First Love

Long ago in a galaxy far away I used to wander the halls of a certain Children’s Hospital in NC. I dreamed about becoming a doctor. I spent hours literally hours in the rooms of many children.  A few the child life folks would actually call me and tell me certain folks had come into the hospital.  In medical school I instituted peds wards visits.  Board games, movies, video games and beaded necklaces. Then in my last two years I befriended a wonderful teenager with relapsed leukemia.  I was her  medical student for about an hour then we painted for the rest of the day and every day that week.  It was her birthday the day I met her.  We watched all the Harry Potter and Twilight movies. I used to bring her chips and dip and we would watch moves late at night when I should have been studying. Her family was rarely there.   She died the summer of my fourth year, when it happened I cried on my sofa for hours.  I went to the heme/onc attending and told them that she was my first patient who died and that I was struggling to process it. Then last Feb, I spent every free moment I had with a family of a young lady with Kniest who had the same surgery I had at nine.  I closed her incisions and then 24 hrs later I was watching Star Trek with her.  This is was what kept me sane.  Funny for most people sick kids scare them or make them uncomfortable or incredibly sad.   Is it wrong that sick kids keep me going?  That they make me whole in a way that my job taking care of them as a doctor does not.   Is it wrong that I need them  more than they need me?

I decided I wanted to be a doctor in a waiting room.  I was 19 fresh (as in less than 24 hours) off a plane from Romania. I was already pre-med but my heart really didn’t commit till that moment.  It was my last pediatric visit.  There was a little girl with Downs Syndrome learning to read Dr Suess.   Culture shock from the horrors of the Romanian institution system hit home and I lost it.  Its always been about the kids, it was never the money or the science. The prestige and the hierarchy made my free spirited heart exhausted from the beginning and the hours push my own fragile at times physical health to the breaking point.  Really it was the kids.

So I should be in my bliss right?  I have arrived.  I work at a world famous children’s hospital that from my friends in Africa to every pediatric applicant envies.   And mostly I am good at it.   I get all my work done.  My team mates like me. My patients like me.  My bosses like me.  In three years I can have any fellowship or job I want.

Here the funny part.  I never see the kids.

I am too busy doing the kids’ paperwork, talking to their parents, to their primary doctors, to my supervisors, to their supervisors.

I keep waking up in my call room and I have been dreaming about Romania and halls of  the NC hospital. About laying on the dirty floor with a baby in my lap or wheelchair racing in the hallway.

The dream is still with me…I just no longer know how to achieve it

I choose to fight…

Its like they are a all the same girl.  14-16ish, beautiful and full of potential.  Some still bring bears or blankets from home. One brought a bible with a book mark.  They all have PID (Pelvic inflammatory Disease->aka a sexually transmitted infection that has been there long enough it has found its way up into the uterus and ovaries, it can lead to sepsis (near death blood infection), infertility, abscesses that can cost you a fallopian tube or ovary and they can lead to chronic pelvic pain).  ITS NO JOKE. We prance on in on rounds every AM and talk about this like its pneumonia. Like its bad luck.  We encourage girls to call their partners and get them tested. We keep the fact that they have a sexually transmitted infection that could kill them if they were not treated a secret from their mothers and grandmothers.  Occasionally, we talk about condoms.  But in the end there is an air of normalcy in the room.  That this is just standard adolescent stuff  like starting your period or graduating from high school or  turning sweet 16  or being allowed to vote.

I sit there in the corner and think about what I was doing at 15.  I was in 10th Grade in FL.  I was in the school play and got to pass out on stage. I went on my first date  by myself without a group.  I flew on a plane by myself for the first time.  I read Harry Potter for the first time. Rebelling was not wearing my hearing aides for two years and refusing to drink milk.  Some of it is that I had to grow up fast because I lived with a chronic illness that was very time consuming especially when I was in middle school.  But most of is it I had parents that loved me enough to fight for my childhood.

Who is fighting for these girls?  Who is their advocate who stands up and says NO this is not OK?   Their parents don’t do it even the ones who know. We their doctors apparently don’t do it either.

I cant not do it.   When I get the chance to have them one on one….I do my best to GENTLY explain to them the consequences of repeated pelvic infections.  I make sure they understand that birth control is not protective against STDs.  And if they give me an inch I go a mile in trying to help them realize that giving themselves to a boy is not going to make them happy or fulfilled especially if that boy is disrespectful, not interested in protection or better yet abusive.

My adolescent attending can call me a bible thumping, naive Southern all he wants.This isn’t even about my bible belt morality.   This is about girls getting sick, babies being born to babies and girls respecting and loving their bodies.  PID, teenage pregnancy THESE ARE NOT NORMAL.  These are not safe.   And by choosing to ignore them we devalue the precious vulnerable teenage girls who are looking for value in all the wrong places and are desperate for someone to say… I care enough to fight for you and tell you the truth.

Please don’t send me to suburbia I don’t have what it takes

We are sitting around the table. We are all the same age. Nearly all of us have doctorate degrees or something similar. We are talking about our goals for the 1-10  years.  Everyone is buying houses and working for top positions in their field. Some of the older ones are having babies.

Then the conversation turns to me.  So Amy?

WHAT I SHOULD SAY if I WAS BEING AN 100% honest: um.. in five  years…..I want to work and teach  in Africa.  I save money for plane tickets.  I  am not sure if I will ever own a home. I dream about having a clinic that has an x-ray machine and a wheelchair ramp.   Oh and I dream about having two shiny hips  so I can put my socks on in the AM without extreme pain.  My desires for the next 10 years:  I want to get married but even if I dont I want to adopt babies, currently I am praying about interracial adoption because African American babies particularly boys hardly ever get adopted. And I want to write books about disability and doctoring and Africa.

Response: Oh.   silence.

Right so Bob, where did you say you were looking to buy a house?

What I say instead: Oh you know get married, have some kids, get a academic pediatric position somewhere, write some books.

Response:  DO you want to buy a house?

silence.

Me: Um probably not.

Right, so Bob…?

Recently I have really been trying to make friends here outside of work. I love my work friends but it would be nice to have friends at church or elsewhere. Its been about like the above snipet every time.  Apparently my interests at 26 are supposed to be marriage, career, house and a retirement plan.   I may live in the city. I may go to a inner city church plant but I feel like I live in the suburbs. I am surrounded by people who in five years will live in the suburbs and have 2.5 kids, a SUV and picket fence.

How is it that I can make friends in  the slums of Romania or with beggars and homeless young mothers in Africa but I struggle to  make friends with my peers in the US OF A? How is it I have so little in common?