Sick and Full of Burning by Cherry Kelly

Author:Cherry, Kelly [Cherry, Kelly]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Boson Books
Published: 2003-07-24T16:00:00+00:00

Meanwhile, two continuing courses in the second year at Mount Sinai, an introduction to medicine that included a consideration of community health problems and a course in history-taking, examination, and diagnosis, dovetailed only all too well with what I was doing at the clinic. When I slipped and called the Rodriguez kid "Bobbi Jean," she let me know that I was just like all the rest "Who are they?" I asked.

"Physicians," she said. She made it sound as if the word itself was a private joke that I didn't understand.

I pointed out that I wasn't a doctor and wouldn't be for a long time yet.

"You are going to be a good one, then, on account of because you already think just like them. Can I have a cigarette?"

"Don't be silly," I said.

"See what I mean? Rules, rules, rules!"

"You'll stunt your growth."

She did a little shimmy into tight jeans and zipped them up, and shrugging into a wraparound blouse with plunging neck-line, gave me the once-over from a frontal point of view. "Is that what happened to you?"

"That is an uncalled-for thing to say!" I sputtered, stung. "Roberta."

"My point is this, Miss Settleworth. You people think the Third World isn't no bigger than the tenements out there"–she waved her hand uptown–"but it is growing. We are going to take over! And then let's see don't you call me by whatever I want to be called."

I was tired that day. All I could answer was, "Right on."She popped her gum.

"You making fun of me?"

"No."

She thought "You understand, there isn't anything personal in what I'm saying, Miss Settleworth."

I said I understood.

"God," she said, by way of letting me know that she didn't want to go too far and wind up by making me really mad, "just between you and I, I don't know how you can stand it"

"What?"

"The noise." The waiting room was overflowing with mothers shouting at the top of their lungs in order to make themselves heard over the shrieking and squealing of little children. The older kids stood around quietly, singly or in small groups, as if adolescence had robbed them of their voices for the time being. We didn't take emergencies and all were out-patients, of course, but tragedy turned up here just as it might anywhere else in the hospital complex. Not long ago one of the teen-agers, a sweet, rather withdrawn, rather elegant young girl named Gina, had developed cancer of the vagina. She didn't even weep, but the look of worry that she must have been born with, one which she wore perpetually and which made everyone want to reassure her in some absolute sense, that look etched itself even more deeply into her pretty face as we stood around awkwardly staring at it, or trying not to stare at it. Plastic surgery could reconstruct the vagina but not the uterus, and it couldn't reconstruct Gina's sense of herself either, not completely, not when that ego was so fragile to begin with. But I hardly knew

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