Nonfiction
You are twelve years old and your mind is like a game of hot potato. Your thoughts are quick and jerky, and you need to get past them before you get burned.
I am a child of the Iranian revolution. In 1983, my mother gave birth to me in Evin Prison, one of Iran’s most notorious jails.
The ward doctor rang me late in the night to say that the Judge had been admitted with COVID-19 and was not doing well. He wasn’t deemed fit for ICU because of his age and his prior illness, the blood cancer for which my team had been treating him for many years.
Pain made me a precocious student of time, each middle ear infection a new lesson on the uncatchable instant.
I spent a lot of time thinking about blood during my training years—hoping I could get enough of it, wondering which vein would yield the best supply of it, wishing the patients had more of it, calling the blood bank for a bag of it.
One afternoon, after my mother had fallen ill for the fourth or fifth time, I pulled out all my eyelashes, one by one. I was thirteen. She had gone to the hospital in the middle of the night with my stepfather—a psychiatrist, but not hers—and after I came home from school that day, nothing was ever the same.
Television had always been a perfect distraction from our family’s drama and trauma, soothing us more than our Baptist faith.
To be ill is to be displaced—displaced from health, displaced from one’s former self, displaced from the community of the well.