In which it takes a village.
Last fall my boyfriend and I climbed the stairway to heaven trail in New Jersey and took a wrong turn near the top. It was confusing. We felt like we had been walking for more than three miles, which was the distance to the lookout point. And it felt like we were no longer going fully uphill; in fact, the trail was dipping downhill more than it was tracing upwards. But the trees were steadily marked with the white paint that had guided us up for the first few miles, so we trudged onwards. After a few minutes of doubting ourselves, I remembered that the stairway to heaven trail was contiguous with part of the Appalachian trail, which extends from Maine to Georgia. We must have accidentally joined onto that trail, and missed the end of our own. I made a rather sheepish about-face and soon enough, we saw the sign we’d missed on the way in—an arrow pointing towards the lookout. And once we got there, we were thrust from the shadows of forest to a granite escarp overlooking bright, endless sky and undulant hills.
That’s the point I think I’ve reached in med school. On Saturday, I took the USMLE Step 1, the first part of America’s medical licensure process. Before that, I had been muddling around in the dark of my house for six weeks, spending anywhere from eight to eighteen hours a day (I used a stopwatch to time myself) trying to fill my poor mildewed bathtub of a mind with facts more quickly than they leaked out. Each week I’d take a practice exam to track my progress on the upward way, wondering if I reached my personal plateau. For a dizzying, terrifying week, my score plummeted by 25 points, and I wondered if I had hit some invisible sweet spot and shot right past it back into mediocrity. I was sleeping poorly (my room had been rented out, so I was sleeping on a hammocky pull-out bed in the living room with my dad’s TV playing in the background), my back would ache in the same spot every day after mid-morning, my body dozed off of its own accord each morning around 10 AM, I was getting evening headaches, and I had a week left until the actual exam itself. I should have been at peak fighting condition, and I was little better off than I was at the beginning of my study period. Worse off, even.
I called a couple from my church, the L’s, to see if I could stay with them for the last week up until the exam. I can’t remember if they even deliberated—they immediately insisted that I come over. The night that I came, I had just finished a particularly bad question set on UWORLD. My dad had made dinner as I was finishing up and got my final score; in my memory, he has never attended any church meetings, and doesn’t pray much out loud. I told him how upset I was, and how afraid that I had backslidden somehow. He began to recite Psalm 23 to me, in Chinese. But he only remembered the first two verses. Together, in English and Chinese, we patched through the rest. I cried into my noodles as I ate.
The L’s saw my red face the night I came over to their place. I had hoped it would go unnoticed, or be written off due to the cold night air. But they asked, and I accidentally started crying again. They immediately sat down with me and prayed—not that I would get the best score or go to the most prestigious residency, but that God would give me the score I needed for a residency placement according to His perfect will, that the score would not limit His ability to move through me. Then the brother shared with me a verse from John 14: “Do not let your heart be troubled. Believe into God. Believe also into Me.” I realized then that my weeping was not for God’s will. His intent would be carried out, if I just took Him as my strength to perform my due diligence. It was really just tears of regret and pride, over the limits of my abilities, the frailty and fallibility of my best laid plans. I had secretly harbored a hope that God’s path for me included all the souvenirs of worldly success: fame, wealth, health, recognition. But He had left His position of glory and omnipotence to walk on the earth like us. He suffered the ignominies and injustice of human existence, was mocked, betrayed, and executed. How have I spent such a long time serving Him without looking at the life He lived? How long have I served Him just looking to myself and my own possessions?
The L’s spent half the week babysitting their granddaughter, and they babied me, too. They made me meals; my dad reminded me to take my vitamins every day (he really believes in their efficacy, don’t @ me); my boyfriend dropped off a week’s worth of chicken essence that I was strictly to drink every night before bed. My friends messaged me and encouraged me as the days ticked down to the test itself. I found out the day before my exam that the L’s actually had given their own bedroom to their granddaughter (she’s 2 and a very light sleeper), and had been sleeping for days on mats on the floor, waking up before 6 AM and putting things away so I wouldn’t see. I was horrified. They are in their sixties. I told them, if anyone should sleep on the floor, I should. I was the youngest, healthiest, and strongest. But they assured me that it was their joy and privilege to take care of me. They wouldn’t allow me to switch with them, despite my fervent insistence. I could only work as hard as I could to make their sacrifices worthwhile.
The exam itself was rather anticlimactic, really. Seven hours of questions, about an hour of break time scattered in-between. It was the lack of drama that made the whole experience kind of surreal. My back didn’t hurt at all, though it had hurt for most of the last two months. I didn’t feel the least bit drowsy, despite dozing off like clockwork for weeks. I had prayed for the ability to perform at my best, not “the” best, and I believe God was faithful. But I could hardly say I got here all by myself.
I realized just how much privilege I enjoyed by being in my community. My family has continuously sacrificed and labored to support my medical school attendance, so that I could study without having to work in the last two years. Even renting out my room, as unfortunately as the timing worked out, was meant to help with tuition. My parents have been shooing me away from doing the dishes or making food. And my church has been praying for me and picking up my slack in services so that I could do my best on the board exams. When I talked to some classmates and asked why they didn’t go home for study time, where (I assumed) they’d have meals and laundry and rent taken care of, some laughed at my naïveté. “Not everybody has that at home, you know. If I went home, I’d have to babysit my baby nephew. They always dump him on me when I come home for breaks.” “My parents work late. They’d expect me to have dinner ready for them when they get back, not the other way around.” I’ve never been more grateful for what I have.
A brief account about my own encounter with Covid-19. My parents went back to Taiwan to vote in the most recent election. On their way back, they went on a brief vacation in Japan and had a layover in Hong Kong. Less than two weeks after his return, my dad suddenly got a fever, muscle aches, and a hacking cough. He had been avidly following novel coronavirus news, much more than the rest of the family, and he immediately was concerned that somehow, he had gotten inadvertently exposed. He hadn’t been sick with as much as a cold for almost eight years; he hadn’t seen a doctor in about as much time, either. But this convinced him to do his civic duty and present himself for testing (this was the third week of January). We put on surgical masks and went to the nearest urgent care center.
The urgent care center had no other patients. I went in first, and explained to the front desk staff about how my dad had recently traveled to Taiwan, Japan, and Hong Kong (notably, not China, which was the only place with reported cases at the time), and that he was experiencing flu-like symptoms. Immediately, the man at the front told us both to wait as far away as possible, near the doors. We must have been a terrible sight. Clips of Chinese people with surgery masks in Wuhan were all over the news, and now we were here, like we crawled right out of a TV screen somewhere. He disappeared, and when he came back, he and the other ancillary staff were all wearing N-95’s. No one offered to put a mask on him, which would have offered the most safety to everyone (this was before the N-95 shortage). My dad’s arms were weak and shaky, and when he fumbled taking off his jacket, no one made a move to help him except me. The nurse practitioner eventually determined we did not meet the specific travel criteria for Covid-19 testing, so we got a flu swab (negative) and were sent on our way.
I can begin to understand the fear of contagion. I plan to go into emergency medicine myself, and the risk apropos to being a frontline worker is part and parcel with my career. I don’t blame the urgent care workers for reacting the way they did. And we have enough preaching from every news outlet, from every shared post on social media, about what we can do in these ever-changing times. But in all their haste to protect themselves, the workers are the urgent care center neglected the one move that would take care of everyone, which was taking care of my dad by putting the most restrictive mask on him, and taking his history orally rather than having him type it out onto an ipad. In the end, whether it’s coronavirus, educational debt, toilet paper shortages, universal healthcare, disability, or financial hardship, America has some hard lessons to learn. Everyone is so busy to take care of themselves and the people they love nowadays that they do so at the detriment of their neighbors, whether that means making sure they stock up on masks, rice, toilet paper, and bottled water, spreading posts of questionable veracity on social media, or violently assaulting Asian people. History will tell, but I think what this global crisis is telling us is that the best way to take care of oneself is doing what we can to take care of the people around us who need help the most.
