The non-medical world

This was written in September and finished just now

September brings with it an end to something. Where I live, it brought a cool, dry, beautiful atmosphere, lazy days where patients [and some doctors] take the afternoon off, and an opportunity for me to loaf around my home and pack my liquids into my carry-on's which I will now be checking in. Yes, that time has come-- my long-awaited vacation.

For the first few days, I cleaned my home like a good girl. I put away my medicine-type books and walked over to the neighborhood bookstore, the muscles on my back and shoulders already breathing a sigh of inward-looking relief. Bookstores, good ones, anyway, have always been a comfort to me. My family's leisure time was often steeped in books when I was growing up. There was no end to the piles of novels and non-fiction how-to's that would build each week on the nightstands of my parents and siblings. My nightstand now is still a mountain of books I've read 10 times and books I could never finish but want to someday: Seamus Heaney's The Naturalist, Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body, several issues of Poetry magazine, a couple of Atlantic Monthly's, etc.

This week I've read Dave Eggers A Heartbreaking work..., Leah Stewart's The Myth of You and Me, Nicole Krauss's A History of Love, and Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird. For about two seconds there, Harper Lee's book was so well written, I had thoughts of going to law school and becoming a female Atticus Finch. For two seconds. My guess is Mockingbird is to law students what House of God is to med students.

During the rest of my vacation, I took three days to visit my family in Virginia and North Carolina. I felt like I was shared custody between my two mothers-- my biological mother and my sister. At one point, I sat down to breakfast with my mother when she brushed my hair back and asked me if I washed my face that morning. My sister subsequently came at me with a powder brush full of foundation makeup. Later that afternoon, my cheeks broke out in contact dermatitis. But dermatitis with the best of intentions.

The strength inherent in my mother's and in my sister's bones and intentions leech out through my own. At work, I can come across as a hard-ass, but I don't mean to. I feel as though I have no control over it, when I say things that are unprofessional or inappropriate and I have to sit down and think about what just came out of my mouth. That hardly happened to me before, or perhaps it did and no one had the balls to tell me. I've just started to notice my moments of lashing out during the last two years. It would be easy to say, Well, this is what my traumatic internship in OB/GYN did to me, or this is what past difficult medical cases have steeped inside me, as it is easy to say, Well, my mother, my upbringing.... But there has to a statute of limitations to blaming others for our own misguided doings.

I have problems, but I'm OK, and I say Thank You every day. Each time, before I think things couldn't sink down farther, I say Thank You.