I am officially the COOLEST 14 year old I never was.
It took me just about 13 years to get here.
"Rory" is one of my 14 year old Onc patients. We smile and giggle when we talk about our favorite WB show.
Me: "I was SO bummed about last season's finale."
Rory: "I KNOW!"
Rory's mom: "They've got to get back together, they can't break up!"
So it goes. I sail into her room, part of the entourage: attending, fellow, me. We take turns listening to heart and lungs, feeling the belly for the spleen and liver. We talk a bit about how we can get her to eat a bit more, what our options were for anti-emetics. She's a fan of the marinnol.
And then, I pipe up: "Remind me to tell you about the time my sister met Jess, whose real name I can never pronounce."
"WHAT?! you mean Milos Ventimiglia?!?"
Yup. I am the coolest 14 year old ever. For about 4 minutes every day.
I wish Nam were there to see me. When she met me, standing in line to get our 9th grade school pictures taken, I was decked out in a matching skirt and blouse set from Bradley's. I was about three months shy of getting that memorable perm.
"Can I borrow a pen?" she asked coolly.
I handed her the one pen I had, a green "sanrio" pen with a cartoonish frog that jumped up and down on a spring everytime you clicked it. "Do you like Keroppi?"
She didn't like Keroppi. Even though she was Korean.
Thirteen years later, and Nam stuck around. If only she were there to see me...
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Sunday, July 16, 2006
Markers
with every passing year, the memory of it fades. I become distanced from this narrative and it no longer feels like my own.
Is it my changing body, with its newer contours and landscapes which have erased the markers? Where is my "second" belly button? Where is that dimple on the posterior iliac crest where they aspirated bone marrow, first at diagnosis, then at induction (day 15, day 29), then at remission?
The markers are still there. But the memory is becoming myth.
"i'll never forget seeing that smear. Twenty-one years later...the absence of neutrophils, the blasts."
My mother's story. Status post, hematology-oncology fellowship from LIJ. In Saudi Arabia, en route to "going back home."
She didn't pick it up right away. The differential of splenomegaly and painful limp in a 3 1/2 year old was far too vast. She probably just has a little bug. It's probably all reactive. Inflammatory. Infectious.
Not proliferative. Not clonal.
My narrative was more concise. At 3 1/2 I was far more articulate than at 27...less hesitant, less bumbling/stumbling, less concerned with words and their multiple meanings, implications, stories.
"I ate two naiappams, my mommy played with my belly and felt my spleen. I was limping.
My father's story: "I heard you screaming all the way from the office!" This was after my weekly spinal tap +/- bone marrow, when I failed conscious sedation. General anesthesia was not standard of care back then.
The thing is, I had no concept of death...or at least I never thought it would happen to me. "Death" was what happened to my Raju mama who no longer came to my home to give me various gifts, like a time warner clock or a spanish doll.
The rest of the story comes in bits and pieces: how my mother made her attending sit down with my father and tell him that "she could die," how my father would get so upset if the television in my room wasn't working, how we took the next flight back to the states and went straight from the airport to the hospital and never once thought of "going back home."
I am becoming distanced from this narrative.
I am doing a pediatric hem-onc rotation in Philadelphia. The few times I felt the lump-in-throat-warmth-in-face-moistness-in-eyes was when the parents' distress manifest. A mother's long pause with downward glance. A father taking his child's hand and covering his face.
And I thought of my amazing parents.
The markers are still there. The bilateral patellar areflexia. The dimple.
But the story is no longer mine. I'm not sure it ever was.
The autobiography of my mother. The autobiography of my father.
Is it my changing body, with its newer contours and landscapes which have erased the markers? Where is my "second" belly button? Where is that dimple on the posterior iliac crest where they aspirated bone marrow, first at diagnosis, then at induction (day 15, day 29), then at remission?
The markers are still there. But the memory is becoming myth.
"i'll never forget seeing that smear. Twenty-one years later...the absence of neutrophils, the blasts."
My mother's story. Status post, hematology-oncology fellowship from LIJ. In Saudi Arabia, en route to "going back home."
She didn't pick it up right away. The differential of splenomegaly and painful limp in a 3 1/2 year old was far too vast. She probably just has a little bug. It's probably all reactive. Inflammatory. Infectious.
Not proliferative. Not clonal.
My narrative was more concise. At 3 1/2 I was far more articulate than at 27...less hesitant, less bumbling/stumbling, less concerned with words and their multiple meanings, implications, stories.
"I ate two naiappams, my mommy played with my belly and felt my spleen. I was limping.
My father's story: "I heard you screaming all the way from the office!" This was after my weekly spinal tap +/- bone marrow, when I failed conscious sedation. General anesthesia was not standard of care back then.
The thing is, I had no concept of death...or at least I never thought it would happen to me. "Death" was what happened to my Raju mama who no longer came to my home to give me various gifts, like a time warner clock or a spanish doll.
The rest of the story comes in bits and pieces: how my mother made her attending sit down with my father and tell him that "she could die," how my father would get so upset if the television in my room wasn't working, how we took the next flight back to the states and went straight from the airport to the hospital and never once thought of "going back home."
I am becoming distanced from this narrative.
I am doing a pediatric hem-onc rotation in Philadelphia. The few times I felt the lump-in-throat-warmth-in-face-moistness-in-eyes was when the parents' distress manifest. A mother's long pause with downward glance. A father taking his child's hand and covering his face.
And I thought of my amazing parents.
The markers are still there. The bilateral patellar areflexia. The dimple.
But the story is no longer mine. I'm not sure it ever was.
The autobiography of my mother. The autobiography of my father.
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