I don’t think a lot about medical school – where I went, ambivalently (make that kicking and screaming), at the age of 32, but today, I am reminded of it.
Yesterday, I was in the hospital, admitted for a planned medical procedure, an ablation of nodes of irregular activity in my heart that cause a condition called atrial fibrillation or AFib. I feel like everyone knows about Afib because of the commercials on cable news for some drug or other to treat it, but not only does not everyone know about Afib, not everyone watches cable news and most of those viewers don’t know what it is as the commercials never really tell you what the diseases are for which they are hawking cures and treatments…
Nevertheless, there I was in the pre-op unit, changing into my gown and watching the nurses bustling about doing their tasks, talking and joking with each other, just being medical staff – normal medical staff, and it began flooding back to me – images of all those hours, mounting up to years, spent in hospitals, putting in IV’s, keeping to-do lists, getting labs, drawing blood, learning. Patients in rows of beds in city or county hospitals. Images and impressions come back, notably of those first weeks of being in Jacobi Hospital in the Bronx, right by the apartments and classrooms and labs of Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where I ended up, almost by accident, in August of 1982.
So much fades, but so much remains. There was Mrs. Reeder, the wan, elderly, dark chocolate skinned black woman, who often asked for water, which I happily brought to her and listened as she talked in her particular drawl about there being nothing like a loooong, cool drink of water on a hot dusty day. I learned to do a pleural tap on her – a bedside procedure in those days in that busy hospital, my resident showing me how to prep her back with betadine, making circles from the inside to the out so as not to bring bacteria back onto the site…. And inserting a needle between her lower ribs, carefully so as not to go too far and puncture her lung. Then we drew out fluid that had collected between the lung and the pleura, the membrane that surrounds the lungs.
To be honest, I don’t remember the medical story or even what disease she had. I just remember her and the long cool drinks of water. I had a sense of a deep history of dusty roads wherever in the south she had come from…and the image of her as a little girl, enjoying those cool drinks of water on the hot days. I could see her transported back there as she took in the water I handed her. We didn’t talk much beyond that. But I am struck with the extent to which I didn’t identify as her doctor, treating her illness. I just have a sense of being a person, a human being, bringing another person a glass of water as she sat there on the edge of her bed. That was all. I didn’t even sense that I was doing something healing or noble or charitable…it was just the one thing I could do for her and, besides, I loved hearing how cooling that water was for Mrs. Reeder. That’s all. I just liked her and liked bringing her water.
I saw her every day on the ward –a room with 8 or 10 beds in two rows, no curtains separating them, and remember her slow smooth pace and the feeling of being with her, knowing that those sips of water and the shared moments were very real and meaningful – to both of us. And I realize, as write, that I loved Mrs. Reeder – in a very simple and pure way. I would not have called it that at the time or thought of it that way, but now, after a long career of people and patients and care and conflict, I know the feeling – like with my other patients – of just loving a soul, meeting it where it is and, in Mrs. Reeder’s case, accompanying her as she flowed back to Mississippi or Alabama or Louisiana or wherever she had been that little girl on the hot days.
It is the same feeling as with Margo or Jess on the bus or, beneath layers of complexity, my own mother…that sense of a child. And I realize that I, until perhaps now, never had that sense of my mother – that somewhere back there, she was a child who was innocent in life and needed love and comfort – without confusion and without hard edges and without the of dark shadows of darkness…just a little girl 2 or 3 or so with blond curls and a mommy and daddy…a little girl who got lost and hurt and angry and cold and edgy and mean and even humiliating…and for this moment, I can, for the first time, sense the hurt…and that familiar longing to do something to love the hurt away.
One Monday, after a day and a half off, I returned to the ward, looked for Mrs. Reeder and found that she had died. I remember a quiet shock, wishing, in a sense, that I had been there or said good-bye, or something. I remember too, the empty bed in that row of beds, just white sheets and a pillow, neatly made, now without her chocolate presence. And I remember my intern, a stocky, tough, Italian American woman with close-cropped black hair and a few studs in her earlobes who taught me so many valuable lessons (like you can always do more scut-work tasks in the ten minutes before rounds than you think you could) saying to me, “Yeah, I know. The ones you really care about never die while you’re on [duty].” Somehow the inference was there that it is out of kindness that they die when you’re not there…generously exiting in your absence, making it easier for you both.
It’s strange to think back. There was so much poignancy in those early days – so much to write and think about. I tried twice to write about Mrs. Reeder…once in Bunny’s condo in South Pasadena and another in the house on Mill Road. Didn’t finish it, but I am filled with a sense of how much I want and wanted to write. Just to reflect on the people and experiences I encountered…and how simple that is – just to write unfettered by those who have to translate feeling into abstract thought, formula, philosophy and theory, when at heart it is just stories.
And I have so many stories to tell…….so many more than I realized, – and that is all I want to do. It’s silly, but I still feel like I could be happy just being somewhere and writing them.
So simple.