all of it; by the time I was in high school, I felt the need to be…just like them. I dated popular girls, finished second in my class, made all-state soccer in my junior and senior years, and was proficient on the piano. At the Naval Academy, I started on the soccer team all four years, double majored in chemistry and mathematics, and did well enough on my MCATs to be accepted to Johns Hopkins for medical school, making my mother proud.
Sadly, my parents weren’t around to watch me receive my diploma. The accident was something I don’t like to think about, nor do I like to tell others what happened. Most people don’t know what to say, conversation falters, and I’m usually left feeling even worse than had I said nothing about them at all.
Then again, I sometimes wondered whether I just hadn’t told the story to the right person, or if that person was even out there. Someone should be able to empathize, right? What I can say, however, is that I’ve come to accept that life never turns out quite like one expects.
Chapter 2
I know what you might be thinking: How can a guy who considered himself a mental and emotional basket case for the last two and a half years even think about becoming a psychiatrist? How can I help anyone if I’ve barely figured out my own life?
Good questions. As for the answers…hell, I didn’t know. Maybe I’d never be able to help anyone. What I did know was that my options were somewhat limited. Anything surgical was out—what with the partial blindness and missing fingers and all—and I wasn’t interested in either family practice or internal medicine.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss surgery, though. I missed the raw way my hands felt after scrubbing, and the sound of the gloves snapping in place; I loved repairing bones and ligaments and tendons and feeling like I always knew exactly what I was doing. There was a kid in Kandahar about twelve years old who’d shattered his kneecap falling off a roof a couple of years earlier, and the local physicians had botched the operation so badly that he could barely walk. I had to rebuild the knee from scratch and six months later, when he returned for a checkup, he jogged toward me. I liked the way it made me feel—that I’d fixed him, allowing him to lead a normal life—and wondered whether psychiatry would ever give me that same satisfaction.
Because who is ever really fixed when it comes to mental or emotional health? Life takes radical twists and turns, and hopes and dreams shift as people enter different phases of their lives. Yesterday, via Skype—we speak every Monday—Dr. Bowen reminded me that we’re all continual works in progress.
I was musing about all of this as I stood over my grill later in the evening with the radio playing in the background. The sun was going down, illuminating a kaleidoscope sky as I flipped the NY strip I’d picked up from the Village Butcher on the far side of town. In the kitchen, I had a salad and baked potato ready to go, but if you’re thinking I’m some kind of chef, I’m not. I have a simple palate and I’m decent with the grill, but that’s about it. Since moving to New Bern, I’d been shoving charcoal into my grandfather’s old Weber three or four times a week and setting the coals ablaze. It made me nostalgic for all those summers of my childhood, when my grandfather and I grilled our suppers almost every night.
When the steak was ready, I added it to my plate and sat at the table on the back porch. It was dark by then, the house lights glowing from within, and moonlight reflected off the still waters of Brices Creek. The steak was perfect, but my baked potato was a bit cold. I would have popped it in the microwave, except for the fact that the kitchen didn’t have a microwave. Though I’d made the house livable, I hadn’t yet decided on whether to renovate the kitchen, or put on a new roof, or seal the windows, or even fix the slant in the kitchen floor. If I decided to sell the place, I suspected that whoever bought it would tear down the old house, so they could put a custom home on the property. You didn’t need to be a real estate whiz to figure