The Mistress

 I've started keeping a physical journal, which I occasionally write in. But sometimes it just seems to make more sense to write things out on here. There's history here.

This last academic year was an emotionally difficult one for me. In addition to work stressors and family matters, this past year was when I felt deep in my bones that I was giving up on EP. There's a particular grief I can't quite explain. Maybe it's like falling out of love. Imagine your life's blood, sparking fire and light for the past decade, and then one morning, you prod at the unrecognizable mass and realize it's turned cold and stale. This was a project I had become so intertwined with, and I already knew instinctually that it was starting to go south. Whenever I was editing and revising, I kept imaging a tiered cake that had been overbaked, with frosting dripping down messily and the base of the cake hacked away into an unstable foundation.

I'd already heard the advice from other writers, from my own mother, from my own friends, that I should work on something else. Move on. It took me months to get to that level of acceptance. Even then, there was nothing that gripped me in quite the same way, that made me want to sit down and spend hours poking through words, when it was so much easier to be binge-watching Netflix.

I finally found the spark I was looking for during the last week of October.

I've known for a long time that I want to write about my experiences in residency. I'd already tried drafting pieces during the course of the past two years. Something felt off, though. I couldn't quite get the tone right. My initial idea was to go after a David-Sedaris-esque tone, but it seemed almost too flippant for the subject matter.

There usually isn't some magical aura preceding the moment when inspiration strikes. In this case, it just came upon me of all sudden, and I was aware of it enough that I could seize onto the idea before it flitted away.

I'm working on a new story. It's still untitled. It takes place at the hospital I train at, in the exact same period of my training. It's essentially an alternate universe, in that I am creating completely new characters from scratch and trying to avoid anyone that exists here in real life. It's a rom-com, a love story that comes to head in the time of Coronavirus. Except everyone has already used that corny "Love in the Time of Corona" spiel so I'm trying to avoid all that shit. My aim is to make it as specific as possible about the experience at this hospital, to reveal almost journalistically the realities of working in a charity hospital. But at the core, I want to write something fluffy.

There was something about EP that felt epic in scope. To this day, when the guitar solo in the live Chicago performance of "Edge of Seventeen" or the crooning in Jaybeatz's remix "Lay Down" plays on my earphones, I am instantly transported to the cinematic moments I wrote that these songs inspired. I don't feel the same way about this Untitled Med Rom-Com. But there's something low-pressure about this new project that has been a pleasant change. I've been forcing myself to write as quickly as I can, to get the garbage down on paper.  There's also something different about writing a romance. Your story lives and dies by your leads. It's like meeting someone new, fleshing out their personalities and relationships, and then trying to throw them together into situations and waiting to see how you can make things sublimate.

Things are still early. I might lose interest. But hopefully in the near future, I will introduce you to Rigo and Elise.

Sur Ton Corps

"Mais merde, le temps passe et toi tu restes plantée là
Dans ma tête, dans mes veines, dans mes images cérébrales
Mon vide atteint des sommet
La nuit je n'ai plus sommeil"

--"Sur Ton Corps" by Tsew the Kid

 

The August sun sets, dipping into the pink bath beyond the Los Angeles skyline. These French rap songs loop on repeat like a Gregorian chant, syllables tumbling like hailstones upon the smoky contoured edges of a melting baritone. Folktales warn of the transformations heralded by nightfall---men who howl at the full moon, monstrous bridegrooms who shed their animal skins upon the wedding night. Dangerous thoughts come in this hour. I become a saturnid, a Luna moth spreading these great wings in search of the spark of heat ignited by low voices, rumbling murmurs, reverberations that radiate down the spinal column like an arrow to the cradle.

I am the Highway

"I am not your autumn moon. I am the night."

My co-resident tested positive. The four of us at X Hospital sit in a cramped closet-converted-to-workroom each day. I looked up the testing protocol at X Hospital.

HIGH RISK EXPOSURE

[ ] Direct exposure within 6 feet. CHECK.
[ ] Prolonged exposure, greater than 10 minutes. CHECK.
[ ] Unprotected exposure or exposure to secretions of a known positive COVID-19 individual. CHECK. 

The other co-residents and I called Employee Health this afternoon. We have been instructed to self-quarantine and to drive to the covid tent tomorrow for testing.

I feel fine. Or... do I really feel fine? What's this junk in my throat? What's this tightness in my chest? Is it getting harder to breathe? Is that a chill coming on? Am I infected, or am I just a hypochondriac?

It's hard to spend much time online these days. Inevitably I end up down a COVID-19 wormhole that becomes a one-way ticket to rage. Today I read this article on Slate, titled "Who Do We Expect to Sacrifice?" It really struck the core of the anger I've been feeling towards our country's situation right now.

I am not your rolling wheels. I am the highway.

I am not your carpet ride. I am the sky.

The Brink

The inevitable is coming.

C, E, and I sit in the cafeteria. We're on ambulatory this week, and the clinics have begun to transition to telephone visits. They didn't really need us residents in Oncology clinic this morning. Only the patients on active chemotherapy regimens came in today; the rest were told to stay home. The attending told us to come back at eleven to see if there were any patients we could help see.

C went to medical school in New York. His classmate in NYC who's rotating on ICU is telling him that there's 200 patients in their hospital who tested positive, 200 more pending test results. The situation with PPEs has gotten so bad over there that the residents are being told to wash their masks for reuse. The admin here won't tell us outright, but the rumor floating around is that there are 4 active cases currently hospitalized in our hospital with 50+ tests pending.

I went to medical school in New Orleans. The ghost of Hurricane Katrina was ever-looming, with the medical school in the shadow of the abandoned Charity Hospital next door. We had attendings who were there when the waters flooded the hospital, when the ventilators lost power and patients had to be manually bagged until they were too far gone. I confess, there were times when I would imagine what would happen if I were the one having to make the uncomfortable judgment calls of having to triage lives. Since moving back to California for residency, the possibility of a major earthquake in Los Angeles had led to similar morbid imaginings.

With a viral pandemic knocking at the door, it's a little odd how unchanged my daily routine has been. I wake at the same hour and make the same commute to the hospital, albeit with considerably reduced traffic. I was waiting outside an onigiri shop for take-out the other day, and this guy also waiting for his order was telling me, "Man, isn't it weird working from home and not being able to go out to bars after work?" Life goes on.

I try not to read the news for too long. Inevitably I end up reading about idiots somewhere in the world, whether it's the Spring Breakers flocking the beaches in Florida or the churches packing their pews because they think this is a hoax or the hoarders filling their shopping carts with an ungodly number of milk gallons, and then I start to rage-stroke and have to close my phone.

An earthquake announces its presence with immediate havoc and destruction. Not this eerie calm that has snaked into the city, while the rest of us in this hospital wait on the brink of the inevitable. We know we're probably going to catch the virus. Most of us will probably be fine. But there's always the chance that some of us will end up like the cases you read about in the news. There was a NY Times profile about two 29-year-old female healthcare workers in China who got COVID-19. Only of them survived. One was a nurse, the other was a gastroenterologist. The latter went into cardiac arrest and multiorgan failure before dying.

For me, catching COVID-19 isn't what's causing that pit of dread, so much as that anticipation of what will happen when our hospital becomes overwhelmed.