Winter, and Womanhood, and Medicine

So I've been waking up early this week, say around 5:00am, so I can join my dad for a day at the office--him writing a sermon, planning worship for Sunday, making hospital visits, lashing a pair of deer antlers to the crown of an old Minnesota Vikings helmet so it can be used for a game at the annual church youth Christmas party; me studying organic chemistry and dabbling in research for a global health paper on podoconiosis.

It's been a blessing, these early mornings and short days: In the office from 5:30 or 6:00am until about 3:00pm, probably with a quick jaunt home in the middle of the day for some leftovers for lunch and then back to work.  It's really astonishing, seeing all those things I didn't learn during the hecticness of the semester, and now being able to see--wow!!--just how amazing it is that you really can predict the acidity of a single proton relative to another protons in the same molecule, or that you can somehow sketch out the structure of an unknown molecule by measuring the different responses to differing chemical environments that carbon isotopes or atoms with spin (like protons) have.  Like... what?!?  What a world.  Wow.  When I study I know it's all praise, learning about an awe-inspiring world made by an awesome God.  Sometimes it's so overwhelmingly awe-inspiring that I even take a quick morning nap on the pews to refresh my mind, and when I come back to my little table and faithful space heater and textbooks and lecture notes in the tiny church library, I am impressed all over again with the wonder of it all.

And then the coming home, when the work is done, leaving the textbooks and lecture notes neatly stacked on my dad's desk overnight: That's a thing of beauty, too.  To put aside the work and just relax, because nothing's due tomorrow (or the next day, or the next week, or really for another month, anyway).  This is the sort of balance I imagine is most healthy for working people.

So I come home, and just relax.  Our TV is in the shop, so partly because of that and partly because this winter I'm being more intentional, I'm reading a book that my aunt gave me, one of those sort-of-for-no-reason gifts that she'll occasionally surprise me with: things that maybe she sees and then remembers me, then buys for me just because she thinks they would be affirming or challenging or good for me.  This aunt in particular has always been conscious that I've grown up in a home of brothers, and has always affirmed my womanhood (when it was that, and my femininity, or girlhood, or whatever it was back then before I had womanhood) in a special way, sometimes with these gifts, and sometimes just with words.  All my aunts, actually, have done this, but this one in particular.

Back, in a moment, to this book, but a digression on womanhood, because it's really a cool thing: I got my ears pierced in September.  They're not pierced now (did you know that about 15% of people have a dermal nickel allergy?  I don't know where I read that, but I feel like maybe it's true), but they were.  They lasted a few weeks before the allergic swelling got too bad and I'd wake up in the middle of the night in pain, or have to call my best friend to help me put them back in when I'd tried to give my ears a brief moment's rest, so I took the earrings out permanently.  And the holes are gone now.  If I feel my earlobes, there's still some tiny, circular scar where I know they were pierced--but no holes.

Since I went to Ghana on Bridge Year with the Abenas (Fitaa and Tuntum, white and black, we called them, to everyone's confusion, though it was true), I'd wanted to pierce them.  These past few years, see, have been a lot about growing into womanhood, about loving being a woman in every way.  I love being able to dress up every once in a while and affirm that I am beautiful with a particular feminine beauty--though looking nice on the outside doesn't mean so much for so long.  I love getting my period, because it means not only that my body is a capable one--oh hey, world, I could have a baby someday!  And that's exciting!  And I want to celebrate it!--but also an active one, living in--making--the same sort of rhythms that go on around us in seasons, stages of life, and day and night.  I love doing dishes and cleaning the bathroom and washing clothes (by hand or with a machine), even though I love mowing the lawn and fixing blown fuses in the car too, because part of being a woman is serving (which is not to say that part of being a man is not serving, too, because doing all these tasks are more related to maturity than to gender roles anyway... but I do tilt toward traditional gender roles--my theology, which in turn cannot help but be my politics--that say women, in partnership with men, bear much of the responsibility to the day-to-day smooth running of a house.  I guess if I'm a feminist, I'm a very weird one.).  I like thinking that someday I'll get to have my own home where and family for whom I can do all these things--and that includes doing the dishes and cleaning the bathroom and washing the clothes.  I love the idea of wearing earrings, some small, not-too-noticeable daily reminder of being a woman: little studs, maybe, when it's time to shovel the snow, or some dangly, sparkly ones for a nice evening out.

My former roommate once shared with me a paper she wrote about feminist expression (or the stifling thereof) in Judaism, and one of her arguments discussed a prayer Jewish men pray thanking the Lord for not making them women.  And, thanks be to God for men, especially those who are strong in the Lord, but this is my prayer: Thank you, Lord, for not making me a man.

I really think this growing into my womanhood has informed my understanding of my medical calling tremendously: I want to be an obstetrician/gynecologist.  There's a lot of fear, I think, or at best uncertainty or misunderstanding, that women have about their bodies.  Childbirth might be one of the easiest examples of this: It's hyped up in a lot of the media as one of the most painful and terrifying experiences a woman can have.  And, well, I've never given birth.  But I've learned a lot about it, and, yeah, I'd have to say I'd agree with the part about it being really painful (also, I've read Genesis 3), and it can also be very uncertain.  But I've also seen babies born, and I have to say that women's bodies are a pretty wondrous creation: Bodies that can grow other bodies from a single cell to billions, separate themselves from the smaller body, and then nourish that other body.  Wow.  Each of these stages wondrous for its own unique reasons!  But too often women's bodies are also be the site of a lot of cultural subjugation and neglect, and that's painfully sad.  Women's bodies should be well affirmed, and well cared for.

But back to this book: It's wonderful.  Truly, truly wonderful.  It's called God's Hotel by Victoria Sweet (who graciously omits the title from the cover, but who is an MD).  Thank you Aunt Ruth!  In it, Dr. S. (as she is known by her patients) tells of her experiences working at Laguna Honda, which is more or less the last almshouse, or hospital serving the poor and chronically ill, in the US.  It's her account of trying to understand what a body is, like what's the anima, the spirit, that makes a person a person and not just a body (amendment to previous note about women's bodies, and bodies carrying, birthing, and feeding bodies: That was in the full, "embodied" [hehe] sense of bodies, as in... Jesus took on a body.  And we are embodied, in a powerful, so-physical-it's-almost-spiritual sort of way.  But now when I'm talking about bodies, I just mean the piles of DNA and proteins and cytoplasm and stuff).

During it, Dr. S. shares about her PhD research (a.k.a. sojourn) into the premodern medicine of Hildegard of Bingen, a mystic and nun who treated patients in the 12th century according to the principle of four [insert plural noun here: humors, seasons, elements, times of day, etc.].  She also leaves the (Lord-willing) future doctor in me yearning for what I understand too well, despite my naive optimism about a profession in healing (or what I pray is at least not just a profession of diagnosing and treating and dragging babies out of birth canals), to be a dying cadence of medicine: Slow medicine.  The sort of medicine that allows doctors enough time with their patients to figure out, hmmm, that patient who has long since been diagnosed as having Alzheimer's (i.e., she seems demented but we're not sure why), diabetes, and depression and who is taking all the associated medicines--and more--actually has a dislocated hip after having a hip replacement, and can safely be taken off of literally all of her medications when her pain is mostly gone after her hip is properly realigned.  It's a remarkable thing, the way medicine is practiced at Laguna Honda, what with the "white-haired little old white ladies" in one of the wards each wrapped in a hand-crocheted blanket made by the head nurse of the ward and the patients going out for a drink just outside the admitting ward.  Romanticized, yes, without a doubt--but the whole thing just tugs at my heart.  Maybe obstetrics and gynecology is different in some key ways from internal medicine, but it's the same philosophy that inefficiency is sometimes the most efficient way of caring, and that often an hour-long physical exam and really full patient history speak more articulately than a full blood workup, that I'd like to think compels both me and Dr. S.

In some ways, my ex-pierced ears remind me of the story of Terry, whom Dr. S. writes about.  Please, I'll request of you, read the book, for the details are worth it, and such a summary does no justice, and yet: Terry was confined to a wheelchair, and out from under the care of the nurses at Laguna Honda, developed terrible bedsores.  Surgeons spent hours grafting tissue from her thighs onto her buttocks and lower back.  After she disappeared for several months after having been taken out "for an afternoon" by her boyfriend, Terry's bedsores were back with a special vengeance, the grafts having turned gangrenous and the sores themselves revealing internal organs, decaying deep enough to expose parts of her spine.  Modern medicine had given an answer with the grafts, and they--and here we'd like to assign blame, and probably much more of it to Terry than to the surgeons, but let us for now merely remember the social context in which Terry may have lived, and then press forward, keeping our pointing-prone fingers to ourselves--had failed.  She would almost surely die of infection, what with such a huge breech in her primary protective mechanism against all the pathogens not only of the world at large, but specifically of an almshouse full of the poor and sick.

She didn't die, at least not soon.  She broke up with her abusive boyfriend, quit drinking and smoking, and over the course of 2 1/2 years (people, that's 365 days * 2.5 = 912 days!  that's so long!) literally regrew the tissue that had been robbed by her bedsore.  Two and a half years.  My ears only took two and a half days to mostly much heal, and two and a half weeks until I could scarcely notice that there had ever been a hole there, save for the the tiny, circular scars.  But somehow both healings are about becoming: For Terry, becoming free from what had entangled her; and for me, becoming the woman I am.  I don't want to be contrived, because I'm not Terry, and bedsores are not ear piercings (though let's be real: how amazingly surreal that our bodies heal like that, just making flesh from what we can't see?  Bodies are intricate handiwork to be sure).  I want to get my ears pierced again (nickel free earrings this time, no cheap stainless steel!) within a few weeks, and my holes will be back.  But there's something profound in healing.


It's late, past my bedtime (the wonderful consequence of waking up so early is going to sleep early, and now that it is already 10:00pm I've transgressed my bedtime by an hour), so here I'll conclude.  No simple thesis restatement, as I was taught in school.  But let me say that I've been blessed by my winter break so far, and when I wake up tomorrow morning to study more organic chemistry, it will be my prayer for God to keep me grounded in the present, believing Him for what it to come (medical school!  residency!  ob/gyn practice!) and thanking Him for what has been--and studying that day because He has put it before me for the now.