In Shock by Rana Awdish

Author:Rana Awdish
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Seven

Vulnerable Masses

By the middle of rounds each day, I would feel an unmistakable aching heaviness in my right side. By the end of rounds, it could truly be called pain. At first, I allowed myself to dismiss it, attributing it to either the old, shrinking hematoma or inflammation related to the mesh from the hernia repair. But I knew it was different, and I knew it was new. I also knew admitting it would set off a series of events that I would have no control over. Once I said it out loud, everything would take on a momentum of its own. So I ignored it for as long as possible, which turned out to be three months. Three months of solid denial and pretense. Observant friends would comment, “You’re holding your right side, is everything OK?”

The truth was, I didn’t know if everything was OK. In fact, I knew something was probably very wrong, but I wasn’t yet ready to face it. In an odd way, my medical training had prepared me to ignore my body. Medical training demands a kind of disembodiment by doctors. It begins in Gross Anatomy lab, where bodies are studied but the lives those bodies led and the deaths that followed are not. It continues into a training that dismisses the need for sleep, demanding thirty-six-hour workdays. It is illustrated by the denial of bodily functions in the operating room. A twelve-hour case meant twelve straight hours in which you did not move from the operating room table. You learned not to drink or eat, you learned not to feel hunger or indulge thirst. Corporeal needs were marginalized, ignored and dismissed. To do what needed to be done, we believed we had to be superhuman. And there was, sadly, an implied superiority in those achievements. Doctors, we believed, were just different.

I recognize now that I carried this disembodied persona into my first pregnancy. I saw what was happening in my body as something to be minimized. To be a good doctor to me meant not having my pregnancy interfere with my work, in any way. I ignored signs, like the horrific swelling, that were identifying a problem. I put on compression stockings so that I could still round for hours. I refused to sit, believing it weak and a concession. And so when the aching, right-sided heaviness started up, I was again disadvantaged, having not yet learned to truly and shamelessly inhabit my body.

In an attempt to address what was steadily becoming a real concern, without actually formally pursuing it, I walked down the hallway from my office and asked my friend, a doctor who I had also done fellowship with, if he would take a look at my liver with the ultrasound machine. He was a bright, kind man. He had completed medical school in Nigeria and had an interest in ultrasound, a modality that was very useful in areas of the world that had less access to sophisticated diagnostics like CT scanning and MRI.

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