Cure- House, MD

chapter 4: MTTP

To practice medicine, you have to have a certain mindset.

You have to be willing to miss family events, lose friends, be unable to maintain relationships, all for the sake of practicing medicine.

It takes a special person to do that.

Luckily, I never was able to get attached to people or things easily. Especially intangible things, like love or friendship. It was somewhat easy for me to leave and start over.

Maybe that's why it's so easy for me to make the decision to stay here at Princeton-Plainsboro.

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Even though I say it's hard for me to get attached, it's completely different when it comes to my mom.

"Hey, honey." I heard on the other side of the phone.

"Hey, mom. I wanted to talk to you about something."

"What's going on? Are you enjoying your trip to New Jersey?" Her sweet, gentle voice cooed.

"I was offered a position here. To work on a diagnostics team." I sighed, closing my eyes as I anticipated her response.

She was quiet for a moment.

"Well, alright. So you're leaving Florida, then?" She asked.

"Yes. I am." I said, fidgeting with my hands as I held my phone up to my ear with my shoulder.

She took it better than I thought.

As I sit at my desk at the hospital, I still think about how lonely my mom must feel. My stepfather passed two years ago from a pulmonary embolism¹. My brother left Florida last month to pursue his neurosurgery career in California. All she really has left is my Aunt Lana, her sister.

My mom is considerably older than me. They had me last. My brother is thirty-six and I'm twenty-eight. My dad got caught onto drugs after they had me due to problems in their marriage and his problems at work and he eventually just left.

He sometimes stopped by for moments on my birthday parties to just wave or say hi. But, he never did it willingly. Most of those instances were forced by my mom, who threatened to sue him for child support if he didn't do as she said.

My mom doesn't know that I know that, though. I found letters and court documents between her and my dad when I was moving out of my childhood home into my first house in Orlando.

My dad often referred to me as a 'shouldn't have been.' My mom was twenty-eight when she had me. She was taking birth control and did not anticipate another child. But, she loved me and my brother so much. I often remember her reading to us at night, mostly stories about helping and healing others. She wasn't a big fan on fairytales-- she liked the real things.

I think that's what pushed both my brother and I to be doctors, if I'm being quite honest. My mother was a healer in her own way. She healed other people by bringing in the troubled teenagers in the neighborhood and mothering them. She healed others by bringing dinner to struggling families.

My dad, on the other hand, was not nurturing in the slightest. I often remember him and my brother getting into fist fights when he would make hurtful comments about me. I remember my brother having to hold me as I cried to sleep because my dad would punish me by breaking my toys or ripping up my drawings. My dad had anger issues.

As people like to say "Like father, like daughter."

I often seen the resemblances between me and my father's personalities. I will leave someone in a moment with no hesitation if I feel that there is even a slight chance that they would hurt me. I isolate myself when I'm upset. But I also see the good in me that's from my mother. I want to heal people. I want to make my community better.