OCTOBER 9, 2019 – Projecting quiet, rugged confidence, the doctor greeted me and donned rubber gloves.
As I described my run-in with a rock, she inspected my split skin and gently pinched the two sides of the wound. The good doctor then took a step back, put her fists on her hips and pondered. “We could stitch it,” she said, “but we wouldn’t have to.”
“Is there enough tissue to stitch?” I asked.
“Piece of cake,” she said. I told her I wasn’t big on cake, and the alternative sounded more palatable. The nurse then gathered wound tape, bandages and a bottle of iodine. What the nurse started, the doctor finished.
“Have you been practicing long in Hayward?” I asked.
“Off and on,” she said. A moment later she continued. “I was in the Reserves with several tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.” With that my split-skin seemed more like a sliver off cabin firewood. When I expressed curiosity, the doctor sat down next to the exam table to continue the conversation.
“Those people just didn’t want us there,” she said of the war zones. More conversation. Her answers to my questions revealed she’d also volunteered at a Syrian refugee camp in Greece; that she’d back-packed in the mountains of Columbia; traveled widely elsewhere.
“What’s your line of work?” she asked.
“I’m a commercial lawyer—business, real estate, finance.”
“Sounds boring,” she said with a twinkle in her eye.
“Can be, but it’s lots of problem-solving, which is rewarding.”
“What are you reading?” she asked, picking up the tome at my side. “Hmm. History,” she said, seeing the cover*. “Looks interesting.”
“Very.”
“I like reading history too,” the doctor said, “but mostly World War Two—especially about medics and doctors in the field.”
I asked questions, and her responses were articulate, economical, knowledgeable. During a pause, I had to remind myself how I’d landed in ER. It occurred to me that this doctor, an eye-witness to so much extreme suffering, might be the greatest actor of all time, suppressing laughter and disgust over my sliver . . . I mean, sliced shin.
But maybe not. Perhaps this doctor was a person called from an ordinary place to lead an extraordinary life; a person who’d developed a deeper, more compassionate understanding of the human condition than most of us will ever achieve.
Upon my release, we shook hands. “Thank you, doctor,” I said. “You are a credit to humanity.”
In the lobby, my wife was chatting away with three guys in camouflage. These cheerful musketeers were awaiting care of their D’Artagnan. With self-effacing jokes, I joined their banter. They’d been musky fishing. D’Artagnan had been accidentally hooked by a lure intended for a 50-pound musky. That sounded far more valorous than, “I ran into a rock.”
The musky hook reminded me of the (funny, as it turned out) story a friend of mine told about his kid brother who’d been snagged by a fish hook in the eyelid. But that story is for another post.
*See my October 2 post, The Republic.
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© 2019 Eric Nilsson
