{"id":3889,"date":"2024-05-09T10:00:26","date_gmt":"2024-05-09T09:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/?p=3889"},"modified":"2024-05-02T13:20:37","modified_gmt":"2024-05-02T12:20:37","slug":"acting-my-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/2024\/05\/09\/acting-my-age\/","title":{"rendered":"Acting My Age"},"content":{"rendered":"

Blog by Tina Chai<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Jaci<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

When asked my age, I almost always want to say sixteen before stopping myself to say twenty-four. I don\u2019t feel twenty-four. At most, I\u2019m twenty-three and three-fourths\u2014oscillating between who I was and who I want to become, but not feeling quite there or quite good enough. Sometimes, I say something foolish to an attending physician, and that\u2019s when I\u2019m nine. Occasionally, all I want to do is sleep, and that\u2019s the two-month-old part of me.<\/p>\n

When I met \u201cZoe\u201d in my adolescent medicine elective at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, she was seventeen but let her inner thirteen-year-old shine. Maybe she didn\u2019t think she would make it to seventeen because she was born at twenty-five weeks with a host of medical concerns that contributed to developmental and behavioral delays. She sat cross-legged on the floor and with crossed arms, between the examination table and the wall, only repositioning to curse at her mother or to curtain her face with her dark curly hair. She refused everything offered. Heart and lung exam? \u201cNo!\u201d Meningitis vaccine before college? \u201cNo!\u201d<\/p>\n

Zoe\u2019s mother wanted to address her daughter\u2019s social anxiety. Zoe refused to eat at school, much less talk to her classmates and teachers. She had been prescribed medication three years ago. For a while, her mother thought she was improving, but then found little white pellets scattered across the bottom of her bed, mixed with dust, tissues, and marbles. Zoe had refused to take the pills, just as she had refused to utter a word to her ex-therapist, just as she refused our care today.<\/p>\n

I sat in quiet observation, recalling Robert Frost\u2019s poem about the end of the world, \u201cFire and Ice.\u201d Zoe a ball of fire, hissed curses and threw embers of \u201cNo!\u201d into the room. Zoe\u2019s mother, serene and cool, battled the inferno with gentle rains of \u201cSweetie, how about another chance?\u201d No one was winning this duel, but Zoe\u2019s mother gave no sign of frustration other than her scrunched lips, reminding me of my own mother\u2019s reserve when I ignored her parenting. The light in Zoe\u2019s mother\u2019s brown eyes and the wrinkles hugging her cheeks signaled provisions of patience. Her hair was thick like Zoe\u2019s but tamed with a straightening wand and highlighted by ivory streaks. Was I looking at a version of Zoe, thirty years into the future?<\/p>\n

I remembered being Zoe\u2019s age in high school, constantly going against my mother, feeling every emotion yet unable to control any of them. Perhaps Zoe\u2019s mother had also learned patience through raising her daughter, hiding her frequent worries; and perhaps Zoe, too, would learn the extent of these worries at nineteen, seeing her mother cry for the first time.<\/p>\n

I brought my attending physician into the room. I stood and she sat above Zoe in a chair as we offered treatment options. How about talking to someone again? \u201cNo!\u201d Medication to calm your nerves? \u201cNo!\u201d Your anxiety is not your fault. We want to help you and your brain. \u201cNo!\u201d Okay, we won\u2019t do anything you don\u2019t want.<\/p>\n

Nothing seemed right after we stepped out of the room, and the stubborn sixteen-year-old part of me broke through. I asked my attending\u2019s permission to go back alone and talk to Zoe; she agreed.<\/p>\n

I wanted to tell Zoe that she may never feel seventeen; that on a good day, she may only feel sixteen and three-fourths; that her anxiety might make her feel nine; that some days all she\u2019ll want is to sleep like a two-month-old; that we want to work through this crippling social anxiety with her. But if I put on my \u201cfuture physician\u201d hat, trying to be as forty as I could, I knew Zoe wouldn\u2019t budge.<\/p>\n

We sat, eye to eye, on the floor. She whispered undiscernible phrases under her breath, and I whispered back, trying to emulate the softness of her mother, of my mother, telling her that giving counseling and medication another chance would help her feel better. Zoe held her breath, fiddling with her shoelaces. The end of our conversation seemed indefinite. Then, smoothing her bangs behind her ears, she whispered, \u201cNo,\u201d but also smiled.<\/p>\n

I left Zoe and her mother with the clinic\u2019s number, feeling so twenty-three and three-fourths\u2014but that was good enough. Zoe\u2019s pause, her softer \u201cNo\u201d and smile, indicated a small change of mind. Change happens in baby steps, as we quietly build trust with our patients so they may listen and take advice. Sometimes we can\u2019t ask more. Yet we also ask a great deal of ourselves. As physicians-in-training, we constantly oscillate between ages, maturing and regressing, hiding our worries about not being good enough for our patients. Just as we gift our patients the space to keep trying, we should extend a similar grace to ourselves.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Tina Chai is a third-year medical student at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, TN. She earned both a BS in biochemistry and a BA in English from the University of Virginia.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Blog by Tina Chai   When asked my age, I almost always want to say sixteen before stopping myself to say twenty-four. I don\u2019t feel twenty-four. At most, I\u2019m twenty-three and three-fourths\u2014oscillating between who I was and who I want to become, but not feeling quite there or quite good enough. Sometimes, I say something […]<\/p>\n

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