Working in a hospital is humbling

I saw the child, down to my left and out of the corner of my eye, as I walked, quickly, through a long and narrow hallway of the ‘old’ hospital. I thought, at first, that there must be some problem between the child and her mother, because the child, one arm in a cast and one leg bandaged and stiff, was struggling to keep up with Mom, who walked a few lazy steps ahead, food and drink in hand - a big shiny plastic bag of chips and pop in a plastic cup. Mom would stop for a moment, just as lazily and slowly as she walked, and glance back over her shoulder.

“What’s going on, here?” I thought and it took me a second to realize that the two were playing a game. The girl, oh the child!, in arm-cast and stiff, bandaged leg, with scars running up and down her face, would walk, softly, into the back of Mom whenever Mom stopped. A game! A game to help the child practice walking, I thought, and to make the burden less burdensome. She struggled, that child, to walk and to keep moving. Ahead of Mom and child was another, a boy slightly older than the girl, 9 or 10, perhaps, to the younger one’s 7 or 8, and he, with the awareness of the older brother, turned and looked at me, silently, as if to say, “that’s the way it is with us, now.”

Humbling. Humbling to work here because every day in this hospital you are witness to acts of courage, and incidents unthinkable, unbearable. I’m glad that, on a rainy and dull Saturday afternoon and stuck in the hospital for goodness knows what reason, they were making a game of it, and taking comfort in one another. It’s all we have, isn’t it?

Alexander McCall Smith: Corduroy Mansions

Alexander McCall Smith is writing an online novel for the Telegraph website. “A new chapter will appear on this page each weekday for the next 20 weeks.” How cool is that? The website is wonderfully creative, with links to the different chapters, podcasts, pages describing the characters and the background, interviews with the author, and reader comments and suggestions for future chapters. Writing should be this fun and interactive, this rounded and democratic. Boo to stodgy old literary fiction* and yeah to interactive websites and chapters of novels published, one at a time, in the papers.

*By stodgy old, I really mean stodgy new and all the current fashions of Booker prize committees, and earnest MFAs and the like, you know?

I’m a workaholic, and, please explain: why is that so terrible?

At work. So, what else is new? It’s pleasant, in a way, in the microscope room we have dedicated to ‘dermpath’ at my teaching hospital, my old stomping grounds, the place where I trained, the institution that served as a backdrop to so many lovely things – the days of the  Italian lab, and Christmas dinner at a wonderful Frank Lloyd House, and pasta at my friend Ilaria’s apartment, and, now, the writing club, the fellowship in medical education (oh, I’ve wanted to do something like that for ages) and all the amazing people I know in my quirky neighborhood, thanks to my mother’s warm-hearted talkativeness and insistence on getting to know everyone. “How is your mother,” they say whenever I walk into a store, and isn’t that nice? Strange that I am so quietly happy here in Chicago, when, in a life very similar to this in Boston, I was so quietly unhappy. Human beings are strange, aren’t they?

Well. Here I am, at work, the bulletin board across from the microscope table covered with thank-you cards from previous dermatology applicants and postcards from the Boston MFA and all kinds of work announcements for dermatology conferences and things like that. The light is brightly fluorescent, a bit harsh, and I hear poor medical residents pattering around outside the door, carrying trays of patient slides to be reviewed, late on a Sunday, and I listen, in alternating little bursts, to A Girl Called Eddy and Aimee Mann. Contentedness. That’s how I’d describe it. Equal parts contentedness and, if I must admit it, a little ambition. I want to do well here.

Like some kind of slim, middle-brow* novella

I saw Vicky Cristina Barcelona two weeks ago while visiting New York for a wedding. I stayed near New York Presbyterian, a few walkable blocks from Memorial Sloan Kettering, and joked to my friend Jonathan that I had become the kind of person who feels most comfortable in the ‘medical womb’, in other words, around those collections of buildings known as medical centers. Good grief.  ”Not quite what I was planning,’ as my favorite six-word memoir says, and isn’t that a kind of universal feeling?

Anyway, back to the movie. The thing I liked best about Vicky Cristina Barcelona is the very thing many critics disliked: the voiceover. I liked the shots of the two young women, next to each other in the car, the voiceover literal and staccato, like the voice that accompanies educational film strips. I felt as if I were watching a film whose screenplay is based on a slim, slightly salacious, and middle-brow novella. Sort of like Damage, which isn’t a novella, but is a book and a movie. Oh, you know what I mean!

I liked the movie, Jonathan didn’t, and his parents seemed to reserve judgement. We four watched the movie in a theater on the upper east side, in the late afternoon, on opening weekend, and had pizza afterwards while discussing the film. The others had some very smart things to say about parallel and contrasting actions, but I felt a bit dull, and added, “I loved the clothes the girls were wearing.” And I did. I liked the soft faded colors, the expensive worn jeans and gauzy, soft blouses.

I think a lot of the critics got this wrong about the movie: It’s not a movie about a more playful and open European lifestyle compared compared to American prudery (and if it is, I reject that meaning!). It’s a movie about dissatisfaction with choices we make. Don’t forget that everyone is slightly dissatisfied at the end of this movie. Remember, ‘not quite what I was planning’ above? Isn’t that a kind of universal feeling? Well, that and young women can be very dreamy and unknowing. I should know. To this day, and I am the kind of person who obsesses over everything, I can’t tell you why I made certain decisions when I was twenty or twenty-two. I had no idea back then, and I have no idea now.

*Update: I don’t think middle-brow is a derogatory term. I like middle-brow, in fact, middle-brow is just fine.