Clash Of Cultures

8. Loss Of A Patient

Salman

Last day of Gen Peds was finally here. I'm glad I had offered to cover Kevin's month on service. It had provided the perfect excuse to not go home to visit my family in Louisville, KY.

My dad and I had barely spoken since the end of undergrad. Mom and I would talk on the phone once or twice a month. But for the most part we stayed out of each other's way.

Over the last 7 years I had been back home once, for my sister's wedding. She was a straight A student throughout school but the whole 'a woman's place is in the house ' idea was so ingrained in her that she agreed to get married in her first year of undergrad. I remember her telling me that her in-laws and future husband had assured her that she would be able to continue studying after marriage.

Of course, she got pregnant 3 months later with a baby girl and then dropped out of college soon after. That was 2 years ago. She was now having her second child. And mom had wanted to me to come back home to meet my new nephew. I wouldn't have minded going. I missed my sister and would have loved to meet my niece and nephew. I had tried to have her come to Chicago a couple of times, but without a source of income of her own and a husband not too keen on me, his rogue brother-in-law, that never happened.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) my mom let it slip that one of dad's friend from Houston was also going to be in town along with his daughter.

That set off all sorts of alarm bells. The last time I met a family friend's daughter, turned out it was an attempt to set me up for an arranged marriage. I was 22 years old then, still a student, with no source of income of my own. The poor girl was 19, and just graduated from high school.

I remember fleeing the room, and the argument that ensued with my father after that. He had promised that girl's parents that I would be marrying their daughter. And my refusal had forever tarnished his good name. There was a lot of screaming and cursing. And eventually my father threw my things out of the house. That night I slept on my friend's couch and vowed to never return to that family again.

Over the next few months my mom tried in vain to have a reconciliation between dad and I. But I was too hurt and angry at him to look back, and was never stopped being his usual arrogant self. Since then I had worked two jobs while putting myself through medical school.

I owed my family nothing!

So when Kevin sent out an email asking for help, I had jumped at the opportunity. Little did I know that I would avoid one Pakistani girl just to get stuck with another.

God...that girl bothers me so much!

I didn't even know why. Maybe it was because she didn't fit neatly in to my box of preconceived notions about her. Every time I thought I had figured her out, she went ahead and surprised me again.

She keeps doing that....and it drives me insane!

She wasn't the quiet, shy woman I had initially thought she would be, but she wasn't the boisterous and overexcited type either. There was something very mature about the way that she approached challenges, that for some odd reason drew me to her. I would find myself looking up rare diseases just so I could ask her about it on rounds and then watch with fascination as she talked through the symptoms and disease processes and come up with hypotheses that were almost always right on the mark. If she was flustered by my questioning she didn't show it, or I was too mesmerized by her to notice.

Part of me also felt bad because she had clearly looked at me as some sort of fellow Pakistani Muslim when she first came here. But I had made it a point to let her know I had a complicated relationship with those identities. Thankfully, she was smart enough to get that.