Joan Is Okay(31)

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NEW YEAR’S EVE SERVICE. My entire team wore party hats, and when midnight hit, some of us twirled our fingers and said a woo-hoo.

Resolutions?

Older nurse: Yeah, the completion of my divorce. Moments before the young nurse announced that she’d recently gotten engaged.

Oh, hon, congrats, said the older nurse. Don’t mind what I just said. The divorce was going better than she’d expected.

My parents weren’t superstitious, but my paternal grandparents were and on occasion my father would indulge me with something out of Chinese lore. I knew the year 2020 to be particularly inauspicious. The earliest of Chinese calendars followed a sixty-year cycle, a sexagenary cycle, of which the thirty-seventh year was one of extremely bad luck. On the thirty-seventh year of previous cycles: 1840, start of the First Opium War against Britain; 1900, Boxer Rebellion; 1960, continuation of the Great Famine and the Great Leap Forward, during which millions of Chinese died of starvation and my father was still a young boy. Then in his teenage years, starting in 1966, came the decade-long revolution.

What revolution? I’d ask.

What revolution, he would say but not name it by name.

(Wén gé, of which wén is culture and gé is to remove, like to remove the skin of an animal in the process of tanning hide.)

My father wasn’t a good motivator or comforter, and I wasn’t a child who had been buoyed along by praise. But when we still lived under the same roof, he would sometimes say to me, I know what you’re made of, daughter, because I know myself. Mettle. Grit. Wherever my father was now, I hoped that he hadn’t forgotten his steel.



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JANUARY WAS WELLNESS MONTH at the hospital, and HR sent us daily reminders to take time for lunch, to join a small group for free afternoon yoga. We were sent meditation packets, samples of chamomile tea, and email surveys about our health. Do you feel physically able to work? Do you feel mentally fit to work? On a scale of one to ten, what is your level of well? I found the last question confusing. Was ten the well or one? Because for patients there was a similar scale: in every exam room a series of cartoon faces morphed from happy to sad, from one to ten for pain and well on that scale was a one, while ten was exceedingly not.

Before the monthlong dedication took hold, it had been wellness week. Before that it had just been a day. I didn’t mind Wellness Wednesday or Week; I found the alliteration catchy. But wellness month had no alliteration, and given the slow trend toward more, wellness year was next.

What was wellness anyway? Was it anything like Loch Ness, like a seemingly placid lake with an unknowable monster hiding inside?

The seminars throughout the month focused on nutrition and healthy eating, ergonomics and injury prevention, stress management versus productivity. I saw the director at the last one, in the very back; his mouth hung open as if he were watching a bad magic show. Put your workers’ productivity into a black hat and watch it disappear. Put your own productivity into a box, now saw it in half.

For a week, Reese became the center of gossip. He had been scheduled to work that week but failed to show up. Difficult poetry went unattended for a morning, acute chaos followed, and a temporary attending had to step in. Madeline and I tried to call Reese, but no response. We emailed him and no away message had been set up. The director even swung by the shared office, just to look around.

Has no one been keeping tabs on him? he asked. How does Doctor Baby-Blue Eyes just disappear?

The mystery was solved when HR informed the director, who then informed us, that Reese had requested and been approved for a wellness break that would extend to the end of January. The director was told only after the fact, because, with both mental health and disability, an employer shouldn’t and couldn’t meddle. These breaks were built into our contracts to be taken anytime from anywhere. A perk of the job that I never thought people actually used.

As I was leaving one evening, so was the director, and we crossed paths in the atrium long after its café had closed. The collar of his coat was inside out, his snow boot shoelaces were untied. I asked why he was still here so late when someone of his caliber could leave as early as 4:00 p.m. My wife, he said. She was visiting her sister for a few days upstate, and whenever that happened and he was on his own, he could stay at work for however long he liked. It reminded him of his younger days, and he relished that. Then he asked me, not necessarily as my boss, he clarified, but as one concerned colleague for another, if Reese was all right, and had he been acting strange before he requested the leave. Did he say anything to you about me?

The director avoided making eye contact. I heard footsteps around us, but it was just one security guard pacing and another walking over to throw a soda can away.

I said Reese had seemed sensitive lately, but he’d always been pretty sensitive.

Would he, for instance, file a complaint?

Complaint, sir?

Against me to HR.

For?

Being too harsh.

The director was still avoiding eye contact and had hoisted his left leg up on a side ledge to tie his laces. When he bent down, he groaned. Like that of a T.rex, his head was too large for his frame and he had disproportionately short arms.

I said Reese and HR did have a special bond that I never liked to ask about or get too involved in, but in practice, I didn’t see what was so scary about HR, the department seemed decently run and staffed by competent people. HR wasn’t nearly as bad as the IRB, which was our internal board of review, or ethics board. Any kind of human research, any consult with or blood draw from a study subject, had to pass through them, and while HR was ever present, almost omniscient, no one really knew how the IRB worked or who worked there, much like the IRS.