bazaar                                  

On Friday morning, when I walk into the clinic, Leroy is standing behind his desk, wearing all white scrubs, snakeskin boots and rocking out to . Our eyes meet, he puts on arm up, one hip out, swivles in a circle and says Oooh girl, you're looking fierce today child. 

In the waiting room they sit for hours. In the sweltering heat, without air conditioning, in the dark. They are waiting for us, for me, to call their names, lead them through the narrow yellow halls into small rooms, ask them about their last normal menstrual periods, measure their fundal heights, find the small, fast heart rates on the doppler monitors. They sit for hours waiting for a routine sonogram, a yearly exam, laboratory results. Without insurance there is no one to complain to. Without insurance they voiceless, powerless, stifled and sweaty. They wait to be seen by a handful of expert clinicians with swift hands and thick Russian accents but settle instead for us, a bevy of blundering students, to provide some of their most intimate care. It is to these women--dark, bright, braided and beautiful--that I am wordlessly grateful to, for allowing me access to learn on them in a most visceral, surprising way.

exposure

In the operating room there is little mercy, save the relief of anesthesia. In the operating room after the quiet rush of anesthetics, the business of surgery is swift and sterile and succinct. Patients are positioned in ways that best serve our access--exposure as it were--humility excluded. In the operating room, beneath the blue drapes and the sterile towels and the rows of glinting instruments, lay sleeping people who have come to us with hope and fear and eager trepidation that we will improve their current station, that they will, to some affect, leave us better than they were. In the operating room, beneath the hot lights and the glare of the scrub nurse, it it easy to forget who is beneath there, a full life on the wrong side of the scalpel. In the operating room, standing in sterility and in front of my patient in a most comprising position, I am reminded in a rush that this is a privilege, that I am the most fortunate one, that I have been given people, in their most intimate moments, from which to learn. In the operating room, in the clinics, in the exam rooms and on the blue floors left sinkless I am reminded that I have had the very particular privilege to to see so many so sick and it when it comes it feels something like salvation.