A Career Woman

As salaam alaikum,

This past Sunday, I was busily cleaning my apartment in anticipation of meeting up with my SO after his trip to SF. My place usually lies in shambles because of the time I spend out of it either hanging out on the East Side or fulfilling my many residency responsibilities. When I planned his Sunday return to Seattle, I proposed he meet me at my place before returning to his place to attend a panel on life after residency by recent graduates with perhaps Ethiopian food thereafter. He happily agreed, even before I mentioned that my place would likely be clean when he came.

"Don't make promises you can't keep," he said flatly.

His dead-pan delivery of jokes usually takes me off guard, and I took mild offense before he told me he was just kidding. Even so, I spent much of my Sunday scrubbing and sweeping and vacuuming.

I was putting the finishing touches on my place when my phone rang. I expected it to be him, because it was almost time for us to leave to go to the recent grad panel. I looked up and it was instead one of my co-residents. I was simultaneously excited and crestfallen. One of my OB patients was due, or as wont to say, "one of my ladies" was due, so I thought it was her presenting to triage in labor. That kind of thing throws monkey wrenches into plans.

Instead, I hear that it is my patient who was supposed to be scheduled for c-section in the coming days. She was contracting painfully every 3 minutes.

I think, great, a c-section at least takes place over a finite amount of time, so I can go in and come out 1.5 hours to two hours later. I told my SO this as we adjusted our evening plans. He would go to a movie while I participated in the section.

Long story short, from anesthesia push back, to slowing contractions to a complicated section, I was not out of the hospital until 6.5 hours after that initial call. By this time, my SO drove back to his place, never having seen my sparkling clean apartment, both of us having missed the grad panel and neither of us having Ethiopian food.

In fact, I didn't eat dinner that night because I had nothing prepared and all food places that I would have bothered with were closed.

It was a gratifying section in which baby was fat and healthy and the surgeon commended me for the command I had over closing the incision. What was not gratifying was talking to my SO to find that he was upset with me after my Sunday was thwarted.

I explained to him that I probably didn't have to be there, but my co-resident sold it as if the delivery were imminent and I got there to find that it was pushed back an hour and a half, then another 2.5 hours, and so on. I couldn't easily say to my patient that I wouldn't return after I had essentially promised her in her last three visits that I would be present for the procedure and round on her in the hospital.

The next day, after I apologized again (even though it really wasn't my fault!) and my SO told me that he was going to ask me a question the next day and he wanted me to think it over. I asked him if it were an ultimatum. He told me it wasn't. I really had no idea what he was thinking, what he was really angry about, and what I had done wrong.

I knew he was going to ask it over dinner. So yesterday, after our quesadillas arrived at this Mexican restaurant near his place, he asked me, "How much of a career woman do you see yourself as? I think I know the answer, but I just want to hear it from you."

Really? That was it? All of that build for that question.

So I answered, "Well, you know, babe, I could totally see me taking some time off of my work schedule to spend time at home with children."

"I know you say that, but then things like Sunday happen."

Things like Sunday? What was special about Sunday? I've delivered nearly 30 continuity patients, some of whom have come in times that it interrupts my plans with my SO. He's understood before. Similarly, I've been called in back up at random times.

"I was fine until you said you didn't have to go in," he told me.

Ahh. And therein lies the problem. I said too much.

For him, I didn't have to go in, but I went in, anyway, prioritizing something I didn't have to do over our plans. Even though I explained to him that I didn't have to go in (I never do for continuities), but I promised this patient that I would come to her c-section when it was scheduled for a future date. I didn't have to but I felt obligated. And, more than that, I wanted to be there for a patient I had bonded with throughout her pregnancy.

"I just want to know if, after we're married, I'm eventually going to be seeing you only 1 or 2 times a week."

Really? This is what came of me scrubbing into one c-section, the exact circumstances of which I described to him? Him thinking that suddenly I'm going to become a workaholic who never comes home?

And he thinks there is some definable dichotomy between being a "career woman" and...not, whatever either of those mean.

So I told him, "First of all, babe, career woman is a really antiquated term."

"Really?"

"Yes, but I know what you mean."

So I broke it down for him.

Because, the truth of the matter is, if I could have married and started a family years ago, even as much as 10 years ago, I would have, if the opportunity came along. So it didn't. So I continued with my education. I asked him, if there were such a thing as a dichotomy between me being a working woman and being more domestic, I shouldn't have gone into medicine at all. I should have instead worked small-time or more acceptably domestic jobs until a potential husband came along. But that's not how I roll. So I continued my education and training, all the while knowing that whenever I did marry and have children, I would adapt it into whatever stage and position of life I was in.

Furthermore, I told him, it is hard to say what I will be like when I have children. Life doesn't stop because I plan to have children in the future. It is a fluid position that changes. So while right now I'd love to be involved in many of my continuity patient's deliveries, I recognize that, at some point, family time will take priority.

But that was such a hilarious question to me. If we got married tomorrow and he wanted to start a family right away, I would be game. But in the meantime, life goes on, I have a robust work life with many professional and patient-doctor relationships to maintain as well. I cannot put my life on pause for a course of life that has never been my decision alone to make. 

Paradigm, Part II

As salaam alaikum,

I'm artificially splitting my entry into parts. They're all written at the same time, but there's so much to say that I wanted to split it into distinct entries.

There is a uniting theme, though: I am more myself now than I have ever been.

I said that it all started with D, but that's not true. It more likely all started with what sparked me to resume my "Center of Awesomeness" and my writing projects. It was the death of Steve Jobs.

I am currently typing on a PC, but I have much respect for Apple products, which I grew up on, using them in school from the time I was in kindergarten until I was co-editor-in-chief of our high school paper. I comfortably alternated between using Macs and PCs in the libraries and computer labs in college. I own an iPod. I always thought that Mac users formed a little bit of a cult, but that didn't keep me from recognizing how much of an innovator Steve Jobs was. I remember the distress that my friend had when Jobs first revealed that he had pancreatic cancer, and how he was worried about what Job's impending death would mean for the future of Apple.

And I almost completed medical school and learned so much about the lethality of pancreatic cancer, and then he died.

His death meant the resurgence of many of his quotes, on facebook, blogs and other modes of social media. I saw this one and it gave me pause:

"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

This is from his Stanford commencement speech in 2005.

I pray for a life long enough to realize my purpose in this world and to approximate God as much as I can, but I also recognize that I could die at any time. This is not usually a thought that causes me anxiety because I do not fear death itself, as long as the circumstances of which are not particularly traumatic or painful. However, I am God-fearing and I don't think, if I were to die now, I'd be in the place I want to be before I meet God.

For me, living life as if it were my last has always meant trying to be as pious as I can be in that moment of life so, theoretically, I'll be ready to meet God at any point in time. But I think, as many of us Muslims and in fact, many of us religious people have trouble doing, we have trouble living in this world and for the next at the same time. We're not entirely sure either what that means or how to balance both. Because we were placed on this world with the confines of space and time and this body and its feelings and urges for a reason, and yes, a big reason is that it's a test, but this existence isn't all about denying everything that is on the earth in favor of the next.

So while I do think it is important that I should try to live each day as piously as I can as if I were to meet God next, there is an element of that piety that is focused on how I live my life here on this earth, the things that I do, who I become and who I impact.

"Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important."

I'm still digesting all that this means, because I believe it to be true. If I had a sudden premonition, for example, that I was going to die if not tomorrow, but in say, five years' time...what would my life look like? What would I do?

So many petty and trivial things of this life wouldn't mean that much to me anymore, including what people thought of me. I would be who I needed to be. Like Mahalia, I would live the life I sing about in my song. At the same time, I would enjoy the fruits of this world that God intended us to enjoy, which are more numerous than the little that we are forbidden, actually, and include some of the things that we, in fear, deny ourselves.

That just made me remember this song, which I think I"ll end this entry with...to be continued:




It's a great prayer, actually.

[uncensored]: Paradigm, Part I

As salaam alaikum,

I'm sitting in bed, reading my Kindle version of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, and I had an epiphany of sorts, weeks in the making. I was reading the story of John Moore, a man who was diagnosed with hairy cell leukemia whose physician, who sued his physician for not informing him of the purpose of the many follow up appointments that Moore attended miles away from his Seattle home. When I read about the sudden appearance of a consent form that Moore felt uncomfortable signing, his physician's somewhat violent insistence that he sign the form, and then his later contracting a lawyer to find out that his physician had been taking samples from him to create a cell line named "Mo," I was like, shit!

And I laughed, and looked at myself in the mirror, covered in my comforter for heat and yet sleeping naked, the heat blasting in my poorly insulated apartment because we don't have to pay.

I looked at myself and I smiled and I said aloud, "I'm more myself now than I have ever been."

And it's true. Right now, this last hour, I'm becoming more myself than I've ever been.

There's so much to say.

I laughed and said shit because I'm halfway through this book and I've just learned so much about the history of medicine...it makes me want to read more and more on the topic. I decided to go into this field because I wanted to translate my love of science into a service career, and I picked medicine. I went further with my dedication to service and decided that I wanted to go into primary care, and chose family medicine. While I see medicine and health care in general as a potentially benevolent entity in our lives, what with its Hippocratic oath and its base of helping people, I've always recognized that there is a potentially sinister and dehumanizing side that is pervasive in some areas more than others. This is really vague because it's really quite ubiquitous in the field, from the level of specific specialties to training programs to fields of research.

And I guess more than ethics class teaching you snippets about the Nuremberg Trials or the Tuskegee experiments, this book highlights succinctly some of the many injustices that were committed in the name of biomedical science, the people who were exploited, and the racists that were the founding fathers of many of the technologies and therapies we now take for granted. For example, the father of cell culture was a eugenicist and a Nazi sympathizer.

I think this is an important book for all medical students to read, particularly those of African decent, to understand a little bit of the history of the field we're going to, to appreciate how far medicine has come even in our lifetime and just years before our births, and to therefore learn to revere less the field and some of its predecessors and recognize the importance of our place in getting health care to those who need it most, those of the very populations that have been marginalized and exploited. We owe it to them, essentially.

I want students of African descent, even Africans who don't feel like they're part of the African American experience, to read this and recognize why it is that there are health care disparities...it's because just 50 years ago, a black patient, dying, could go to a white hospital and the all-white staff, including doctors and nurses, would feel comfortable sending that person away to their certain demise because they upheld segregation and didn't want a black body to taint their white hospital. Fast forward 40 years to Katrina, and its no wonder that happened. The Civil Rights Movement was great but future generations did not carry that forward. The movement was awesome in the most formal sense of the word but it was incomplete without the next generation understanding what their task was to be done.

But that's not why I'm more myself than ever before.

It's a complicated sentiment that, as usual, I'm not sure I can express succinctly. It all started when I met D (yes, he's still around, in some form). I met D while going out with my friend. I saw him "across a crowded room" and I instantly found him attractive. I think I'll save it for another entry.

I realize more people would probably read my stuff if it were shorter. At the same time, it wouldn't be me if it were shorter, so I think I'll put up with a lower readership in order to express myself as I see fit.

I am, after all, more myself than I've ever been before.

I'll Be Doggone

As salaam alaikum,

And I quote,

"So yes, this is, again, my new Center of Awesomeness. And I'll be doggone if, within days of writing this, someone else comes along...because that's what happened last time." - Saturday, October 15.

Hrm. Yes. I didn't feel it in the air at that moment, but I felt it later that night. And then, that very night, I met a man who I'm talking to now. New letter. We'll call him D.

So yes, I'll be doggone.

Whatever on D! I'm talking to him now, we'll see what happens. I'm not giving up on my Center of Awesomeness. Because if/when D goes away, I still have work to do...I still have to work on existing and being without men or the promise of a man in the future.

Hard to do when you have one knocking on your door. Figuratively. He's actually calling me.

As the Isley Brothers said, "I got work to do. I got a job, baby!"