I think this will likely be one of the lasts posts I write about years of difficult and devastating behaviour I tolerated from my mother during the course of my life. Sooner or later, one thinks enough, ruminates enough, writes enough and hopefully processes enough to wake up and just say enough is enough. Before I reach that point though, I have several more short stories to document, not so much for you the reader, but for future me. Reminders of events that may seemingly be minor and inocuous now were deeply traumatising and had long lasting impacts on my behaviour and mental health.
In a previous post, I discussed some of the challenges I experienced as a young adult attending university, studying medicine and living at home with my parents and all that entailed. Will there be a separate post about the anxieties I experienced in relation to girlfriends, bringing them home to meet the parents, and the worry of whether they would meet my mother’s high standards? Most likely, yes there will. Will there be further posts about trigger events that have consolidated the impairment of self esteem, self confidence and internal sense of safety that was constructed relentlessly through my mother’s emotional neglect? Almost without question.
Right now I want to talk about how, having wrangled my way through the first four years of medical school, I elected to defer a year of my studies to undertake a year of clinical research. The idea enthralled me academically and would involve undertaking a project over the course of a year, writing a thesis and presenting the findings at a conference. I explored a number of project options before settling on a study of blood pressure and heart rate variability in the neonatal intensive care unit of the hospital in which I had been training. From the moment I first stepped in to the NICU and saw the incredible nature of the work being done to save the smallest and sickest babies I had ever seen, I knew I had found my career path.
My supervisor was a neonatologist with unruly curly hair, 6’6 if he was an inch and an awkwardly asymmetric gait that not infrequently led him to catch his toes and stumble on the lino floors of the hospital. His shirt was never fully tucked in. There was always some part of it dangling out to the side. When he laughed, he had this characteristic snort that still brings a smile to my face even to this day. This man was among the most intelligent humans I had ever met, yet you would never have picked it. When we had student-supervisor meetings together, he would lean back in his chair and raise both hands to the top of his head before scratching the top whilst deep in thought. A trait I picked up from him and never managed to put down. On ‘ward rounds’ of the intensive care unit, I would watch in awe as this tall gangly man with enormous hands would examine and hold babies no bigger in size than his hand themselves, with all the care, love and sensitivity one could imagine. For years, as a trainee in neonatology, I thought of him everyday as I learned the art. Trying to replicate the practice with my own oversized mits.
The year was hard work but incredibly rewarding. I would start at 8am, work through til 6pm before driving home to my parent’s house for dinner and then return to the hospital sometimes until midnight. Most weekends involved the same routine. At the time, I used to think that the return to the hospital at night was in order to get more work done. The reaity in retrospect was that it was to get out of the house. I actually didn’t get that much work done at all. But going back was easier than staying at home. At one point, after enduring my mother yelling at me and attacking me for how unpleasant I had become to live with because I never smiled or talked, which of course I think was the beginning of deterioration in my mental health and robustness following twenty years of trauma, but in her mind was the result of the studies instead. It was never mum’s fault. Nothing ever was.
Then one night, I had enough. I couldn’t do it anymore. The argument started, or the yelling or whatever it was. I walked into my bedroom and grabbed as much clothing as I could hold and put it in the back seat of the car. I drove to my girlfriend’s parents house and promptly burst in to tears. The following day I managed to acquire short term accommodation at the residential rooms at the back of the hospital where I was able to stay for a couple of months. This was how I moved out of home. This is not normal. This is not how kids move out of the family home. It is not how my younger siblings moved out of home. It is not normal for a kid to pack all their s%^t in the car to escape verbal and emotional abuse in order to save themselves. I did move back several months later, but old patterns die hard and very little changed. Fortunately, the next two years involved a significant proportion of time on various campuses around the city and the state and this managed to break up the time at home. With a swim teaching job on Saturday mornings my own source of income, moving out was not an option.
To come back to the research year briefly. It did become my chosen career, and I am thankful every day that I met my supervisor that year. At the end of the year I bought him a bottle of scotch and we had a toast in his office. I got drunk at his New Year’s Eve party. He coaxed me back to work in the unit as a consultant for a time. Then, he got unwell. I didn’t realise just how unwell until it was clear that he was dying. I wrote him a letter in the days leading up to his death. His wife read it to him. At his funeral she shared several lines of the letter with the congregation. I cried through the entire event. This beautiful, awkward amazing human, who had devoted his life to saving the lives of our sickest and smallest babies had been taken far too many years too soon. I miss him still.
A mentor and a gentleman.
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