?!

In the past three months, I have read fifteen novels, close to a thousand articles, and countless blog posts. Some have inspired, others have moved, and a select few have provoked deep reflection long after the last full stop. My hunger for knowledge is voracious, but I believe books which are great stimulate not intellect but the heart. It is very easy to communicate an idea. However, to truly connect with another person, one human to another, that is a talent. Effective rhetoric is a talent. There is no greater pleasure than an evening in the company of a great book, which is why I have no greater regret than abandoning books in their entirety in my final two years of school.

Today a police car drove through the pavement I was walking on. I was behind it, safe, but the paradox got me thinking about others like it I have seen in my life.

Laws do not apply to their enforcers. Those who teach lose sight of the mystery and wonder of learning. The understanding of the social and emotional desecration a disease can wreak is superficial in those who claim expertise in its pathophysiology. Photographers and models recognize only imperfection, chefs poor taste, and dancers steps offbeat. People who live, truly live—whether in sex, drugs, cigarettes, alcohol, extreme sports or record-setting—limit the time they have to do it. People who blanch their world grey with dietary, recreational and social sacrifice prolong their lifelong Lent, but where the Christian festival culminates in celebration, they will receive no commendation for their self-denial.

I wonder if there is ever a good without an evil, virtue if there is no vice. I am very relativistic in my views, and the world has done nothing but console that stance.

This morning I sat through forty minutes of unadulterated gore. I saw malignancies that disintegrated the upper lip, tongues with tumors the size of a closed fist, and lymph nodes near the base of the neck that had secondary metastases tearing through the shoulder. My tolerance to cruor is generally quite high. I remember only a handful of movie that genuinely disgusted me, and I thought that resilience would keep through medical school. Looking at the inside of a real neck, even if only on the slides of a presentation, is not the same as looking at the inside of computer generated gore, because when you know something is real, you lose your security blanket of fantasy; you no longer have the option to tell yourself, ignore it, it’s not really happening. When something is real, it gets to you.

The cure, I assure you, was worse than the condition. Somewhere between the jaw that had been cut in the middle and “opened like the pages of a book”, as the lecturer so poetically called it, and the skin graft from a part of the scalp that had been “cut and swung over the upper lip”, like a lever, I lost my will to continue, not only with the lecture but with Medicine in its entirety. The body deserves respect. To mutilate it without feeling remorse, even if said mutilation ultimately benefits the owner of the body, is cold and inhuman. I don’t want to lose my respect for the human body. My fascination with it was what made me want to do Medicine in the first place. I think my take on what a doctor should be is incompatible with the reality of it.

When I was a child, what carried me to sleep was not the count of sheep. It seemed vulgar to let my mind drone with imaginary animals leaping over a picketed fence that had been prostituted to countless minds. It was not prayer, for even as a child I had my doubts about an omnipotent deity whose answers to my calls came on a whim and I had as much chance of an answered prayer as calling a coin toss.

I fell asleep in the arm of imagination.

I created stories. I imagined new endings for stories that I had seen or heard before. I was the architect of worlds and the director of a movie only I could watch and in which I played every part. I was the hero, the sidekick, the damsel-in-distress. I was the villain, the henchmen, and all the metaphysical forces of malevolence. Archetypical characters in a melodrama where good always triumphed over evil, because at eight, that was all I could imagine. Many times I would call cut because someone somewhere had screwed up, some line or action that would butterfly-effect in evil triumphing over good, and I hated it. So I would stop, redact, and run the scene from the top.

I grew older, the stories grew in complexity, and sleep grew to become a struggle. Sometimes these dramas would span over an hour. Waking eternities passed and the little director in my mind would still be storming up and down the set, making sure each scene was perfect, which was difficult because now one must be creative and ingenious with one’s ideas, and one must strive to never replicate what has already been done. It became difficult to keep focussed when there were so many rules.

By fifteen, I’d stopped entirely. My priorities then lay elsewhere, but the point is that I stopped. And I miss the lull of my imagination.

My name is Karen Jones.

Heart monitor beeps. Green mountains flash across a black abyss.

Breathe.

A year ago, I trailed my feet through the golden sands on the beaches of Hawaii, where two hundred of my friends and relatives watched me marry the love of my life. The waves were gentle, and so was he. I still remember his smile.

Oxygen mask. Arms fly out of blue scrubs. Overhead, lights shoot like comets.

Breathe.

As a couple, we could not have been luckier. Many try to conceive and draw blanks. Somewhere along the way someone has a problem, so they try again and again. We decided we wanted an early start to our family. The month after I stopped taking the pill and he stopped using the condom, God blessed us with a miracle. I missed a period. After that, I missed two more.

White coat fires machine gun orders.

Clear the OR. Get her on the table. Move.

I had none of the symptoms of morning sickness; my body handled the hormones fine. Once I had a cousin who got pregnant. The whole time I was scared the poor dear would vomit the baby out. I prepared myself with lemons and ginger, which were supposed to take away the nausea I would feel, because even if I was comfortable in bed, wrapped in my blanket, warm and cozy, I would feel it throw me into an ocean with waves the size of mountains and a shore distant as the boundaries of a savannah, with only a plank of wood to keep me from going under. But I felt fine. That, I thought, was a sure sign motherhood was ingrained in my biology.

Hands on my body. Lift. Down.

Breathe.

Even my gynecologist was impressed by my progress. All the milestones were met when they were supposed to—she put little ticks and smiley faces beside the dates—and I had nothing to worry about. Absolutely nothing.

Push ninety migs propofol, stat. Needle bites into wrist.

There is a special condition in pregnancy. It’s special because no one knows about it until it’s there and you can’t do anything about it. Placenta accreta. Latin. Literal translation: overgrown placenta. It happens when the baby decides you’re too good a mother and sends its placenta deeper into your uterus than it should, like a weed with overgrown roots. The placenta does not want to let go. It’s a condition that affects approximately one in every two and a half thousand births. Impossible to detect unless you’re looking for it and impossible to cure once you do.

Breathe.

There was a blip on my last ultrasound. It was there for a flicker of a second, and even my gynecologist wasn’t sure if she had seen it herself. She ordered an MRI. MRI confirmed it was. My options following it were as follows: bleed to death during delivery, don’t deliver and still bleed to death, or have an emergency Caesarean. It’s cake or death, really. But there’s a catch. See, mine was a particularly good case of the condition, wrought with excitement and complication. It was a placenta increta. The doctors went berserk.

Trophoblastic invasion of the myometrium has penetrated all parts of the uterine wall. Vaginal delivery is unviable. Traditional Caesarean will induce an inhumane termination. The only option is a hysterectomy.

I don’t understand.

We will save you by removing your uterus, but the baby goes, too.

I chose to live.

Breathe.

Voices meld. Eyes roll back. Blackness.

Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. You gave me a daughter whose head I will never hold. My penance is sacrifice. I will never again bear a child, for once before I chose life but dealt death.

May she find eternal love in Your arms.

Today I walked through the tunnel to get to the Tube. I saw many backs and many faces, but two stood out from the crowd. They belonged to two young men walking fast in my direction. Their clothes were simple and unostentatious—some variation of a plaid button-up and a pair jeans. They looked decidedly straight. They must have been close friends. I admit I let my eyes linger for the full five seconds they were in view. Five seconds may not seem very long, but when you’re on the street, your eyes flit from face to face in the order of milliseconds. Five seconds, in comparison, is a lifetime.

They were lost in their own conversation, weaving through the spaces in the crowd just as I was. Then I caught it. It was when they were making it around a right curve. One of the guys—I’ll call him John—tried to lead other guy past a family of four. I’ll call the other guy Ryan. John swung his hand forward, into Ryan’s. Their hands met. But before Ryan finished his next footstep, John had already broken contact. But there was love in that touch. It passed like static. It was short and it was over before I knew it began, but it was there. I saw it later in John’s hand, still leading in front of him, just out of reach of Ryan’s hand. And I saw it in Ryan’s smile, how as they overtook the family, it reached his eyes. It was one of the most beautiful smiles I have ever seen.

Wake up. Roll out of bed. Stub a toe. Bite back pain. What happened to night? Where did sleep go? Stolen time both infinite and infinitesimal. Too dark. Hit the lights. Too bright. Out the door. An ocean of faces. Fingers of insomnia fog my vision. I’m swimming in sharks. Sharks move fast, move forward, move left, right, center. I’m not really here. Dodge a car. I am here. The lights just turned red. The color of roadkill. I could have been roadkill. Traffic rushes. It’s the Amazon River. White rapids of aluminum, lorries like boulders in the current. River stops. Lecture theatre. Nonsense and garble wrapped in military-grade encryption. I don’t understand any of it. Door slams. Throw everything aside. Collapse on bed. Rinse. Repeat.

I wish I never saw you sitting aisle seat, two rows from the front. I wish I had paid less attention. I wish chance had kept our paths separate, so come midday you would be out of sight and out of mind. Instead, you walked with me up the same stairwell and waited there, outside the same room, for the same tutorial. There were twenty-seven other rotations. Twenty-seven. Why did you have to be in this one? I wish I never said hello. It was out of character. Normally I let silence shepherd me into regret and curse myself for it after. I made an exception for you, you know.

I wish that your academic nonchalance was reason enough for me to move on. The fact that you either aren’t capable enough to pass or don’t care enough to try should repulse me. It doesn’t. All I want is to see you through. It must kill you to see your friends from first year already in their fifth while you’re still stuck in second. It’s all just numbers. You’re still here; you’ll get there some day.

I wish your eyes, your perfect, ocean eyes, I wish I was blind to the weight they carry. I think the mystery is why I’m so attracted. You’re a puzzle I want to solve. Deep down I think I’m still a kid who likes to play with new toys. There’s so much about you I don’t know. I wish I didn’t want to, but I do. I want to know all of your deepest fears, your struggles and your hurt, and I want to take them away. I want to know what makes you happy and laugh and sing and shout, and I want to give it to you everyday. But above all else I want to know if you feel the same about me as I do about you, because a big part of me feels I’m walking circles with a compass, always coming back to the same point.

I wish I could stop talking to you, because every time we say goodbye you take a bigger piece of my heart with you. And I don’t know how much heart I have left to give before you have it all.

Today the dawn flared with the golden promise of a new beginning. The morning aged. Streets teemed with people, roads flowed with traffic, and cities spilled civilization. The sun watched them from its zenith. They were like ants, bold and blind to concerns outside their colony. Warriors were sent to far places, and the sun heard the grim war song of artillery fire. Its phrases were punctuated by the bassline of syncopated detonation. This was a species plagued by trifle conflict. Disappointed, the sun began its descent, and its last embers spilled blood over the horizon.

I believe in science.  I believe in atoms, Brownian motion, probability and entropy.  I believe in the conservation of mass and energy—you can’t get something out of nothing.

I believe in purpose.  I believe everyone has a place and everything exists for a reason.  I believe that the right to decide that purpose lies with each of us.  No one can tell you how to live your life but you.  Whether you’re the most intelligent person in the world or the most idiotic, the most caring or the least, whether you’ve done good or bad, people will talk.  Live the way you want.  To hell with what anyone else says.

I believe in a morality that is relative and circumstantial.  The same action in a different context has a different moral standing.  But there is always an overarching right and wrong.  Intrinsic value.  Utilitarianism.  The greater good.  I believe that goodness is innate—that there are no bad people, only bad decisions.  No one is beyond forgiveness.  The death penalty only benefits bank accounts and tax dollars, not the people who fund them.

I believe in happiness, love and the soul.  I believe that we are all entitled to experience and nurture each one.  I believe we already do, and if you don’t feel it, you need to shift your perspective.  It does get better.

I believe that the strongest weapon is a thought, and words give it infinite ammunition.  Cities and civilizations have crumbled, but the ideas that founded them stand invincible to the decay that follows in time’s footsteps.  I also believe that words are potent drugs, more powerful at soothing pains of the heart than morphine, more able to cure malignancies of the spirit than chemotherapy for cancer, more invigorating than any antidepressant.  That because of this, we should take care with words.

I believe that at the end of the day, it’s the small things that matter most.  A hug is worth more than a thousand bars of gold.  And I am thankful for each and every one.