Dr. Gary said something to me a couple of weeks ago that I have had a hard time erasing from my mind.
He came into D ward on my evening charge shift and we started talking about how appropriate it is for me to be taking care of all these people having cleft lip repairs because, in his words, I have “lived it”.
I guess I feel like I havn’t earned the right to say I have lived it though. From what my long-term-memory-challenged mother tells me, I never really had any issues. I had my cleft-lip repaired when I was 12 weeks old and carried on to live a relatively lovely life. I ate, spoke, and for the most part looked like anyone else. Never once did a teacher tell me I wasn’t the same as the other kids. Never once was I cut from a team because of the way I looked. Never once was I denied a job because someone thought that having a congenital deformity would affect my work performance.
I had the opportunity to be who I was created to be --- that’s how Dr. Gary worded it anyways.
The unique qualities that I was designed to share with the world didn’t have to be suppressed as a result of a society that told me I was undeserving. We see people here every day who don’t have that same luxury.
Lack of access to healthcare means that people go their entire lives without a surgery that takes little more than an hour. Lack of awareness about the physiological basis of congenital disorders, and sometimes just disease in general, means that people are ostracized from sources of income and socialization. Something so minute can literally have the ability to take a person’s life away on so many levels. Something that is also a part of me but never had the chance to define or dominate me.
This morning, I was going through my 10-yr-old patient’s chart, making sure she was ready for surgery. I quickly scanned the admission assessment, looking for anything pertinent. I found something that was more significant to me that I would have been hoping for. Under “occupation” was the following response
“Quit school three years ago due to teasing”
Her whole life, education, and future, defined by the split tissue on one side of her upper lip. An entire nightmare that she has been living that I never had to experience. A soul that has been denied the opportunity to be shared with the world, because of a socially constructed hierarchy of value. To say “it doesn’t seem fair” is an understatement.
Dr. Gary told me that he loves when – within weeks after a person’s repair – you start to see them coming through. The parts of them that were always there, but that they felt ashamed or unable to show.
It gives me hope, for the ones who are here, having surgery - being given the opportunity to look more like the world expects them to look. But it leaves me asking that age-old question, yet again, of how is it fair that where you are born determines so much about whether you live or die.