Joan Is Okay(37)

I said I wasn’t a brain surgeon.

He rolled his eyes and said that he knew. Just a little joke.

Mark could provoke with jokes or without them, and now that he was always in my apartment and felt comfortable enough around me, he liked to provoke me into having conversations with him that I didn’t want to have.

What do you have against rogue doctors anyway? he’d asked after I’d refused to watch with him an old episode of ER.

The point of the training is to un-rogue you, I’d said. To prevent the hero, savior, God complex so that a doctor doesn’t break team. Else who would trust her again? A hospital is an ecosystem, not a pedestal.

Mark could see where I was coming from, but just to bat for the other side (which he did a lot), just for the sake of discussion, hear me out for a second, he would add. There was still something noble and sacrificial in what I did, even though I as one doctor, one data point, downplayed my role. While I didn’t do all the procedures myself, I drew up the plan. The idea generation and oversight made me the lead person, the architect. Do we credit the Eiffel Tower to Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel or the construction workers who built it?

By construction workers, I asked, do you mean the nurses, interns, residents, techs, the janitorial staff who clean and disinfect daily, the cafeteria staff who feed us, teams of engineers who keep our database and lifesaving machines running?

He said let’s agree to disagree, for now.

A greeting he insisted on using with me was What’s up, Doc? Then as he was leaving, Later, Doc. When I asked if he could stop calling me Doc, he said I should consider it a term of endearment and no can do, Doc.

Since I started staying at home, a daily query from him was why I was home so much now, when before he would be lucky to see me once every other week.

I deflected the question for a while but eventually told him about my leave. To simplify matters, I chose to not mention my father. Mark didn’t need to know about him and I was tired of explaining that he’d lived in China, where the rest of my family was from, but not me.

Six weeks? Mark said. That’s a lot of time off, isn’t it? Most jobs don’t even give you half as much. He thought docs worked around the clock.

I said a month of it was mandated.

On what grounds?

I said I’d forgotten to complete a training, and, by the time I’d remembered, my window had expired. I was making up these lies as we went along.

What kind of training? Mark asked.

The first word that came to me was wellness. A training about wellness with lots of different modules, both in person and online.

For a light afternoon snack, Mark had made us a charcuterie board of aged crystalized gouda and paan. He chewed his gouda slowly and pensively, while I went through several cubes at once.

But why would they give you more time off for not doing something? he asked. Isn’t vacation sort of a reward? So, shouldn’t they have made you do the training anyway, then assigned you more work?

All good points, ones that I hadn’t considered before I decided to lie, hence why the general guideline is to not.

I said yeah, weird, isn’t it, but that’s just how things were done. Our hospital was a peculiar one, with its own rules and regulations. It could have also been a miscommunication between the departments; either way it was a decision that I had to respect. When Mark posed more questions, I shrugged and said I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. I prided myself on finishing all of my trainings on time and to not have done one made me sad.

That was what I’d assumed until the following day, when after he’d let himself in and called me doc, he brought up my leave and made-up training again.

Having reconsidered my unfortunate situation, he hoped that I wasn’t being bullied. It happened to diligent employees all the time. A mysterious glitch in the system, and somehow, they found themselves on a long holiday, which was a euphemism for a suspension for something they didn’t do.

He asked if I had been suspended, then.

I said those weren’t the words that anyone had used.

Could someone have surreptitiously done this to you?

Not to my knowledge.

In the last few months, any strife at work?

I felt back in a counselor’s office and a bright light had been placed on me with a slim window of response. Out of habit, I said no.

You’re a woman of color in a male-dominated field and you haven’t experienced any strife?

What do you mean by strife? I asked. Because in my head I was picturing labor camps and starvation. Having grown up in the streets or been born with a congenital defect, having never had a chance to prove myself or to get my education—that was strife.

Friction, discord, a dispute, he said.

Just one dispute is what you mean by strife?

For sure. But can also be multiple disputes around a central issue.

There hadn’t been many disputes, I replied. My director and I got along. My team and I got along. One colleague had offered to save me her eggs; another had shown me how to juggle. I left some parts out, like when Madeline had shaken my chair, and when Reese had thrown three foam stress balls for me to catch but almost pelted me instead. None of these felt quite like strife, but quirks. Everyone had their quirks, and who was I to judge?

What do you mean by central issue? I asked, which I shouldn’t have, because it launched Mark into a long, abstract speech filled with words that made me wince. He thought my wellness training was a sham, a ruse, and a consequence of systemic r-word, through and through. Whenever he used the r-word, my left cheek muscle would twitch and I had a desire to crack my neck.