Stuck

The needle tip, shiny and curved and bloody, winked at me. After 36 straight hours of helping deliver babies and sewing up their mothers, I had stuck a needle all the way through my thumb. I felt nothing. Well, not nothing, just not physical pain. Despair at the idea of having to go to the ER to get my blood tested for HIV and hepatitis. A numb disbelief that it would be an extra hour before I could drop down into blessed, dreamless sleep.

Getting stuck is actually what woke me up. I was an intern, and I was drowning. There were always a few residents who loved the pressure, who hardened into brilliance like diamonds under stress. I admired them, but I couldn’t relate. Some of us exercised or drank to excess. Some ate for comfort, or barely ate at all. There were addictions and affairs and divorces, families ripped apart in sacrifice to the gods of medicine. 

I learned where to turn, and it wasn’t my family. I’d called home weeping, thumb throbbing, thinking of quitting, thoughts of liver failure or AIDS weighting my head. My mother told me to suck it up. My father said I’d known what I signed up for. I got the message: failure was not an option, crying gets you nowhere.

As in my childhood home, the first place I lived where the walls had teeth, I turned to books. To read is to escape. To feel weightless at the turn of the first page, waiting for the hard yank of acceleration taking you out of yourself. I survived those months on candy bars, Diet Dr. Pepper, and stories. I became known as the resident who had novels in her bag instead of medical texts. The strange one who went to the movies by herself and emerged hours later, alive, breathing, feeling again.

After a needle stick they test you every few months for a year to make sure you’re free of disease. Every time the syringe filled with my blood because the needle had gone in, I thought about sitting alone in a theater, waiting for the screen to go dark, hovering in anticipation. Cracking the spine of a new book and being exactly where I wanted to be in that moment--stuck in someone else’s story.