Tap Dancing on Everest by Mimi Zieman

Author:Mimi Zieman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Globe Pequot
Published: 2024-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

12

Labor and Delivery

“You can still choose someone else—a real doctor,” I told Robert on the phone one year after I’d accepted his invitation.

“What good is the best doctor in the world if they decompensate at altitude?”

“You could have both! A doctor who has proven themselves at altitude!”

“They won’t be so much fun or have that calming influence I’m counting on. Don’t forget that you’re also team psychologist. You’ll have to remain chill and organized while the rest of us go crazy.”

I laughed. He met me while I was in the middle of a Zen-trekking experience in Nepal. Doesn’t he realize a Jewish girl from New York City is not typically seen as a calming influence?

Robert pointed out that if we had a severe injury, there was no hope of helicopter evacuation, so even experienced doctors wouldn’t be able to do much to save someone. Later, I’d realize many lightweight climbs didn’t even take along a medical person because the teams were small. But I had to feel like my presence meant something. And it did. It meant everything. At least to me.

Luckily—and predictably—Robert had a plan to distract me.

“I’m contacting magazines to sell them the ‘Mimi Gets Fit, Climbs Everest/Training’ story,” he said. This resulted in the New York magazine article that called me an “unlikely candidate for an assault team of any kind.”

To get fit, I alternated running and weightlifting with climbing up and down the twenty-eight floors in my apartment building. I took the trusty maroon “beast” (unsurprisingly, the original owner hadn’t wanted it back) and filled it with forty pounds of books to run up and down my stairwell. When I slipped it on my back, it felt like a hug from a long-lost friend.

I practiced rock climbing in the Catskills at “the Gunks,” a popular climbing ridge, returning to the Country, where I’d first experienced wilderness. Ed Webster, whom I’d met in Nepal during the Shabbat dinner in the mountains, had taken me rock climbing for the first time during the previous year when I visited him in Colorado.

The med school gym smelled of sweat and iron when I picked up the smallest five-pound dumbbells, surrounded almost entirely by men grunting under heavy barbells. Gradually my strength increased, and I lifted ten pounds, then twenty. Completing repetitions was a concrete goal. For the first time, I had visible biceps.

When I wasn’t in the weight room, I ran the track around the basketball court or down Morris Park Avenue, lined with trees. I rode my bike to City Island, a gem of a place with seafood shacks, near lapping waves on an eastern lip of the Bronx. Every night, instead of shuffling back from the hospital to my studio apartment and flopping on the couch, I ran. Being breathless with exertion relieved some anxieties.

Despite my research and physical training, I remained worried. Five months before the trip I sat in the tiny office of a student in the psychology doctoral program, part of the med school counseling service.

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