Love vs. Drama

Termite forgot her anniversary. We laugh about it, because that’s what you do when you can’t believe you forgot your anniversary. What, should we be crying?

Drama seems to surround us. A colleague’s contract was non-renewed, for no reason anyone knows of. She’s the only Suboxone provider for our practice, and for our poorest patients. Leafy might leave our practice, because the Linebacker’s ER job is getting worse every day.

My own life seems remarkably normal.

Termite has had enough of her husband. She just wants to be happy, and it isn’t so at home. She thinks she’d be better off alone, raising her kids herself.

I don’t know what to tell her.

My next patient looks very Mayan. We exchange greetings, but she gets right to the point. She needs me to check a rash. It’s probably herpes: that’s what she was told before. She got it from a man. Not her husband, mind you. No, he’d never do that.

Five years ago she arrived here alone, hoping her family would soon follow. She didn’t follow all the rules, of course, because these days that’s hard to do. So she was without “papeles.” But she had a job. And she sent money to her two kids and her husband.

There was a man at work who took notice of her. She didn’t like it. She told her coworkers, who laughed at her and called her a drama queen. He took more notice of her. Then he took advantage of her.

She doesn’t speak English. She was afraid of the police. He played into that. He threated to report her to La Migra if she told anyone.

This went on for five years.

Of course she was depressed, of course she felt like dirt. He made her feel that way. Obviously she was trapped.

Her husband and kids finally were able to move here as well.

“He’s a good man, my husband” she said. “The best.” But she couldn’t touch him, barely could look him in the eye.

A friend from the Laundromat finally took her aside, ostensibly to help her move some furniture. “You’re sad,” she said. “What’s going on?”

And it broke the ice. Now she’s in counseling, her husband finally knows. Most days she’s on the path to healing. She brought charges against the man, found out he’d done this to 6 other women. She can’t have a normal sex life, she can’t breathe sometimes on bad days, but it’s alright. 

Well, it’s not alright. But she’s alive, and what’s more, she finally wants to be.

When you walk into a room and close the door, you have no idea what world you’re about to encounter. Pain, joy, anxiety, insomnia, anger, mania, hyperactivity. Then you have to leave the room and let it roll off you so you can walk fresh into another world. It’s not that easy, you know.

The words of another patient come to mind. She’s gone admittedly “a little wild” since divorcing her husband. There are bruises on her body, consensual. She occasionally gets PID. She wonders if she might be bipolar. She wants to find out, because “Our job in this life is to be happy. And that is our own responsibility. So I want to find out how I can be happy.”

Me too.