Clash Of Cultures

13. Mental Health Matters

Salman

'I am here if you need to talk'

I looked at her message again. My thumb sliding over those words on my cell phone's screen, as I leaned against the wall in the bathroom stall. Trying to fight back the tears, and not throw up, as the images of the dead pregnant woman flashed across my eyes. 

"Noor", I heard myself take her name, and closed my eyes to picture her face. Hoping against hope that the vision of the woman and her smile, that haunted my dreams, would erase that of my patient whose life I could not save. 

I didn't just need to talk to her. I needed her in entirety so badly in that moment, that if I could have gone up to the NICU and dragged her out of there, I would have. I needed to hold her, to take in her scent, to feel her softness, to hear those words she always seemed to say with so much sincerity that my walls came crumbling down leaving me vulnerable and exposed. 

But I couldn't do that to her. Because she was the beautiful rose and I was the ugly, thorny stem. I couldn't wrap her innocence in my darkness, and self-destruction. As much as I wanted to, reaching out to her would mean pulling her in to my vortex of misery and despair, leaving a mark on her untainted soul. 

And she isn't mine to destroy. Heck she isn't mine at all. 

She never will be, because I cannot be the man she deserves. 

I pushed the image of her out of my mind. There would never be a place for her in my life, so there would never be a reason for me to let her occupy my mind. Instead, I needed my usual elixir, to forget her as much as I needed to forget my patient.

I deleted her message, and texted my trusted friend, Mark. 

'Hey. Do you still have your rainy day stash?'

'Yeah, why?', he replied almost immediately. 

I ignored the the 'why' part of his reply. No one needed to know about the real me. I just needed him to live up to the pact that we had made: When life got to too much to handle, it was ok to use chemicals to reset our brain, no questions asked. 

 'I need it. Leave it outside the ER in our designated spot. Now!'

Noor

The wind was picking up, so I zipped up my jacket and started to speed walk towards my apartment. It had been a tough day for everyone in the NICU and the ER. Not being able to save a mother is always heartbreaking. And now it was pretty clear that the baby we had just saved was not going to regain consciousness either. I hoped that the walk in the cold air would help me relax and process the events of the day. My colleagues all had family to go home to, which made my loneliness all the more difficult to bear. But this was the cost of doing a residency in the US, and as unhappy as I was, I was still grateful to be alive and healthy.

As I passed the alley behind the ER entrance, I noticed a man in a grey fleece and blue scrubs sitting along the wall. He was bent forward, with his head tucked between his legs, and was holding something that looked like a joint. I was scurrying past this figure in the shadows when I noticed the Children's Hospital emblem on his arm.

Wait...Could that be...?

"Sal? Is that you?", I asked as I kneeled next to him instinctively.