!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!
xv
Marcia and I met for dinner the last Friday in March, at one of my favorite spots in Porter Square.
“I don’t suppose they’ll be setting up out on the sidewalk any time soon, not after last night,” she observed. “That was a cold one. Did you sleep OK? Your boiler ever get fixed? Or is it still down jacket weather inside your place at night?”
“It was cold – I was cold – last night.” I dropped my head dejectedly, trying hard not to cry. Marcia had known me too long, though.
“Howard?”
“Uh-hum,” I mumbled. Lifting my head up towards her, I flippantly offered, “Howard may not have been good for much at the end, but at least he kept me warm at night.”
“He’s really gone? To Israel?”
We found a table at a window looking out on Mass Ave. “He’s gone. Over a week now,” I returned. “I don’t know why I feel so cliche – ‘can’t live with him, can’t live without him.’ He got a one-way ticket. And even if he did come back, those feelings – my feelings, whatever they were – have disappeared. Not gone with him, simply gone.”
“What do you mean, ‘Whatever they were’, your feelings?”
Composed again, I managed to look straight at her. “We worked so well together, a regular team, Howard and I. And I’ve never had a closer friend, or someone I admired so much. ‘Admired’, past tense. He used to be so…committed, driven, to setting things right. But once he actually got out into the fight, at the law clinic, it was if he were cast adrift, no ambition.” I frowned at the menu, full of burgers and beers. “It got a little awkward at the end, to tell the truth, the way he adored me, always insisting I tell him ‘I love you.’ Even when he knew I didn’t feel it, like he was insecure?”
“Sometimes you didn’t feel it, or always? At least the last couple of years, when I’ve been around you, it wasn’t the same as…” She caught herself, as if afraid to say the wrong thing.
“The same as what? I don’t know if I ever felt about Howard the way I did with…”
Marci said, as if shifting topics, “You said you wrote to Mike Harrison?”
“Three weeks ago. It was Matching Day for med students, and I got curious, what he’d decided, where he’d go this summer, for internship and all.” I tried to switch to safer ground. “It’s a year away for you, have you figured it out yet?”
“Psychiatry for sure, and New York or here, but of course, no idea yet until I interview places.” Now it was her turn to frown at the menu. “I don’t feel like eating here, do you?”
“Not any more”, I laughed. “Let’s go back, see what’s in the cupboards, OK?”
On the way over to Orchard Street, I took her arm, and said, “Marcia, what do you think? I feel like calling Mike…”
“He hasn’t written back yet?”
“He can go months or more to send me a letter. It’s his birthday soon, something’s telling me I need to find out about where he’s going next year.”
“Are you sure, Janie – Sarah? You don’t need to go there. I mean, not after Howard’s just left. Don’t you think that’s a little obvious, looking back to your ex for comfort?”
But I couldn’t help myself. A week later, on the night before his birthday, I called at 9 PM, hoping he’d be home in LA.
“Hello?” his familiar baritone greeted me. I was grateful I didn’t have to go through one of his roommates.
“Mike? It’s Sarah – Janie – Sarah Stein.”
“Hi!” He sounded pleased. “I got your letter. Been meaning to write, but we’ve been going skiing the past couple of weekends, up at Mammoth, and that’s a 12 hour round trip just to get there and back…”
Quickly, I said, “Skiing. I understand. Listen, it’s your birthday tomorrow – Happy 25 – and I was thinking about you, so I decided to call. I got curious, where are you going, for internship?” I got that all out in one gulp, and hoped he’d launch into one of his extended explanations.
“Oh, right. I’m staying here! In OB, you know.”
“Ob? Why?”
He sighed, sounding hesitant. “Yeah, you kind of pooh-pooh’d that, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t really mean to make you feel weird about it, Mike.”
“Well, you did. But it just feels so right, for me. There’s a little bit of everything. Surgery, office work, even a little bit of counseling. The big thing for me, what really draws me, is the babies. To be around that happiness…the smile on a new mother’s face, after she’s worked so hard, hurt so much, it all melts away when she sees, feels that little one fresh in her arms. Being around that everyday, it melts every thing else away. I learned the past four years, that illness, sickness, is not exciting to me. I mean, my roommates, who are going into Internal Medicine? They get so excited dealing with intractable problems, always another question to ask, another test to order. All I feel about that is, I’ll never know enough to do a good job there. OB, it’s different pretty unchanging as a process, you know? Your is to make sure everything stays safe, so the mother and her family can have the birth they want. Some OBs, if they don’t see a problem, they go out of their way to find one, maybe so they can be a hero. Me, I only want to be around that happiness, be there at the start of so many stories. Every now and then, I get to use a little skill, use my hands to help the baby out. It’s like being a music teacher, sometimes – I know what needs to happen, and I help her figure out how to play her instrument.”
He’d paused for breath, so I inserted, “Where? Which program?”
“I said, here. My first choice, and I didn’t really have a second one.”
“Why there? What’s so good about LA?” [MAYBE WE NEED TO KNOW WHAT SHE’S FEELING HERE?]
“Couple of things, It’s so busy here, I know it’s the kind of place where I’ll be able to learn, by doing. I’m not the kind of person who does I don’t do well sitting in a lecture, taking notes, and then putting that to use. I have to deal with the actual problem, get my hands messy, so to speak. And here, the attendings, they simply aren’t around. So the residents, they’re in charge, the senior resident, he’s the last line of defense..”
My feminist antennae instantly went up. “He?”
“Well, yeah, you’re right, they’re all men, at least up to now. But in my class, the ones coming in, there are three women out of twelve. And seeing how things are going in med schools, I bet the balance will tip soon enough. I may become a dinosaur, some day. But I really don’t see why it should be an issue though. If only male doctors could take care of men, and only female doctors, women, is that right? What kind of a world is that, segregated by sex, by gender?”
I stayed silent, so he went on. “And the other thing, this is not only the largest program in the country, it’s also the best.”
“Really? Better than Harvard.”
He laughed. “Yeah. Four or five years ago, USC decided to make their Women’s Hospital a Mecca, a magnet for clinical and academic medicine. So they went and hired Dr. Q, the editor of the most prestigious journal, and he started stealing people from all the programs, in New England, and New York. He took practically the entire OB department from Yale, that’s the place where they literally invented fetal monitoring. even the guy who has all the patents on the systems, and brought them out. If you want to learn how to manage labor using that, well, we’ve got a lock on the experts. Same thing with Gyn Oncology, cancer surgery. I don’t want to be some hot shot in a University department somewhere. I’m not someone who has an ambition to be a professor or department chair, I want to actually help people, help women, directly. That’s why I became a doctor to begin with, one of the reasons, and this is the best place in the country learn how to do that.”
“I’m a little sorry, I guess, that you’re not going to be a shrink.”
“I told you, didn’t I, that I decided I didn’t want to sit around on my rear end eight hours a day, listening to people tell me how bad the world is. And if I weren’t a talk therapist, well, dealing with crazier people, we still don’t know what causes psychosis, or what works with it. We can tamp it down, make people zombies with drugs, but curing them? No.”
Finally, he seemed finished, so I said, “You know, I was in LA last Christmas. You were back in Cincinnati, they said. Seeing your parents?”
“Yeah.”
“How’s your mother?”
“She has a clinical practice going now, seeing patients and all. That cancer, the stroke, it took a while, but she did not give up.’
“Anything else? How long were you there for?”
He hesitated. “Actually…I went back for a six week rotation in urgent care at Cincinnati General.”
“Why on earth would you go back there for something like that?”
Again, the line went silent for a few seconds. “OK, I guess it can’t hurt me now. It was Molly. I had this stupid idea we could get together…”
“Sounds like a ‘but…’,” I offered.
“But…yeah, it just wasn’t there, you know.”
Boy did I ever. Now it was my time to be silent. Finally, “Howard’s gone. For good, I think.”
“Oh?”
“He’s gone to Israel, to live, work on a kibbutz. I don’t know…No, I don’t care…if he ever comes back.”
“I’m sorry,” Mike said with an actual hint of concern in his voice.
“It’s OK, I think. I mean, the next 5 years, I expect I will be totally enmeshed in this program at BU. That’s where I want to put my energy, my commitment.”
There was another awkward pause during which I heard my therapist in my head, telling me, “You have to ask him…” so I ventured, with a lilt, “So, how’s your sex life?
Thankfully he returned the laugh, saying, “Hah! Not so much now-a-days.” He paused. I could almost see him chewing over the next thing before he came out with, “But I did meet someone, last night in fact.”
Surprised to feel genuinely interested, I asked, “Who? Where?”
“It was at the hospital – where else? April – funny name, huh? We were both in the lab, waiting to spin a hematocrit, and kind of fake-fought over who got to use the machine next. She’s a new nurse, an RN waiting for her license to come through, and of course, I’m still a medical student for a couple more months. So we wondered about protocol, who had priority.”
“Who won?”
“She let me go first.”
Curious, I asked, “Is she younger than you?”
“That’s funny – her birthday is two days after mine, we found out, so we’re both still 25, for a few more days. She said, ‘Be sure and tell me what 26 is like, next time you’re on call’.”
“Cute…”
“Uh, I took that as a good sign, so I said, why don’t we just go celebrate our birthdays when we get off the morning after.”
“So you asked her out?”
Surprised, he answered, “Yeah, I guess I did.” He chuckled, “We’ll see how that goes.”
Feeling bold, I asked, “What’s she like, look like I mean? Her hair?”
“Don’t know, she had on one of those bonnets we have to wear in the delivery room. Blonde, maybe?”
We both fell silent for a few seconds, and I could sense the call coming to an end. Still, the therapist-in-my-head made me say, “Mike, I am…” I worried over the next word. Happy was not right, not honest. Still, I did want his life to go well, so I tried, “…I’m glad you’ve found your calling. Be careful with the women you see, you take care of – they’ll need a good doctor, a caring doctor, I know you can do that for them, OK?”
He said, in a serious tone, “All right. OK.”
“Oh, and Mike? This nurse? Please don’t try to win her with any fake charm. Just be yourself. If that doesn’t work, she’s not good enough for you. Hear me?”
He sighed, saying simply, “Uh-huh…”
The line between us sounded dead, so I tried, “And, Mike, please write. I really do want to hear, to know who you are and what happens to you, no matter where, no matter when.”
“I will, I really will. I promise.”
xv
Marcia and I met for dinner the last Friday in March, at one of my favorite spots in Porter Square.
“I don’t suppose they’ll be setting up out on the sidewalk any time soon, not after last night,” she observed. “That was a cold one. Did you sleep OK? Your boiler ever get fixed? Or is it still down jacket weather inside your place at night?”
“It was cold – I was cold – last night.” I dropped my head dejectedly, trying hard not to cry. Marcia had known me too long, though.
“Howard?”
“Uh-hum,” I mumbled. Lifting my head up towards her, I flippantly offered, “Howard may not have been good for much at the end, but at least he kept me warm at night.”
“He’s really gone? To Israel?”
We found a table at a window looking out on Mass Ave. “He’s gone. Over a week now,” I returned. “I don’t know why I feel so cliche – ‘can’t live with him, can’t live without him.’ He got a one-way ticket. And even if he did come back, those feelings – my feelings, whatever they were – have disappeared. Not gone with him, simply gone.”
“What do you mean, ‘Whatever they were’, your feelings?”
Composed again, I managed to look straight at her. “We worked so well together, a regular team, Howard and I. And I’ve never had a closer friend, or someone I admired so much. ‘Admired’, past tense. He used to be so…committed, driven, to setting things right. But once he actually got out into the fight, at the law clinic, it was if he were cast adrift, no ambition.” I frowned at the menu, full of burgers and beers. “It got a little awkward at the end, to tell the truth, the way he adored me, always insisting I tell him ‘I love you.’ Even when he knew I didn’t feel it, like he was insecure?”
“Sometimes you didn’t feel it, or always? At least the last couple of years, when I’ve been around you, it wasn’t the same as…” She caught herself, as if afraid to say the wrong thing.
“The same as what? I don’t know if I ever felt about Howard the way I did with…”
Marci said, as if shifting topics, “You said you wrote to Mike Harrison?”
“Three weeks ago. It was Matching Day for med students, and I got curious, what he’d decided, where he’d go this summer, for internship and all.” I tried to switch to safer ground. “It’s a year away for you, have you figured it out yet?”
“Psychiatry for sure, and New York or here, but of course, no idea yet until I interview places.” Now it was her turn to frown at the menu. “I don’t feel like eating here, do you?”
“Not any more”, I laughed. “Let’s go back, see what’s in the cupboards, OK?”
On the way over to Orchard Street, I took her arm, and said, “Marcia, what do you think? I feel like calling Mike…”
“He hasn’t written back yet?”
“He can go months or more to send me a letter. It’s his birthday soon, something’s telling me I need to find out about where he’s going next year.”
“Are you sure, Janie – Sarah? You don’t need to go there. I mean, not after Howard’s just left. Don’t you think that’s a little obvious, looking back to your ex for comfort?”
But I couldn’t help myself. A week later, on the night before his birthday, I called at 9 PM, hoping he’d be home in LA.
“Hello?” his familiar baritone greeted me. I was grateful I didn’t have to go through one of his roommates.
“Mike? It’s Sarah – Janie – Sarah Stein.”
“Hi!” He sounded pleased. “I got your letter. Been meaning to write, but we’ve been going skiing the past couple of weekends, up at Mammoth, and that’s a 12 hour round trip just to get there and back…”
Quickly, I said, “Skiing. I understand. Listen, it’s your birthday tomorrow – Happy 25 – and I was thinking about you, so I decided to call. I got curious, where are you going, for internship?” I got that all out in one gulp, and hoped he’d launch into one of his extended explanations.
“Oh, right. I’m staying here! In OB, you know.”
“Ob? Why?”
He sighed, sounding hesitant. “Yeah, you kind of pooh-pooh’d that, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t really mean to make you feel weird about it, Mike.”
“Well, you did. But it just feels so right, for me. There’s a little bit of everything. Surgery, office work, even a little bit of counseling. The big thing for me, what really draws me, is the babies. To be around that happiness…the smile on a new mother’s face, after she’s worked so hard, hurt so much, it all melts away when she sees, feels that little one fresh in her arms. Being around that everyday, it melts every thing else away. I learned the past four years, that illness, sickness, is not exciting to me. I mean, my roommates, who are going into Internal Medicine? They get so excited dealing with intractable problems, always another question to ask, another test to order. All I feel about that is, I’ll never know enough to do a good job there. OB, it’s different pretty unchanging as a process, you know? Your is to make sure everything stays safe, so the mother and her family can have the birth they want. Some OBs, if they don’t see a problem, they go out of their way to find one, maybe so they can be a hero. Me, I only want to be around that happiness, be there at the start of so many stories. Every now and then, I get to use a little skill, use my hands to help the baby out. It’s like being a music teacher, sometimes – I know what needs to happen, and I help her figure out how to play her instrument.”
He’d paused for breath, so I inserted, “Where? Which program?”
“I said, here. My first choice, and I didn’t really have a second one.”
“Why there? What’s so good about LA?” [MAYBE WE NEED TO KNOW WHAT SHE’S FEELING HERE?]
“Couple of things, It’s so busy here, I know it’s the kind of place where I’ll be able to learn, by doing. I’m not the kind of person who does I don’t do well sitting in a lecture, taking notes, and then putting that to use. I have to deal with the actual problem, get my hands messy, so to speak. And here, the attendings, they simply aren’t around. So the residents, they’re in charge, the senior resident, he’s the last line of defense..”
My feminist antennae instantly went up. “He?”
“Well, yeah, you’re right, they’re all men, at least up to now. But in my class, the ones coming in, there are three women out of twelve. And seeing how things are going in med schools, I bet the balance will tip soon enough. I may become a dinosaur, some day. But I really don’t see why it should be an issue though. If only male doctors could take care of men, and only female doctors, women, is that right? What kind of a world is that, segregated by sex, by gender?”
I stayed silent, so he went on. “And the other thing, this is not only the largest program in the country, it’s also the best.”
“Really? Better than Harvard.”
He laughed. “Yeah. Four or five years ago, USC decided to make their Women’s Hospital a Mecca, a magnet for clinical and academic medicine. So they went and hired Dr. Q, the editor of the most prestigious journal, and he started stealing people from all the programs, in New England, and New York. He took practically the entire OB department from Yale, that’s the place where they literally invented fetal monitoring. even the guy who has all the patents on the systems, and brought them out. If you want to learn how to manage labor using that, well, we’ve got a lock on the experts. Same thing with Gyn Oncology, cancer surgery. I don’t want to be some hot shot in a University department somewhere. I’m not someone who has an ambition to be a professor or department chair, I want to actually help people, help women, directly. That’s why I became a doctor to begin with, one of the reasons, and this is the best place in the country learn how to do that.”
“I’m a little sorry, I guess, that you’re not going to be a shrink.”
“I told you, didn’t I, that I decided I didn’t want to sit around on my rear end eight hours a day, listening to people tell me how bad the world is. And if I weren’t a talk therapist, well, dealing with crazier people, we still don’t know what causes psychosis, or what works with it. We can tamp it down, make people zombies with drugs, but curing them? No.”
Finally, he seemed finished, so I said, “You know, I was in LA last Christmas. You were back in Cincinnati, they said. Seeing your parents?”
“Yeah.”
“How’s your mother?”
“She has a clinical practice going now, seeing patients and all. That cancer, the stroke, it took a while, but she did not give up.’
“Anything else? How long were you there for?”
He hesitated. “Actually…I went back for a six week rotation in urgent care at Cincinnati General.”
“Why on earth would you go back there for something like that?”
Again, the line went silent for a few seconds. “OK, I guess it can’t hurt me now. It was Molly. I had this stupid idea we could get together…”
“Sounds like a ‘but…’,” I offered.
“But…yeah, it just wasn’t there, you know.”
Boy did I ever. Now it was my time to be silent. Finally, “Howard’s gone. For good, I think.”
“Oh?”
“He’s gone to Israel, to live, work on a kibbutz. I don’t know…No, I don’t care…if he ever comes back.”
“I’m sorry,” Mike said with an actual hint of concern in his voice.
“It’s OK, I think. I mean, the next 5 years, I expect I will be totally enmeshed in this program at BU. That’s where I want to put my energy, my commitment.”
There was another awkward pause during which I heard my therapist in my head, telling me, “You have to ask him…” so I ventured, with a lilt, “So, how’s your sex life?
Thankfully he returned the laugh, saying, “Hah! Not so much now-a-days.” He paused. I could almost see him chewing over the next thing before he came out with, “But I did meet someone, last night in fact.”
Surprised to feel genuinely interested, I asked, “Who? Where?”
“It was at the hospital – where else? April – funny name, huh? We were both in the lab, waiting to spin a hematocrit, and kind of fake-fought over who got to use the machine next. She’s a new nurse, an RN waiting for her license to come through, and of course, I’m still a medical student for a couple more months. So we wondered about protocol, who had priority.”
“Who won?”
“She let me go first.”
Curious, I asked, “Is she younger than you?”
“That’s funny – her birthday is two days after mine, we found out, so we’re both still 25, for a few more days. She said, ‘Be sure and tell me what 26 is like, next time you’re on call’.”
“Cute…”
“Uh, I took that as a good sign, so I said, why don’t we just go celebrate our birthdays when we get off the morning after.”
“So you asked her out?”
Surprised, he answered, “Yeah, I guess I did.” He chuckled, “We’ll see how that goes.”
Feeling bold, I asked, “What’s she like, look like I mean? Her hair?”
“Don’t know, she had on one of those bonnets we have to wear in the delivery room. Blonde, maybe?”
We both fell silent for a few seconds, and I could sense the call coming to an end. Still, the therapist-in-my-head made me say, “Mike, I am…” I worried over the next word. Happy was not right, not honest. Still, I did want his life to go well, so I tried, “…I’m glad you’ve found your calling. Be careful with the women you see, you take care of – they’ll need a good doctor, a caring doctor, I know you can do that for them, OK?”
He said, in a serious tone, “All right. OK.”
“Oh, and Mike? This nurse? Please don’t try to win her with any fake charm. Just be yourself. If that doesn’t work, she’s not good enough for you. Hear me?”
He sighed, saying simply, “Uh-huh…”
The line between us sounded dead, so I tried, “And, Mike, please write. I really do want to hear, to know who you are and what happens to you, no matter where, no matter when.”
“I will, I really will. I promise.”
xv
Marcia and I met for dinner the last Friday in March, at one of my favorite spots in Porter Square.
“I don’t suppose they’ll be setting up out on the sidewalk any time soon, not after last night,” she observed. “That was a cold one. Did you sleep OK? Your boiler ever get fixed? Or is it still down jacket weather inside your place at night?”
“It was cold – I was cold – last night.” I dropped my head dejectedly, trying hard not to cry. Marcia had known me too long, though.
“Howard?”
“Uh-hum,” I mumbled. Lifting my head up towards her, I flippantly offered, “Howard may not have been good for much at the end, but at least he kept me warm at night.”
“He’s really gone? To Israel?”
We found a table at a window looking out on Mass Ave. “He’s gone. Over a week now,” I returned. “I don’t know why I feel so cliche – ‘can’t live with him, can’t live without him.’ He got a one-way ticket. And even if he did come back, those feelings – my feelings, whatever they were – have disappeared. Not gone with him, simply gone.”
“What do you mean, ‘Whatever they were’, your feelings?”
Composed again, I managed to look straight at her. “We worked so well together, a regular team, Howard and I. And I’ve never had a closer friend, or someone I admired so much. ‘Admired’, past tense. He used to be so…committed, driven, to setting things right. But once he actually got out into the fight, at the law clinic, it was if he were cast adrift, no ambition.” I frowned at the menu, full of burgers and beers. “It got a little awkward at the end, to tell the truth, the way he adored me, always insisting I tell him ‘I love you.’ Even when he knew I didn’t feel it, like he was insecure?”
“Sometimes you didn’t feel it, or always? At least the last couple of years, when I’ve been around you, it wasn’t the same as…” She caught herself, as if afraid to say the wrong thing.
“The same as what? I don’t know if I ever felt about Howard the way I did with…”
Marci said, as if shifting topics, “You said you wrote to Mike Harrison?”
“Three weeks ago. It was Matching Day for med students, and I got curious, what he’d decided, where he’d go this summer, for internship and all.” I tried to switch to safer ground. “It’s a year away for you, have you figured it out yet?”
“Psychiatry for sure, and New York or here, but of course, no idea yet until I interview places.” Now it was her turn to frown at the menu. “I don’t feel like eating here, do you?”
“Not any more”, I laughed. “Let’s go back, see what’s in the cupboards, OK?”
On the way over to Orchard Street, I took her arm, and said, “Marcia, what do you think? I feel like calling Mike…”
“He hasn’t written back yet?”
“He can go months or more to send me a letter. It’s his birthday soon, something’s telling me I need to find out about where he’s going next year.”
“Are you sure, Janie – Sarah? You don’t need to go there. I mean, not after Howard’s just left. Don’t you think that’s a little obvious, looking back to your ex for comfort?”
But I couldn’t help myself. A week later, on the night before his birthday, I called at 9 PM, hoping he’d be home in LA.
“Hello?” his familiar baritone greeted me. I was grateful I didn’t have to go through one of his roommates.
“Mike? It’s Sarah – Janie – Sarah Stein.”
“Hi!” He sounded pleased. “I got your letter. Been meaning to write, but we’ve been going skiing the past couple of weekends, up at Mammoth, and that’s a 12 hour round trip just to get there and back…”
Quickly, I said, “Skiing. I understand. Listen, it’s your birthday tomorrow – Happy 25 – and I was thinking about you, so I decided to call. I got curious, where are you going, for internship?” I got that all out in one gulp, and hoped he’d launch into one of his extended explanations.
“Oh, right. I’m staying here! In OB, you know.”
“Ob? Why?”
He sighed, sounding hesitant. “Yeah, you kind of pooh-pooh’d that, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t really mean to make you feel weird about it, Mike.”
“Well, you did. But it just feels so right, for me. There’s a little bit of everything. Surgery, office work, even a little bit of counseling. The big thing for me, what really draws me, is the babies. To be around that happiness…the smile on a new mother’s face, after she’s worked so hard, hurt so much, it all melts away when she sees, feels that little one fresh in her arms. Being around that everyday, it melts every thing else away. I learned the past four years, that illness, sickness, is not exciting to me. I mean, my roommates, who are going into Internal Medicine? They get so excited dealing with intractable problems, always another question to ask, another test to order. All I feel about that is, I’ll never know enough to do a good job there. OB, it’s different pretty unchanging as a process, you know? Your is to make sure everything stays safe, so the mother and her family can have the birth they want. Some OBs, if they don’t see a problem, they go out of their way to find one, maybe so they can be a hero. Me, I only want to be around that happiness, be there at the start of so many stories. Every now and then, I get to use a little skill, use my hands to help the baby out. It’s like being a music teacher, sometimes – I know what needs to happen, and I help her figure out how to play her instrument.”
He’d paused for breath, so I inserted, “Where? Which program?”
“I said, here. My first choice, and I didn’t really have a second one.”
“Why there? What’s so good about LA?” [MAYBE WE NEED TO KNOW WHAT SHE’S FEELING HERE?]
“Couple of things, It’s so busy here, I know it’s the kind of place where I’ll be able to learn, by doing. I’m not the kind of person who does I don’t do well sitting in a lecture, taking notes, and then putting that to use. I have to deal with the actual problem, get my hands messy, so to speak. And here, the attendings, they simply aren’t around. So the residents, they’re in charge, the senior resident, he’s the last line of defense..”
My feminist antennae instantly went up. “He?”
“Well, yeah, you’re right, they’re all men, at least up to now. But in my class, the ones coming in, there are three women out of twelve. And seeing how things are going in med schools, I bet the balance will tip soon enough. I may become a dinosaur, some day. But I really don’t see why it should be an issue though. If only male doctors could take care of men, and only female doctors, women, is that right? What kind of a world is that, segregated by sex, by gender?”
I stayed silent, so he went on. “And the other thing, this is not only the largest program in the country, it’s also the best.”
“Really? Better than Harvard.”
He laughed. “Yeah. Four or five years ago, USC decided to make their Women’s Hospital a Mecca, a magnet for clinical and academic medicine. So they went and hired Dr. Q, the editor of the most prestigious journal, and he started stealing people from all the programs, in New England, and New York. He took practically the entire OB department from Yale, that’s the place where they literally invented fetal monitoring. even the guy who has all the patents on the systems, and brought them out. If you want to learn how to manage labor using that, well, we’ve got a lock on the experts. Same thing with Gyn Oncology, cancer surgery. I don’t want to be some hot shot in a University department somewhere. I’m not someone who has an ambition to be a professor or department chair, I want to actually help people, help women, directly. That’s why I became a doctor to begin with, one of the reasons, and this is the best place in the country learn how to do that.”
“I’m a little sorry, I guess, that you’re not going to be a shrink.”
“I told you, didn’t I, that I decided I didn’t want to sit around on my rear end eight hours a day, listening to people tell me how bad the world is. And if I weren’t a talk therapist, well, dealing with crazier people, we still don’t know what causes psychosis, or what works with it. We can tamp it down, make people zombies with drugs, but curing them? No.”
Finally, he seemed finished, so I said, “You know, I was in LA last Christmas. You were back in Cincinnati, they said. Seeing your parents?”
“Yeah.”
“How’s your mother?”
“She has a clinical practice going now, seeing patients and all. That cancer, the stroke, it took a while, but she did not give up.’
“Anything else? How long were you there for?”
He hesitated. “Actually…I went back for a six week rotation in urgent care at Cincinnati General.”
“Why on earth would you go back there for something like that?”
Again, the line went silent for a few seconds. “OK, I guess it can’t hurt me now. It was Molly. I had this stupid idea we could get together…”
“Sounds like a ‘but…’,” I offered.
“But…yeah, it just wasn’t there, you know.”
Boy did I ever. Now it was my time to be silent. Finally, “Howard’s gone. For good, I think.”
“Oh?”
“He’s gone to Israel, to live, work on a kibbutz. I don’t know…No, I don’t care…if he ever comes back.”
“I’m sorry,” Mike said with an actual hint of concern in his voice.
“It’s OK, I think. I mean, the next 5 years, I expect I will be totally enmeshed in this program at BU. That’s where I want to put my energy, my commitment.”
There was another awkward pause during which I heard my therapist in my head, telling me, “You have to ask him…” so I ventured, with a lilt, “So, how’s your sex life?
Thankfully he returned the laugh, saying, “Hah! Not so much now-a-days.” He paused. I could almost see him chewing over the next thing before he came out with, “But I did meet someone, last night in fact.”
Surprised to feel genuinely interested, I asked, “Who? Where?”
“It was at the hospital – where else? April – funny name, huh? We were both in the lab, waiting to spin a hematocrit, and kind of fake-fought over who got to use the machine next. She’s a new nurse, an RN waiting for her license to come through, and of course, I’m still a medical student for a couple more months. So we wondered about protocol, who had priority.”
“Who won?”
“She let me go first.”
Curious, I asked, “Is she younger than you?”
“That’s funny – her birthday is two days after mine, we found out, so we’re both still 25, for a few more days. She said, ‘Be sure and tell me what 26 is like, next time you’re on call’.”
“Cute…”
“Uh, I took that as a good sign, so I said, why don’t we just go celebrate our birthdays when we get off the morning after.”
“So you asked her out?”
Surprised, he answered, “Yeah, I guess I did.” He chuckled, “We’ll see how that goes.”
Feeling bold, I asked, “What’s she like, look like I mean? Her hair?”
“Don’t know, she had on one of those bonnets we have to wear in the delivery room. Blonde, maybe?”
We both fell silent for a few seconds, and I could sense the call coming to an end. Still, the therapist-in-my-head made me say, “Mike, I am…” I worried over the next word. Happy was not right, not honest. Still, I did want his life to go well, so I tried, “…I’m glad you’ve found your calling. Be careful with the women you see, you take care of – they’ll need a good doctor, a caring doctor, I know you can do that for them, OK?”
He said, in a serious tone, “All right. OK.”
“Oh, and Mike? This nurse? Please don’t try to win her with any fake charm. Just be yourself. If that doesn’t work, she’s not good enough for you. Hear me?”
He sighed, saying simply, “Uh-huh…”
The line between us sounded dead, so I tried, “And, Mike, please write. I really do want to hear, to know who you are and what happens to you, no matter where, no matter when.”
“I will, I really will. I promise.”
********