayings, admonishing the storm to go away. There were always a few restaurants defiantly staying open, serving nonperishable food and whisky to the diehards vowing to stick it out. Stores were full of people stocking up on bottled water and batteries, jovially agreeing with each other in the checkout line that it’s always better to stay than to evacuate. There were hurricane parties, and special hurricane masses, and voodoo ceremonies, and smaller rituals throughout the city, some of which had been performed before every impending disaster since the mid-1800s.
Those were innocent times.
Here’s what I’ve been hearing about this one: People have been leaving for days. Neighbors have been watching each other line up suitcases by cars, the houselights turning off, the streets gradually darkening as the life is drained from them. I spent last night on the phone with friends who were evacuating patients from the hospital, taking phone calls about transports while catching me up on their evacuation plans. People have been wandering through the streets with luggage, as though homeless already. Trains and buses have been picking up the lines of the poor and elderly who have noplace else to go, shuttling everyone north. A church in the Bywater evacuated all its members to a resort. Even from here the streets seem gray and somber. The tourists all had to leave by noon yesterday. Instead of drag queens out in full force for the Southern Decadence festival this weekend, soldiers with machine guns are patrolling the streets. There is one, a friend says, on every corner. “I should’ve taken pictures, I guess,” she says. “But. Well. I didn’t.”
Something strangely funny to me is that I keep inadvertently calling this hurricane “Katrina.” As in, “How you doing, Catherine?” “Oh, I guess all right. But I’m really worried about Katrina.” It’s like Katrina’s been out there somewhere this whole time while we’ve been working valiantly, in ways both epic and tiny, to heal. And now she’s coming back.
While I was writing this I got a text message from a friend who was on the road in evacuation traffic, checking in. I called her up and talked with her and her boyfriend on speakerphone as they inched through New Orleans East in a long line of cars and trucks and minivans. We’ve been meaning to talk for weeks, this friend and I, and at 5am on this dark morning we finally caught up, not only about the hurricane but also about internship, our other friends, our patients who have died. Every now and then they’d break in with an update: “We’re still in New Orleans East!” “We’re going between 0 and 3 miles per hour!” “That car has a huge bird in it and the other one has an amazing dog! Everybody’s got their pets with them!” In the middle of a really intense story about a hospice patient dying in the ER, my friend interrupted herself and said, “Whoa, that guy’s barbequing in the back of his pickup truck!” And there, in that long slow line of barely-moving traffic, was a man strapped into a chair in the back of a truck, throwing motor oil on a grill to get it to light, flames shooting wild orange into the chilly night sky.
“This city,” my friends sighed.
Maybe yesterday or the day before, when I had one of those what-else-can-you-do-besides-pray moments, I made a little New Orleans altar in this cubbyhole in my wall that seems like it was created for precisely that purpose. It’s full of random things, like beads and this purple-green-and-gold flower I got one Mardi Gras, and a silver sequined garter I wore in a wedding procession, and a bottle of Abita, and photographs of secondlines and Mardi Gras Indians and my neighborhood and the people I love. I’ve got a candle burning there constantly, keeping vigil along with me.
“Don’t you miss this?” My friend asked me sarcastically while she sat in that crowded pre-dawn traffic. Oh, yes, I answered with utmost seriousness from the calm of my comfy glowing candlelit house. Here, I’m just another displaced New Orleanian, waiting breathless for the inevitable. Right now there’s nowhere I’d rather be than right there with them, in the achingly slow traffic, that long procession of our people, together for the last time until who can say when, leaving home behind like we’d leave our hands, or true love; listening to each other’s voices and the calm barking of the dogs from the open windows of everyone’s cars in the cool predawn dark, together before we all scatter, again, to the edges of this country, those bright orange flames lighting everyone’s way to uneasy, temporary safety.
It’s been awful to be away these last few days, taking surgery call and running in the mountains while my loved ones have been going through the motions of boarding up houses, tucking away important papers, having barbeques to use up what’s in the fridge. I don’t have a TV so I’ve been getting my news from friends and family. They all sound so weary and capable. Right now, at 4 am, if they haven’t done so yet, they are packing, or driving, or they’ve already arrived at the far-flung places they’re going. They are bringing pets and photographs and documents. There is no deliberation, no frenzied stuffing of pillows and kitchen tongs in the backseat while forgetting ATM cards and prescriptions. They know what to bring. They know when to leave. They know where they’re going. They’ve done this before. They know.
There is no carnival aspect to this evacuation, as far as I can tell. In the past, even before Katrina, during the last few days before a hurricane came—or didn’t—there was an almost festive air in the city. People boarding up their houses would decorate the plywood with spray-painted sayings, admonishing the storm to go away. There were always a few restaurants defiantly staying open, serving nonperishable food and whisky to the diehards vowing to stick it out. Stores were full of people stocking up on bottled water and batteries, jovially agreeing with each other in the checkout line that it’s always better to stay than to evacuate. There were hurricane parties, and special hurricane masses, and voodoo ceremonies, and smaller rituals throughout the city, some of which had been performed before every impending disaster since the mid-1800s.
Those were innocent times.
Here’s what I’ve been hearing about this one: People have been leaving for days. Neighbors have been watching each other line up suitcases by cars, the houselights turning off, the streets gradually darkening as the life is drained from them. I spent last night on the phone with friends who were evacuating patients from the hospital, taking phone calls about transports while catching me up on their evacuation plans. People have been wandering through the streets with luggage, as though homeless already. Trains and buses have been picking up the lines of the poor and elderly who have noplace else to go, shuttling everyone north. A church in the Bywater evacuated all its members to a resort. Even from here the streets seem gray and somber. The tourists all had to leave by noon yesterday. Instead of drag queens out in full force for the Southern Decadence festival this weekend, soldiers with machine guns are patrolling the streets. There is one, a friend says, on every corner. “I should’ve taken pictures, I guess,” she says. “But. Well. I didn’t.”
Something strangely funny to me is that I keep inadvertently calling this hurricane “Katrina.” As in, “How you doing, Catherine?” “Oh, I guess all right. But I’m really worried about Katrina.” It’s like Katrina’s been out there somewhere this whole time while we’ve been working valiantly, in ways both epic and tiny, to heal. And now she’s coming back.
While I was writing this I got a text message from a friend who was on the road in evacuation traffic, checking in. I called her up and talked with her and her boyfriend on speakerphone as they inched through New Orleans East in a long line of cars and trucks and minivans. We’ve been meaning to talk for weeks, this friend and I, and at 5am on this dark morning we finally caught up, not only about the hurricane but also about internship, our other friends, our patients who have died. Every now and then they’d break in with an update: “We’re still in New Orleans East!” “We’re going between 0 and 3 miles per hour!” “That car has a huge bird in it and the other one has an amazing dog! Everybody’s got their pets with them!” In the middle of a really intense story about a hospice patient dying in the ER, my friend interrupted herself and said, “Whoa, that guy’s barbequing in the back of his pickup truck!” And there, in that long slow line of barely-moving traffic, was a man strapped into a chair in the back of a truck, throwing motor oil on a grill to get it to light, flames shooting wild orange into the chilly night sky.
“This city,” my friends sighed.
Maybe yesterday or the day before, when I had one of those what-else-can-you-do-besides-pray moments, I made a little New Orleans altar in this cubbyhole in my wall that seems like it was created for precisely that purpose. It’s full of random things, like beads and this purple-green-and-gold flower I got one Mardi Gras, and a silver sequined garter I wore in a wedding procession, and a bottle of Abita, and photographs of secondlines and Mardi Gras Indians and my neighborhood and the people I love. I’ve got a candle burning there constantly, keeping vigil along with me.
“Don’t you miss this?” My friend asked me sarcastically while she sat in that crowded pre-dawn traffic. Oh, yes, I answered with utmost seriousness from the calm of my comfy glowing candlelit house. Here, I’m just another displaced New Orleanian, waiting breathless for the inevitable. Right now there’s nowhere I’d rather be than right there with them, in the achingly slow traffic, that long procession of our people, together for the last time until who can say when, leaving home behind like we’d leave our hands, or true love; listening to each other’s voices and the calm barking of the dogs from the open windows of everyone’s cars in the cool predawn dark, together before we all scatter, again, to the edges of this country, those bright orange flames lighting everyone’s way to uneasy, temporary safety.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
little grandpa
I'm back at the VA again, on a slow-ish surgery service, keeping my head above water and rememebring how much I love to use my hands. I love my patients here, these birdlike old men with tiny wrists and spindly fingers, how they scoff when I ask them about their pain. "Young lady, I've been through worse than this," they all say, and you believe it, even though today they can barely reach the rails of the bed. The VA gives out these pajamas that they all wear, in navy or--my favorite-- Santa-Claus red, and in them these shuffling anachronistic men, toting walkers and IV poles and oxygen tanks around the floor, look like they wandered in from 1954 and never made their way back. They all have old fashioned names like Clarence and Alvin and Elmer. You can almost see their whole lives walking around next to them, all those decades of hard work and combat and love and kids and sickness and grief.
One of my favorites right now is this crotchety but beautiful man from the hills of east Oklahoma who has, it turns out, carcinoid tumors all over his body. He came in for what seemed to be simple stomach surgery, and his hospital course has been getting more and more complicated with each day. The general opinion is that he may or may not last the year. When we told him he had widely metastatic cancer he nodded in a slow and dignified way and said, "Well. That's some bad news. Thank you." A few days ago we met with a social worker to begin the process of helping his family put his affairs in order. He said he'd never realized he needed to do that before. Every time I go into his room he takes my hand in both of his and says, "Thank you for visiting, doctor. Tell me about your day."
The other day we had to go up to the chemo infusion room to reattach a feeding tube in an old man on hospice care who was dying of leukemia. When we went up to see him his head was wrapped up in a blanket so you couldn't see his face. We took down the blanket and I was amazed. He was so old and so sick that his skin was practically transparent. His eyes, which you could tell used to be black, were shiny and silver. It was like everything extra had been stripped away in this man, except what was absolutely necessary for him to go through the mechanics of living out his last days. He was with a beautiful young woman who called him "Little Grandpa." When I took his hand before we did the procedure I could watch every fiber in his face transform, one by one, into the brightest purest smile I've ever seen on a person. Holding that man's hand, so shiny and close to death, I felt like I was touching something holy.
One of my favorites right now is this crotchety but beautiful man from the hills of east Oklahoma who has, it turns out, carcinoid tumors all over his body. He came in for what seemed to be simple stomach surgery, and his hospital course has been getting more and more complicated with each day. The general opinion is that he may or may not last the year. When we told him he had widely metastatic cancer he nodded in a slow and dignified way and said, "Well. That's some bad news. Thank you." A few days ago we met with a social worker to begin the process of helping his family put his affairs in order. He said he'd never realized he needed to do that before. Every time I go into his room he takes my hand in both of his and says, "Thank you for visiting, doctor. Tell me about your day."
The other day we had to go up to the chemo infusion room to reattach a feeding tube in an old man on hospice care who was dying of leukemia. When we went up to see him his head was wrapped up in a blanket so you couldn't see his face. We took down the blanket and I was amazed. He was so old and so sick that his skin was practically transparent. His eyes, which you could tell used to be black, were shiny and silver. It was like everything extra had been stripped away in this man, except what was absolutely necessary for him to go through the mechanics of living out his last days. He was with a beautiful young woman who called him "Little Grandpa." When I took his hand before we did the procedure I could watch every fiber in his face transform, one by one, into the brightest purest smile I've ever seen on a person. Holding that man's hand, so shiny and close to death, I felt like I was touching something holy.
Sunday, July 13, 2008
skin check
One cool thing about living in the desert is that when you have a string of cool, drizzly grey days in the middle of summer, everyone looks around in wonder and says, “isn’t this weather amazing?” I’ve gotten rained on three times in the last week, and still I don’t carry an umbrella with me. Being outside in the rain is pretty beautiful, and anyway this is desert rain: it dries off before too long.
And then there’s rainbows! Every afternoon we’ve had these enormous rainbows that stretch across the whole entire sky, literally from horizon to horizon, in every possible color; sometimes two on top of each other, glimmering brilliantly like mirrors. The first three or four days these rainbows came out, I ran outside, stood in the middle of the street like a little kid, and said “Whoa! No way!” Now I’m afraid of getting spoiled by the onslaught of so much ridiculous beauty. Really, what more can you possibly even imagine when you’re being bombarded by enormous crazily beautiful rainbows every single day?
I’m doing dermatology at the VA and I actually love it. I’m not sure why there’s such a pervasive compulsion in medical culture to complain enthusiastically about the VA, but I feel at home there. The one here is like a carnival. Every morning the lobby is full of volunteers making popcorn, and four-foot-tall old ladies serving people teeny cups of coffee and exactly one vanilla sandwich cookie behind the Information desk, and old-timers in those huge baseball caps with the pins on them that say “Korea War Veteran,” sitting on benches and nodding wisely together; and—yes—a Mexican folk band made up of about 27 people, at least 11 of whom have either crutches or wheelchairs, and they’re all joyously singing songs like “De Colores” and amiably squinching out of the way whenever people need to get by them. Every morning! How can you possibly be in a bad mood when this is what greets you upon entering your workplace every day?
More importantly than the sideshow in the lobby, which I could really sit and watch all day, are the veterans I get to work with, who are so beautiful and sad and dignified. The vast majority of them are men in their seventies and eighties who are coming for routine skin checks. Many of them have had skin cancer before, and we biopsy suspicious lesions on at least half of the ones we see. We examine them, inch by inch, sometimes with magnifying glasses and penlights, from the waist up. It’s a strange, incongruous, overly scientific gesture for the setting, because ultimately there is something so human and humbling about an eighty-year-old man with his shirt off. The belt, the suspenders, the coarse hairs in surprising places, the way age has settled the belly. The pale tender places the sun doesn’t touch. We carry our histories in our skin: the scars the world has bestowed upon us, and also those hidden vulnerable untouched places even the most gnarled and weathered among us still have. I don’t take these careful examinations lightly.
One of the last people I saw on Friday was a guy about my age who came back from Iraq about seven months ago and has had no end of health problems since his return. “Yeah,” he sighed, leaning deep and long back into his chair. “I’ve never been the same since that deployment.” He sustained significant head and leg injuries and has been unable to work steadily since then. Because he hasn’t been able to work, or sustain his former level of physical activity, he’s been sitting around the house a lot and he gained 50 pounds, and now he has hypertension and diabetes even though he was, up until recently, a completely healthy man in his early thirties. In addition, he’s been hospitalized twice for severe skin infections requiring IV antibiotics, and the day I saw him he came to the derm clinic with strange lesions on his legs suggestive of skin manifestations of TB. That’s a lot for a young person to take on.
“How are you doing, just in general?” I asked him.
“I’m depressed!” he said cheerfully. “Ya know? I’m not the person I used to be and it’s frustrating. But what am I gonna do? This is how it is. I could mope around forever or I could just keep going.”
We sat in silence for a while.
“Know what I realized the other day?” he asked.
“What?”
“I’m so thankful to be alive. Even after everything, you know?” He looked down, picked at the cracked vinyl arm of his chair. “That’s something.”
And then there’s rainbows! Every afternoon we’ve had these enormous rainbows that stretch across the whole entire sky, literally from horizon to horizon, in every possible color; sometimes two on top of each other, glimmering brilliantly like mirrors. The first three or four days these rainbows came out, I ran outside, stood in the middle of the street like a little kid, and said “Whoa! No way!” Now I’m afraid of getting spoiled by the onslaught of so much ridiculous beauty. Really, what more can you possibly even imagine when you’re being bombarded by enormous crazily beautiful rainbows every single day?
I’m doing dermatology at the VA and I actually love it. I’m not sure why there’s such a pervasive compulsion in medical culture to complain enthusiastically about the VA, but I feel at home there. The one here is like a carnival. Every morning the lobby is full of volunteers making popcorn, and four-foot-tall old ladies serving people teeny cups of coffee and exactly one vanilla sandwich cookie behind the Information desk, and old-timers in those huge baseball caps with the pins on them that say “Korea War Veteran,” sitting on benches and nodding wisely together; and—yes—a Mexican folk band made up of about 27 people, at least 11 of whom have either crutches or wheelchairs, and they’re all joyously singing songs like “De Colores” and amiably squinching out of the way whenever people need to get by them. Every morning! How can you possibly be in a bad mood when this is what greets you upon entering your workplace every day?
More importantly than the sideshow in the lobby, which I could really sit and watch all day, are the veterans I get to work with, who are so beautiful and sad and dignified. The vast majority of them are men in their seventies and eighties who are coming for routine skin checks. Many of them have had skin cancer before, and we biopsy suspicious lesions on at least half of the ones we see. We examine them, inch by inch, sometimes with magnifying glasses and penlights, from the waist up. It’s a strange, incongruous, overly scientific gesture for the setting, because ultimately there is something so human and humbling about an eighty-year-old man with his shirt off. The belt, the suspenders, the coarse hairs in surprising places, the way age has settled the belly. The pale tender places the sun doesn’t touch. We carry our histories in our skin: the scars the world has bestowed upon us, and also those hidden vulnerable untouched places even the most gnarled and weathered among us still have. I don’t take these careful examinations lightly.
One of the last people I saw on Friday was a guy about my age who came back from Iraq about seven months ago and has had no end of health problems since his return. “Yeah,” he sighed, leaning deep and long back into his chair. “I’ve never been the same since that deployment.” He sustained significant head and leg injuries and has been unable to work steadily since then. Because he hasn’t been able to work, or sustain his former level of physical activity, he’s been sitting around the house a lot and he gained 50 pounds, and now he has hypertension and diabetes even though he was, up until recently, a completely healthy man in his early thirties. In addition, he’s been hospitalized twice for severe skin infections requiring IV antibiotics, and the day I saw him he came to the derm clinic with strange lesions on his legs suggestive of skin manifestations of TB. That’s a lot for a young person to take on.
“How are you doing, just in general?” I asked him.
“I’m depressed!” he said cheerfully. “Ya know? I’m not the person I used to be and it’s frustrating. But what am I gonna do? This is how it is. I could mope around forever or I could just keep going.”
We sat in silence for a while.
“Know what I realized the other day?” he asked.
“What?”
“I’m so thankful to be alive. Even after everything, you know?” He looked down, picked at the cracked vinyl arm of his chair. “That’s something.”
Sunday, July 6, 2008
great joy
Tomorrow’s my last day on the newborn service; I’m gonna be sad to leave. Every day there was like being in the middle of a hopeful prayer. It’s such a beautiful honor to witness some of the absolute first moments another person spends in the world.
One amazing thing about working with newborn babies is that you just can’t be down for long. I knew a resident in San Francisco who visited the newborn nursery and held a brand-new baby every time a patient died. These last few weeks, every time I’d feel exhausted, frustrated, or like the dumb new intern who doesn’t know anything, I’d pick up a baby and hold them by a big window that looks out onto the mountains. Babies are so scrawny and wrinkly—some of them are downright reptilian-looking, really—and we think they are so beautiful! It’s an amazing thing to remember, the enormous capacity our hearts have, how much we can overlook if we put the big things where they belong.
Something awesome that happened was that one of the brand-new parents told me she wanted me to be her little one’s doctor, so they’re gonna come see me in clinic next week! I’ve had people say they wanted me to be their doctor before (to which I’ve always responded with, “Really? Are you sure?” or, “I’m not really a doctor yet…”), but this was the first time that I could say, “Great! Come see me in clinic next week!”
I’m so excited to watch this one grow. Yay!
One of the first days I was working there, I was holding a baby after I’d finished examining her, and her eyes popped open and she looked straight into my eyes and I realized I was one of the very first human beings this little person had ever had eye contact with. I felt a huge sense of responsibility that I still can’t fully explain: commitment as a person and a doctor to be fully present in the lives of the people who share their intimate, sacred parts with me; a renewed sense of devotion to the world around me, a reminder to keep plugging away, step by step, toward justice and respect for those of us who are here.
I think there’s a reason I got to start my life as a doctor here, with all these brand-new perfect little people. I think it was a gift for my spirit, and I am so grateful. Recently I’ve been remembering a christening my brother and I stumbled upon a couple of weekends ago when he was here visiting. The priest, a gigantic man with a barelly voice and hands as big as dinner plates, took up the baby and said, “God has welcomed you into this world with great joy!” Without realizing it, I’ve been thinking those words toward the new babies every time I pick one up to check for sacral dimples or listen for murmurs. I hope I can keep this blessing central with all of my patients: the crotchety old ones, the apathetic preoccupied ones, the ones who are like most of us: too sick and tired and old to be flawlessly beautiful anymore. God has welcomed you into this world with great joy, I hope to remind myself, about each and every one.
One amazing thing about working with newborn babies is that you just can’t be down for long. I knew a resident in San Francisco who visited the newborn nursery and held a brand-new baby every time a patient died. These last few weeks, every time I’d feel exhausted, frustrated, or like the dumb new intern who doesn’t know anything, I’d pick up a baby and hold them by a big window that looks out onto the mountains. Babies are so scrawny and wrinkly—some of them are downright reptilian-looking, really—and we think they are so beautiful! It’s an amazing thing to remember, the enormous capacity our hearts have, how much we can overlook if we put the big things where they belong.
Something awesome that happened was that one of the brand-new parents told me she wanted me to be her little one’s doctor, so they’re gonna come see me in clinic next week! I’ve had people say they wanted me to be their doctor before (to which I’ve always responded with, “Really? Are you sure?” or, “I’m not really a doctor yet…”), but this was the first time that I could say, “Great! Come see me in clinic next week!”
I’m so excited to watch this one grow. Yay!
One of the first days I was working there, I was holding a baby after I’d finished examining her, and her eyes popped open and she looked straight into my eyes and I realized I was one of the very first human beings this little person had ever had eye contact with. I felt a huge sense of responsibility that I still can’t fully explain: commitment as a person and a doctor to be fully present in the lives of the people who share their intimate, sacred parts with me; a renewed sense of devotion to the world around me, a reminder to keep plugging away, step by step, toward justice and respect for those of us who are here.
I think there’s a reason I got to start my life as a doctor here, with all these brand-new perfect little people. I think it was a gift for my spirit, and I am so grateful. Recently I’ve been remembering a christening my brother and I stumbled upon a couple of weekends ago when he was here visiting. The priest, a gigantic man with a barelly voice and hands as big as dinner plates, took up the baby and said, “God has welcomed you into this world with great joy!” Without realizing it, I’ve been thinking those words toward the new babies every time I pick one up to check for sacral dimples or listen for murmurs. I hope I can keep this blessing central with all of my patients: the crotchety old ones, the apathetic preoccupied ones, the ones who are like most of us: too sick and tired and old to be flawlessly beautiful anymore. God has welcomed you into this world with great joy, I hope to remind myself, about each and every one.
Monday, June 23, 2008
a little deluge
The last few days I've been struggling through orientation, memorizing ACLS protocols in the daytime and spending my evenings with the other brand-new interns, telling stories and salsa dancing and drinking beer on warm patios. It's a nice life, although I think we all have a little bit of a calm-before-the-storm feeling, that sense of the proverbial ball about to drop. "Starting to seem more real?" one of the third-year pediatrics residents asked me as I walked into a session on shock yesterday. I remember thinking that I didn't really know how to answer.
In some ways, I feel like medicine is one long journey through a strange galaxy where there's nothing that isn't unfamiliar and alien. Especially from the healthy, happy, well-rested well-fed side of the canyon, "real" strikes me as a bizarre word. I still feel like I'm not totally sure what I'm about to get into.
But it is, if anything, beginning to feel more inevitable. Today I read a friend's TB test and signed my name, with an MD at the end, in the blank for the healthcare provider. That was such a simple act, but it felt more important than all the 5-minute talks about the VA hospital police force and hand-washing. It isn't lost on me, the power of my name now, what I can wield with a simple signature.
Ok, I'm honestly scared to death.
But I know I'm not alone in that, and I think this fear is ultimately a good thing. Hopefully it will help me to stay humble and conscientious, to put my patients before my own agenda, ego, or busyness.
Today on my run it started raining. Yes! I am not kidding. All day the sky had been showing these clouds that, in New Orleans, would've had us all running for cover, parking our cars on high ground. Here, evidently, even though rain may actually fall out of the sky, it's usually so dry that the rain rarely makes it all the way down to you and me. Don't you think that's the craziest thing ever?
But today I really did feel raindrops while I was running. And, I'll have you know, I was not the only one. During the whole entire block or two while it was raining, the wind kicked up all this crazy dust into the road and I passed a bunch of cars with the windows down and all these hands stretched out into the streets, grasping and clutching those drops of water, like they needed to make sure they were real. Wow. There was joy in those hands that you could see from way down the street. I'd never seen anything like it.
Normally, I am a big wuss about rain. Part of this is about where I'm from: New Orleanians have had more rain in the past few years than any human beings should need to endure. We know too well about the destruction, violent or mundane, that rain can cause. Even a long time ago, though, if I walked outside and it started to rain, I'd usually just turn right around and go back home.
But on my run today I welcomed the rain. I stopped in the middle of the street, gazing straight up into the grayish pink sky. Wind whipped clouds of yellow dust around me and the drops made indentations on my arms and I still kept standing. I didn't need to hide or run away from all that water. Instead, I felt like I was being blessed then, running down the street with those little drops splashing my shirt, all those car windows open with the hands thrust out, cupping the rain, holding it, all of us out in the whirling world around us, so grateful and unafraid to be immersed.
In some ways, I feel like medicine is one long journey through a strange galaxy where there's nothing that isn't unfamiliar and alien. Especially from the healthy, happy, well-rested well-fed side of the canyon, "real" strikes me as a bizarre word. I still feel like I'm not totally sure what I'm about to get into.
But it is, if anything, beginning to feel more inevitable. Today I read a friend's TB test and signed my name, with an MD at the end, in the blank for the healthcare provider. That was such a simple act, but it felt more important than all the 5-minute talks about the VA hospital police force and hand-washing. It isn't lost on me, the power of my name now, what I can wield with a simple signature.
Ok, I'm honestly scared to death.
But I know I'm not alone in that, and I think this fear is ultimately a good thing. Hopefully it will help me to stay humble and conscientious, to put my patients before my own agenda, ego, or busyness.
Today on my run it started raining. Yes! I am not kidding. All day the sky had been showing these clouds that, in New Orleans, would've had us all running for cover, parking our cars on high ground. Here, evidently, even though rain may actually fall out of the sky, it's usually so dry that the rain rarely makes it all the way down to you and me. Don't you think that's the craziest thing ever?
But today I really did feel raindrops while I was running. And, I'll have you know, I was not the only one. During the whole entire block or two while it was raining, the wind kicked up all this crazy dust into the road and I passed a bunch of cars with the windows down and all these hands stretched out into the streets, grasping and clutching those drops of water, like they needed to make sure they were real. Wow. There was joy in those hands that you could see from way down the street. I'd never seen anything like it.
Normally, I am a big wuss about rain. Part of this is about where I'm from: New Orleanians have had more rain in the past few years than any human beings should need to endure. We know too well about the destruction, violent or mundane, that rain can cause. Even a long time ago, though, if I walked outside and it started to rain, I'd usually just turn right around and go back home.
But on my run today I welcomed the rain. I stopped in the middle of the street, gazing straight up into the grayish pink sky. Wind whipped clouds of yellow dust around me and the drops made indentations on my arms and I still kept standing. I didn't need to hide or run away from all that water. Instead, I felt like I was being blessed then, running down the street with those little drops splashing my shirt, all those car windows open with the hands thrust out, cupping the rain, holding it, all of us out in the whirling world around us, so grateful and unafraid to be immersed.
Saturday, June 14, 2008
It’s Gonna Be All Right
I’ve been hesitant to write here. Not because there haven’t been infinite beautiful and puzzling things to write about; not because—believe you me—I haven’t had time; I think it’s more that I’ve been relishing this transition time lately, the in-between-ness and rootlessness that comes when you leave one home and haven’t yet begun another. I’ve known since I was young that, for me at least, if I write something down it becomes true in a way it wasn’t before. You can’t take it back after that. And so I’m realizing that, happy as I’ve been these last few weeks, I haven’t been jumping up to write “I live in New Mexico.” There’s finality there, those words staring back. I think I haven’t been ready for that yet.
But I guess I just did it. That’s something.
I’ve been missing New Orleans in both bizarre and predictable ways. The other day a Dr John song on a friend’s CD made me cry, but I could’ve told you that 3 months ago, when I knew I’d be leaving. Or there’s this thing that happens, which I totally expected and was prepared for, which is that when I tell people here I’m from New Orleans, they say, “Oh. Were you there when all that stuff happened?” (I mean, that’s ok. What else are people gonna say? And it doesn’t make me torrentially sad, or angry, like it used to when people said that, it’s just one of those “oh, yeah” moments, like when you come back from a life-transforming journey and people are like, “that sounds cool.”)
That stuff doesn’t affect me too much. I think that in a process of nostalgia or longing, it’s the stuff you didn’t expect to provoke strong emotion that ends up taking on extra meaning, even if it just makes you grin, or wonder. Here’s what some of those things have been for me lately:
The fleur de lis on a friend’s hat in an old photo.
A stranger on the street wearing a “Make Levees Not War” T shirt (aww.).
The red beans and rice I cooked for some friends the other night, the way they just didn’t taste the same.
The mailman. He comes every day, in the morning if you can believe it, and he actually brings mail that’s addressed to me, and nobody else. It’s astounding. But we don’t say hi, and he doesn’t know my name or that I just graduated from med school, and he’s never shown me a picture of his adorable 2 year old daughter.
The university hospital, which is shiny and bustling and actually has—yes—a cafeteria.
These crazy yellow flowers—I don’t know what they are—jumping out of bushes and all over the sidewalks and, really, kind of getting in everybody’s way, and they smell just like night blooming jasmine. In the desert! Could you believe that?
Hummingbirds. They are everywhere. My grandfather loved hummingbirds, and every time I see one I feel his spirit with me.
The streets: not their relative silence but that one time, one day, when I heard faint strains of what may have been a trumpet, wafting over a balcony and a fence into the warm rosy street.
But I’m totally not wallowing in sadness and homesickness. Things here have been beautiful and full of—I don’t know how else to say it—potential. There’s more to say but for now I’ll give you a little list of just some of the things I’ve already started to fall in love with:
Bike paths! Oh my gosh, they are everywhere!
Recycling! It comes every week and you don’t even have to pay for it!
The sunsets. I’ve found a couple of hilltops in my neighborhood where you can see for miles, all the red and silver rooftops glinting this weird orangey-gold light, and if you look over to the east the mountains are bright pink.
Lavender, which grows everywhere and makes the streets smell like crisp laundry.
Salsa dancing, which people do everywhere: in jam-packed bars with people dressed to the nines; an unassuming sports bar called The Tavern; a steakhouse (I am not joking); this beautiful amphitheatre place outside of the museum where people dance on the stairs and the balconies and between the seats, and right next to enormous metal sculptures.
The way everybody’s like, “Wow, really? Welcome to New Mexico! We’re so glad to have you here!” whenever I tell them I just moved.
Art is everywhere. People make art out of anything. (That reminds me of home, too).
My neighborhood library, which is in Ernie Pyle’s old white house, which is tiny and white and cute and has a garden outside, and there’s this twinkly white-bearded guy behind the desk who not only knew the name of every single kid who came in while I was there this morning (like, 14 kids), but also what kind of books they’d like. “I think this would be beyond most 8 year olds I know,” he said to this one red-headed girl with skates on, “but I bet you can handle it.”
The guy on Central Avenue tonight with a huge telescope in the middle of the street. “We’re looking at the moon tonight,” he declared to anyone walking by. “Wanna see?” And the telescope was so awesome that you could see canyons and plains and mountains on the moon, and after we were done exclaiming how cool it was the man said, “let me show you something really amazing.” And he repositioned the telescope to some random-looking place in the sky and when we looked through, there was Saturn! With rings!
“How’d you know where it was?” I asked.
“I have great aim,” the guy said.
The fireworks we saw coming home last night (from an outdoor concert! At the zoo! Where you could go look at the polar bears during the set break!). The fireworks weren’t for any major occasion; apparently they just do them on Fridays at the Isotopes games. We pulled over in a clearing by the park to watch them, which I thought would take about 5 minutes. But it just kept going and going. These fireworks were serious. So loud they shook the car, explosions of red and blue and purple raining down on the city. About 30 minutes later I was like, “wow. They really aren’t stopping.”
“Yeah,” Vanessa said from the front seat. “They’re pretty intense about fireworks here.”
I can live with that.
But I guess I just did it. That’s something.
I’ve been missing New Orleans in both bizarre and predictable ways. The other day a Dr John song on a friend’s CD made me cry, but I could’ve told you that 3 months ago, when I knew I’d be leaving. Or there’s this thing that happens, which I totally expected and was prepared for, which is that when I tell people here I’m from New Orleans, they say, “Oh. Were you there when all that stuff happened?” (I mean, that’s ok. What else are people gonna say? And it doesn’t make me torrentially sad, or angry, like it used to when people said that, it’s just one of those “oh, yeah” moments, like when you come back from a life-transforming journey and people are like, “that sounds cool.”)
That stuff doesn’t affect me too much. I think that in a process of nostalgia or longing, it’s the stuff you didn’t expect to provoke strong emotion that ends up taking on extra meaning, even if it just makes you grin, or wonder. Here’s what some of those things have been for me lately:
The fleur de lis on a friend’s hat in an old photo.
A stranger on the street wearing a “Make Levees Not War” T shirt (aww.).
The red beans and rice I cooked for some friends the other night, the way they just didn’t taste the same.
The mailman. He comes every day, in the morning if you can believe it, and he actually brings mail that’s addressed to me, and nobody else. It’s astounding. But we don’t say hi, and he doesn’t know my name or that I just graduated from med school, and he’s never shown me a picture of his adorable 2 year old daughter.
The university hospital, which is shiny and bustling and actually has—yes—a cafeteria.
These crazy yellow flowers—I don’t know what they are—jumping out of bushes and all over the sidewalks and, really, kind of getting in everybody’s way, and they smell just like night blooming jasmine. In the desert! Could you believe that?
Hummingbirds. They are everywhere. My grandfather loved hummingbirds, and every time I see one I feel his spirit with me.
The streets: not their relative silence but that one time, one day, when I heard faint strains of what may have been a trumpet, wafting over a balcony and a fence into the warm rosy street.
But I’m totally not wallowing in sadness and homesickness. Things here have been beautiful and full of—I don’t know how else to say it—potential. There’s more to say but for now I’ll give you a little list of just some of the things I’ve already started to fall in love with:
Bike paths! Oh my gosh, they are everywhere!
Recycling! It comes every week and you don’t even have to pay for it!
The sunsets. I’ve found a couple of hilltops in my neighborhood where you can see for miles, all the red and silver rooftops glinting this weird orangey-gold light, and if you look over to the east the mountains are bright pink.
Lavender, which grows everywhere and makes the streets smell like crisp laundry.
Salsa dancing, which people do everywhere: in jam-packed bars with people dressed to the nines; an unassuming sports bar called The Tavern; a steakhouse (I am not joking); this beautiful amphitheatre place outside of the museum where people dance on the stairs and the balconies and between the seats, and right next to enormous metal sculptures.
The way everybody’s like, “Wow, really? Welcome to New Mexico! We’re so glad to have you here!” whenever I tell them I just moved.
Art is everywhere. People make art out of anything. (That reminds me of home, too).
My neighborhood library, which is in Ernie Pyle’s old white house, which is tiny and white and cute and has a garden outside, and there’s this twinkly white-bearded guy behind the desk who not only knew the name of every single kid who came in while I was there this morning (like, 14 kids), but also what kind of books they’d like. “I think this would be beyond most 8 year olds I know,” he said to this one red-headed girl with skates on, “but I bet you can handle it.”
The guy on Central Avenue tonight with a huge telescope in the middle of the street. “We’re looking at the moon tonight,” he declared to anyone walking by. “Wanna see?” And the telescope was so awesome that you could see canyons and plains and mountains on the moon, and after we were done exclaiming how cool it was the man said, “let me show you something really amazing.” And he repositioned the telescope to some random-looking place in the sky and when we looked through, there was Saturn! With rings!
“How’d you know where it was?” I asked.
“I have great aim,” the guy said.
The fireworks we saw coming home last night (from an outdoor concert! At the zoo! Where you could go look at the polar bears during the set break!). The fireworks weren’t for any major occasion; apparently they just do them on Fridays at the Isotopes games. We pulled over in a clearing by the park to watch them, which I thought would take about 5 minutes. But it just kept going and going. These fireworks were serious. So loud they shook the car, explosions of red and blue and purple raining down on the city. About 30 minutes later I was like, “wow. They really aren’t stopping.”
“Yeah,” Vanessa said from the front seat. “They’re pretty intense about fireworks here.”
I can live with that.
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