Thursday, June 12, 2008

Fly to the Moon

Flies litter my windowsills. I don't have screens on the back windows and it has been hot, so when Szilvie visited we opened them. That was a week ago. I'm still batting at flies with the folded up glossy magazine filled with beautiful people who have time.

I have spent the last day and a half (my first day off in 14 or so straight 12-30 hour days) learning how to bring back people who are dead or about to die. I wish I could have done that for Pop. In my heart of hearts I feel bad for not going home instead of going to New York. I feel bad for talking to a friend instead of him in the few days before he died. I feel bad that I didn't go home more often. I mostly feel bad that he's gone.

At the end of days, I miss him. I find letters he wrote me. I see his picture. I rummage under my bed looking for my medical license and find the box where I have stashed his handkerchiefs and bow ties. They smell like him, even through my stuffy-from-crying nose. I have his special rabbit fur lined gloves in my dresser drawer. He used to keep them in is dresser too. Mom says his ashes are in his room now. In a wooden box.

I'm so tired from all the work and stress of balancing my interns and attending and med students and patients and schedule and responsibilities and lectures and what feels like a million other tiny or big things which crowd out the tiny or big things I'd really rather let in. Pop would make that better. I miss him loving me in life.

My cousin got married last weekend. I couldn't go because of work. And Bryce graduated college the weekend before. I never did make it back to visit him in New York. I'd planned to go that week that Pop died, when we both rushed home instead, numbed by the first disbelief of grief.

I ran into one of the almost graduating cardiology EP fellows when I walked into work yesterday. He will be moving back to where he grew up. His fellowship through cardiology and then electrophysiology is one of the longer ones. He talked about how he did it because he loved his job so much. And that he was single because it was more important to him than a relationship. My actions say the same lately, I suppose.

There's the theory of the "multi-hit" hypothesis where genes have several cancer protecting mechanisms and multiple hits have to take them out one by one until the actual cancer becomes uncontrolled. I feel like genes sometimes. Each time I thought I had taken enough hits, something else would come along. After the lupus, which literally does attack my genes, and in the months of adjusting to that, my parents divorce hit, my medical problems hit again and again, and then Pop died. That was the ultimate hit. The last one, I felt, that stood between me and a cancer of emotion and loss and loneliness and the ability to love and trust.

Some days I try to heard the flies back out the open window so i don't have to kill them with the glossy beautiful skinny girls on the magazine. Although the violent slams give me a miniscule outlet for unnamed frustrations.

And so I have taken a sleeping pill now and the words become blury and my headaches come back and I don't know what I'll wear for thirty hour call tomorrow since the scrubs I have have become too small as I have become cushingoid, like my bitter lupus patient or my renal transplant patient without arms or legs who is a breath of sweetness on morning rounds. Even on small doses of steroids, our faces become round. Moon facies. Full Moon.

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