Ask Me Why I Hurt (4 page)

Jan pulled into an empty lot and parked. I jumped out of my seat ready to set everything up. But when we lowered the jacks, there was a horrible hissing and grinding sound. I jumped out in a panic and ran to the front of the van to examine four hydraulic jacks, designed to raise and lower the twenty-six-thousand-pound van. Instead of lowering properly, the front right one had stopped midway. Hydraulic fluid was jetting in a thick, oily stream. Already it had made a huge puddle over the gravel. Oh, no, not now, I thought. The van was sitting on a slant. Everything on the van, from the medical equipment to the refrigerators, was designed to work on a level surface. We couldn’t see patients on a lopsided floor.

Jan hopped out through the narrow door behind me. “I’ll take care of it,” I told her. I crawled under the van, squirming. Fluid was still squirting out of the jack. Maybe I can pull it down in place myself, I thought. I put both hands on the metal. Hydraulic fluid poured down over my arms. As hard as I pulled, nothing moved. The thing was frozen. I crawled back out, my cargo pants ruined with dust and grease. The front of my yellow shirt was smeared with oil. I wiped my hands on my pants and began punching numbers madly into my phone. I was calling the mechanic who had helped us renovate the Winnebago.

Then I stopped. In the midst of my consternation, which had completely absorbed my attention, I looked up absentmindedly and beheld a sight that took my breath away. Homeless kids had materialized, seemingly out of nowhere, and were lined up next to the door of the van. Their silent faces confronted me. I had
dealt with the occasional homeless teenager before but had never seen a line of them, and their physical reality was a shock. I could see road dust on their clothes. Some had packs across their backs. Others were empty-handed. One girl had a wide cherub’s face. When she turned to look at me, I could see an infected sore on her cheek. I had yet to set out lawn chairs for seating or to organize anything, for that matter.

“Are you the doctor?” the girl with the cherub’s face asked.

“Yes.” My voice stuttered. I smoothed it out. “I’m Dr. Christensen.”

She had blond hair held back with a dirty pale blue rubber band. She was short and barely came to my chest. The infected sore on her cheek looked bad. Her sneakers were busted out, the laces coated in grime. Jan had opened the door again and, standing on the gravel, was trying to pull down the steps. She was yanking with all her strength. At first the steps didn’t work either. Nothing was going as planned. Once Jan finally got them down, the kids crowded up into the van.

“Excuse me,” I told the girl. I went to wash hydraulic fluid off my hands in the tiny sink. Jan was handing out intake forms to the kids crowding around. My phone was ringing in my pocket with a call from the mechanic, and I didn’t have time to answer it. I led the girl to an examination room. “Wait here,” I said, signaling at the exam table, and went back up front to get an intake form. Jan was raising her voice, trying to organize the kids into some sort of queue. The floor
was
slanted. I couldn’t find a pen, and the kids around Jan were getting loud with frustration.

“Jan, where are the clipboards?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t think to order any. Did you?”

I returned to the room and handed the girl a form. I took my pen out of my pocket, reminding myself to make sure I got it back.

“I don’t get this,” she said, looking down at the form she was supposed to fill out.

“What’s the problem?” I asked, raising my voice to be heard. The noise out front was getting loud.

Someone knocked on the door. “Is Johnny in there?” the person shouted. “Hey, Johnny!”

My cheeks colored with frustration and embarrassment. This was not a professional environment.

The girl was pointing to the form, to where it asked for her immunization history. “I don’t know about shots,” she said. “I don’t think I ever got any.”

Of course, I thought. A homeless kid won’t be carrying around an immunization record. I tried to say something, but the loud knocking came again.
“Johnny!”

I looked down to see hydraulic fluid embedded in the pores of my forearms. I opened the door, flinching at all the noise outside. “Johnny’s not here,” I said more brusquely than I wanted.

The boy outside smiled sheepishly. “OK, dude. Chill out,” he said, and wandered back up front.

I closed the door, feeling more and more frantic by the moment. I examined the infected sore on the girl’s cheek. “How did you get this?” I asked.

“I think it was a spider,” she said. “We’ve been sleeping in this abandoned house.”

She lifted the bottom of her filthy shirt and showed me another infected bite on her belly. I looked at the angry sore. The edges were raised and swollen. I didn’t think they were black widow bites; those caused stomach pains but didn’t leave the kind of marks she had. I wasn’t sure what these bites were. I realized I had a lot to learn about different kinds of insect and animal bites. The one on her belly concerned me. It was close to the lymph nodes in the groin. Her general health seemed pretty run-down too. Her immune system was not fighting back.

“These bites are pretty infected, and the infection is spreading,” I told her. “You’re going to need some oral antibiotics. I need to examine you. Then I’ll see you in a week, see how you are doing.”

“You mean you’re coming back?” She looked disbelieving.

“We’ll be coming to this location once a week—”

More pounding on the door distracted me. “Let me find some
cream,” I said. I rushed through a wall of kids in the hall, all asking if it was their turn, to ask Jan where the antibiotic cream was kept. The front of the van was cacophony. Kids were talking and shouting and asking questions. Paper forms began drifting to the floor. I stuck my head down the steps and saw a group of kids outside, running around the van. Some were playing hacky sack in the gravel. Others looked as if they were giving up and started to leave.

“Hey, don’t leave,” I called.

I raced back with the cream. The girl was standing up, ready to go. “Don’t leave yet,” I said. I hadn’t given her a full exam yet. I hadn’t asked her why she was homeless. I hadn’t even suggested a place for her to stay. I didn’t even
know
if there was a shelter in Tempe for homeless kids. Maybe there weren’t any. After a year of preparation, I thought, I am completely unprepared. The day was taking on the nightmarish hue of doom. We didn’t have the right medicine for this or the right order form for that. I felt it would take me hours to get to the bottom of this one girl’s medical situation, and there were a dozen more like her right outside my door, all with just as many needs. I felt panicky. I wanted to go back and start all over again. Only this time I would have clipboards and pens and an even floor.

“Randy.” Jan knocked on the door. She was holding a urine sample. It was the color of thick yellow soup. If I had been in my right mind, I would have looked at it and worried about a case of severe dehydration. Instead I just felt a sharp frustration.

“Not now!” I snapped at her, and felt horrible. I sounded exactly like the kind of doctor I couldn’t stand. As I turned back to go to the girl, my hands were trembling with nerves, and the smell of hydraulic fluid rose to greet me.

We drove in silence back to the loading dock that night. I felt shell-shocked. I was deeply dismayed at how badly the day had
gone. I kept thinking, What on earth made me think I could do this? I had known the extent of the problem. I knew there were thousands of homeless kids ranged across the country. It was the severity of their needs that had made me want to help them. But reality is different from numbers. Numbers are never real. These kids were real, and I felt I had barely helped any of them.

I didn’t want to admit it, but I had thought my job would be easier. I knew it was only the first day, but I had pictured myself having the time to make meaningful connections with the kids. I really thought I would be dealing with their situation in a straightforward manner. They would step on my van homeless, I would attend to their medical needs, and somehow this would help them get off the streets. I didn’t know exactly how I had come up with this naive idea. I had just assumed that once I gave them medical care they would be happy and healthy and somehow transition into rewarding lives. It would be fulfilling, and I would feel good about myself. What I had not envisioned was being soaked in hydraulic fluid, the nurse-practitioner I respected radiating disappointment next to me, and a tsunami of doubt flooding my heart.

I looked out the passenger window. I tried to imagine myself doing this for ten years. Ten years of kids with infected bites and dirty clothes and distrustful eyes and immunization histories that were one long question mark. Ten years of teenagers who came to me with a list of problems that unfolded in layers, problems that spanned their lives and would not be solved in one visit, or even ten visits, or maybe even ever. Ten years of dealing with intractable problems that probably went back for generations. Could I deal with that? Could I deal with the prospect of kids whom I never helped?

We stopped by the children’s hospital. It was late. I stepped out of the van weary. Jan followed. She was dragging a huge bag filled with the dirty gowns from the day. She looked uncharacteristically bushed. “I’ll get those,” I told her. Jan gratefully relinquished the bag. My first day ended with my lugging a bag of dirty gowns into an almost empty hospital, hoping to find someone to help me get
them laundered. I had to smile at myself. I might have been the first doctor in the history of the hospital to finish his day by washing gowns.

It was again past eleven when I got home. I wondered how long my wife would put up with this. Luckily as a doctor she was used to crazy long hours, but still. “How did it go?” Amy asked, yawning. She was fresh out of the shower and sitting at the kitchen island, an empty bowl of ice cream next to her. A medical journal was there. She had been reading it while waiting for me. I was touched she had stayed up.

“It was hard,” I said. I kissed her. “I want to talk to my dad. I’ll be right back. Promise.” What I wanted to say was that I had had a desperately terrible day and needed to talk to my father. I knew she understood.

I took my phone into my home office. Maybe it was because I knew what he would say. Dad believed the first responsibility of a man was always to take care of others. When Amy and I started dating, I had taken her to visit my parents, driving up to their place in Gilbert, right outside Phoenix, in her little green Volkswagen. Amy had loved the rural Arizona farmland, with its irrigated pastures and horses nuzzling patches of green grass in the sun. My dad did not love her car.

He took one look at her tires and began reading me the riot act. “Look at those tires!” he said once we were alone in the driveway. Amy was enjoying a soda in the cool, shaded living room with my mom and sister, Stephanie, who was over for Sunday dinner with her husband, Curtis, and their two young, boisterously happy sons. “Those tires are bald,” Dad said forcefully. “They could blow any time. Do you want Amy getting a flat tire when she is alone on the freeway?” I promised to have them changed soon. “Change them now,” Dad said, and went back in the house.

Dad listened to the stress in my voice. I had pulled him from bed. He waited until it all came out. “Son, remember that time when you were little and your sister bonked you on the head with a hammer?”

“How could I forget?” I said, laughing.

“And what did I tell you?”

“I should have ducked.”

“That’s right. Not because she was right to hit you. But life isn’t always fair or easy, and the sooner you learn to handle it, the better off you will be. Now, you wanted this, right? Then figure out what you can do to make it work. You got that smart wife of yours. Isn’t Amy an adviser on this van?”

“She is.” When her father gave us the gift from their family trust, we had created an advisory board. I had remembered how important her father’s questions had been and asked several professionals to sit on a board to give us guidance and ask those hard questions. Amy was now on the board, as were several hospital and social service administrators.

“Then why are you talking to me and not talking to her?” he asked pointedly.

Good point. Because I’m embarrassed to tell her how horribly it went, I thought.

“That’s what an adviser is for,” he said. “They give advice. But you got to ask for it.” He waited a moment. “Don’t be too proud to ask for help, son.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

He chuckled before hanging up. I pictured him and mom in their house in Gilbert, a home with its neat rows of family photographs in the hallway, the hobby shelf with my mom’s miniature adobe houses, and the little guest room with my childhood bed. Whenever I thought of my dad, I would remember Kremmling, Colorado, where my sister, Stephanie, was born. It always came back in the bright memories of childhood: the times spent fishing at the lake, the gentle jokes at the dinner table about our Lutheran gringo dad marrying a Catholic Mexican girl. We were proud of how my parents were so in love they weren’t going to obey the rules of the time. My dad had always lived by his own heart. When I was growing up, I wanted to be just like him.