Category: Uncategorized

  • Dreams

    Some memories of medical school and residency are like dreams. I recall certain details vividly but can’t make sense of them—largely because I have forgotten much of what I once knew: facts, entire bodies of knowledge. Rare diseases and syndromes, medications I haven’t used in years, rules we were forced to memorize (CD4 counts at […]

  • Ash Wednesday

      For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.   A Wednesday morning in February 6 AM. At the gym before work, I am taken off guard, as I am every year, when a man steps off […]

  • Different

    Yesterday I saw a patient in clinic–an overweight white woman, 35 years old, with half a dozen facial piercings and tattoos–for a routine pap smear. I asked, as always, if she had any questions or concerns she wanted to discuss. “I want to know about the day-after pill,” she said. “I’m having sex with my […]

  • My Pro-Choice Dad (2)

    Fifteen years later, I am pregnant with my first child. I tell my dad one evening over dinner. It is just the two of us; I’m visiting him while my mom is out of town on business. He is delighted to hear the news, I can tell from his expression, but he doesn’t say any […]

  • My Pro-Choice Dad (1)

    I am 19 years old. In a day or two I will be leaving for India—a five-month trip, the longest and the farthest I have ever been away from home. I have taken off a semester from college to volunteer as an English teacher in a village primary school. As I pack my suitcase in […]

  • The Agnew Clinic

    The men in the dark background remind me of us as medical students. Curious. Eager, even. We tried to hide it better than they did, of course. We knew enough not to stand on tiptoe and crowd over one another’s shoulders, not to turn the patient into an object, a specimen, a freak show. An […]

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