A meditation on what is worth taking home

I had lunch recently with a woman who lives in my building, after exchanging numbers as friendly neighbors do. We were getting to know one another, and she wanted to hear more details about my work. I briefly described doing regular Ob/Gyn care, with a focus on treating pregnant women with substance use disorders. We talked about meth, fentanyl and how, during the pandemic, mental illness and overdose-related deaths have been ravaging the country.

She asked me how I don’t take work home with me. I responded that I do.

I assume…

A table, some chairs, and most importantly, you

With my back against a cold table, my thighs spread open and my feet precariously balanced on what feel like spatulas, I am fully aware of my place in this room. The young Family Medicine doctor leans in toward my knees, brought tightly and awkwardly together by my naked, shivering legs, and he asks me to relax my legs further. This place was not designed to relax. He touches my inner thigh and I twitch. He asks me again to relax. Me, the patient, subject, specimen on a bench. …

I’ve worked in a county hospital, and I’ve worked in a private clinic. The waiting rooms looked different, the staff’s enthusiasm varied, and the patients of all ages came from different backgrounds, education levels, and phases of their lives. It never ceased to amaze me that despite variation in settings and situations, the look on someone’s face when seeking an abortion has mostly been the same. Eyes diverted toward the floor, shoulders curled slightly inward, hands fidgeting with one another, or arms crossed, the body is closed. She recedes into herself.

Sometimes the guilt is haunting.

She wants to focus…

It doesn’t take much browsing to realize there is very little information about the victims of the mass shootings in Georgia. We know a little about Delaina Yaun, and the names of the other victims: Paul Michels, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Elcias Hernandez-Ortiz. The Atlanta victims’ identities have not been released.

We know a lot about the murderer. We know he is a 21-year-old white male, who was quiet in high school, who frequented massage parlors, who considers himself to have a sex addiction and self-treated with mass homicide, who “eliminated temptation,” whose parents suspected him of the shootings. He…

I have several memories of people blaming me for being out of touch with my Japanese roots. One was a gym coach, the classic kind with a buzz-cut who wore sunglasses on our indoor basketball courts, carried a whistle around his neck and chewed gum as he told me, at 11 years old, that I didn’t “seem” Japanese. Another was a geeky college teaching assistant who, after unsolicitedly sharing his infatuation with anime, told me I should learn Japanese because “it’s actually quite a beautiful language.” …

I am no hero.

I don’t break down doors and run into the fires of my patients’ lives.

I have made some sacrifices. In twelve years of training to be a doctor, I missed weddings, baby showers, and funerals, experienced my own health cyclically decline and recover, lost sleep in quantities of years of my life I’ll never recover, grieved the loss of patients, mentors, and peers, witnessed the deterioration of my relationships, and worked through my own traumas as a women’s health care provider in a world that insists on terrorizing women [1]. As an obstetrician-gynecologist, I am finding…

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which led to the forced relocation of Japanese Americans living on the West Coast to concentration camps. Now, 79 years later, the tendency to imagine hostile enemies within our own nation has not changed.

In response to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Executive Order 9066 authorized the military to forcibly evacuate all persons deemed a threat to national security. This is how some 120,000 Japanese Americans, the majority of whom were U.S. …

Netflix’s trending docuseries and the exploitation of mental illness

If you have heard about Netflix’s new true crime docuseries featuring the story of Elisa Lam, you’ve also likely heard scathing reviews detailing the many ways in which the producers missed the mark. If you plan to watch the series, I don’t feel bad for spoiling the end. The documentary should not have been aired as a mystery in the first place.

A summary of the story can be found in many other articles.

The tragedy of Elisa Lam is that, like 5.7 million adults in the U.S. and 45 million…