Copyright Parminder Bolina, 1995, reprinted by permission of Student Doctors Press.
I don't mind injections a bit, and I enjoy getting my blood drawn. This is because as a child, virtually the only times I ever spent alone with my father were when he gave me my allergy shots twice a week. It was a real father-daughter bonding experience. Now every time somebody sticks a needle in me, I get a little Oedipal thrill.
My father is more than a doctor. He is the director of a research center. When my brother calls my father to talk, my father looks at his legal pad and tells my brother to call between one and one-thirty on Friday. When I call my father, he quizzes me on whatever he thinks I should have learned in the past year. He has been doing that ever since I could talk. I used to think he did it to make me feel stupid. Now, in my last year of medical school, I realize that he has been pimping me for thirty years. My brother is treated like an applicant for lab space. I am treated like a student on the wards.
My mother is a psychotherapist who does not believe in germ theory. After my last third-world junket, I ended up in a hospital in Santo Domingo with a pneumothorax, a broken arm, scabies, and amoebic dysentery. My mother flew three thousand miles from California to bring me bagels and lox on ice. She sat by my bedside and told me that my medical problems were all evidence of my subconscious desire to return to civilization. I have a fantasy that someday I'll be hospitalized with murine typhus, and my mother will tell me that it's one more example of my tendency to somaticize my emotions. “But Mom, I got it from a flea bite.”
“But why did you allow yourself to be bitten?”
“I forgot to pack my flea collar. I always forget to pack something.”
“You just started an internship at a new hospital, in a new city. Major life stresses. Immunosuppression. Hypothalamus. Mind-body interface….”
“My doctor says that has nothing to do with it.”
“Doctor, shmoctor. I'm your mother. I know you. You've always been like this.” Before she leaves the room she'll have me convinced that while stress makes other people break out in hives, me it causes to break out in typhus.
My father became a radiologist because he's into gadgets and can't stand sick people. His father was a general practitioner whose patients used to call in the middle of the night to complain about their ailments and drag him out of the house at all hours, so my father knows that sick people are whiny and boring and self-centered, and besides, they smell bad. Dad tells me I should go into eye surgery. It is a very hot field, technically exciting; you get to play with lots of gadgets and you make mucho macho moola. When I interrupt him to point out that I have no interest in eye surgery, he says I shouldn't let that deter me. If he were in medical school now, he says, he would become an eye surgeon. I want to be different from my father, though. I'm going into family medicine.
Jan Steckel
Yale University
School of Medicine
Class of 1994