New Year's Eve
Character Development | After He Said Cancer
Dear Family, Friends, and Fellow Memoirists,
The recent course that I took in character development was transformative for my writing, and I want to share the new first chapter of my book. What I have learned is that the first few chapters are critical to setting up who I am, as the protagonist of my memoir, and my core values and misbelief.
Misbelief? Yes, this was a strange concept for me, too. It is something I believed, which proved true for me earlier in life, but is proven wrong by events unfolding in the book. Then, the protagonist (me) must transform to learn the lesson and come to a new understanding of the world. This transformation of the protagonist is the core of memoir.
I won’t say more, but leave you to read the “new” first chapter of the book. Please tell me what you think of the character development and how I present my misbelief. Grateful for your support and comments, as I continue the journey of finding an agent and/or small press.
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Men’s health was never something I found terribly interesting. They couldn’t become pregnant, make a placenta, nourish a fetus inside their bodies, and didn’t have breasts to feed a newborn. Ergo, their health was largely unimportant, at least to me.
How could their health compare to that of a woman, who birthed and mothered children, created loving homes, and nurtured the world? Sure, men could create loving homes and be excellent fathers, but women were the foundation of society. It was my humble opinion, but one that was shared by my colleagues.
Once, one of my attending teachers told me a joke that stuck with me.
“Why can’t men become pregnant?” he asked, a smirk finding its way onto his face.
I shrugged, waiting for the response.
“They would do it once, and then never, ever do it again, and the species would collapse,” he said.
I smiled. True, I thought. The drive to become a mother should not be underestimated. There was no end to the difficult pregnancies I had seen women carry resulting in months of bedrest, complex vaginal lacerations, high blood pressure diseases that nearly took their lives, and the everyday discomforts of varicose veins and hemorrhoids. Then, a few years later, the same woman would come back pregnant again. Being pregnant was far from a walk in the park, and choosing to do it again was a triumph of the drive to become a mother.
The more I thought about it, simply being a woman was in many ways, a sacrifice. Imagine having painful periods every month with more blood lost on a single pad than most men had ever seen from a flesh wound. Many women found intercourse painful and felt the need to endure but never had the enjoyment of their male partners. In fact, simply having a vagina made one vulnerable, because it could be taken advantage of by men who needed to exercise their power. Ask any woman who has walked down a dark alley alone, whether she felt the need to look over her shoulder. Enough said.
It’s hard to know when I became so committed to women’s health, but it might have been cemented on New Year’s Eve, as the world was turning the page from 1999 to 2000. I was more than halfway through OB/GYN residency and would soon no longer be working 100-plus-hour weeks. Everything would change once I had more time away from the hospital, I thought. My marriage would fall apart, though that was still ahead of me. I spent so many hours in the hospital that whatever problems we had barely registered. My entire focus was on women’s health.
I was on gynecologic call for Harborview Medical Center, a Level III trauma center, which was also the main emergency center caring for victims of sexual assault. At the time, there was one main gynecologic exam room used for forensic exams. It was in a dingy side hallway and was barely large enough for the patient, me, and the powerful microscope that I needed to take pictures of vaginal lacerations.
Patients were often lined up on stretchers in that dingy hallway, just outside the room for sexual assault exams. It was not uncommon for a mentally ill patient to start screaming and for the screams to be heard through the walls. Sometimes, the screams would punctuate my sentences during the assault intake with the victim.
Tonight was no exception. While the world was celebrating this important New Year’s Eve, I was in that dark hallway, waiting for the next patient. I tried to imagine what it would feel like to lie on the grass of Gasworks Park and watch the fireworks from below, sipping tea from a thermos, immersed in the lights and sounds. I knew what I was doing was important, but my days off were few and far between. Being on call tonight felt unlucky.
The queue of sexual assaults needing gynecologic forensic exams was growing longer, and the rape stories from earlier in the evening were already burning a hole in my brain. One woman I examined earlier in the evening had been home with her grandson, asleep in her own bed. The rapist entered through an unlocked window, came into her bedroom, and assaulted her. Her grandson was in the room next door, so she stayed silent and didn’t resist, hoping he wouldn’t wake up, make a noise, and call attention to himself.
I understood her sacrifice and admired her for it. She took on the trauma of the assault in hopes of saving her grandson, which she did. I would have done the same.
The next patient I was waiting for needed a CT scan of her head to check for bleeding. Not sure what she was hit with, but internal bleeding always took priority over the gynecologic part of the exam. Hopefully, the CT scan showed that she didn’t have brain damage from whatever the scum-of-the-earth had done to her.
My head was hurting. It had been a few weeks since my last day off, and I was in dire need of sleep. Muscle through the rest of this call shift, I told myself. Hopefully, I would get a long enough break around 5 AM to go home and shower before the start of morning pregnancy clinic.
I suppressed my fatigue and tried to focus on showing the compassion and kindness that my next patient desperately needed. After my exam, she would be offered help from the sexual assault survivors’ program, counseling, support groups, and assistance to navigate the legal system in case they pressed charges. Most would never see their rapist punished for what he did.
This was the moment that I made a promise to myself. As long as I lived, I would be a champion of women’s health. It was what I was born to do.