Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons
Because.
Because it was 1998 and I was a 23-year-old med student who had decided that she could support herself and her pre-schooler son better as a doctor than she could’ve as a musician. And my similarly too-young med student husband and I had been doing the math to figure out exactly when to start trying for a little sister who could be born in 1999 just before graduation and before internship, since if I knew anything about my own body it was that I was fertile.
Because.
Because ‘Torn’ was on the radio all the time, cranked up as I drove the 30-minutes to the hospital (20-minutes if you knew a back way before dawn), with me singing along in a rare tension release. Torn—two parts of my life—being a mom at home and a med student at the hospital— that I needed to keep very separate, or I would never be able to leave my little sweetheart in the mornings.
Because.
Because it was my psychiatry clerkship with the legendary Dr Gottesman. The story went that on his way home, he had seen a man atop a fence, poised to jump onto the highway. In the tale, Dr Gottesman talked him down, police all around, and the man brought to life was sure Gottesman was actually ‘God-is-man’ and that he was the savior.
Because it was the song. The song that was everywhere. The song whose lyrics somehow fit everything that was my life that May.
Because of one of my assigned patients on that psychiatry clerkship. She was a middle-aged woman who would scream and threaten—but would never talk about her mental health issues that brought her to the hospital. This was alternating with her stripping off her hospital gown, lying naked on the floor.
Because one morning the troubled woman seemed calmer, and I thought I might have a chance to get some information, build some rapport.
Because she asked me if I had any children and I responded an immediate “yes”.
Because then she suddenly shook her arms at me, and yelled “your children will die, die, die.”
Because I froze.
Because I knew it was impossible that she was predicting the future, and because my family was safe at home (and 20 to 30 minutes away from the hospital), but because as a mom, I still felt a stirring—my deepest fear.
Because deep in my belly, I learned instantly not to share personal information at work.
Because in 2024, I’m in the grocery store’s produce section, and all I wanted was ripe avocados. But instead, I’m wide awake, flashbacks of the young mom working with the larger-than-life psychiatrist, and the fortune-teller when naïve 23-year-old-me tried to connect.
Susan Hatters Friedman is a psychiatrist specializing in forensic psychiatry and maternal mental health. She is pursuing a Master's in Crime Fiction at the University of Cambridge, and has studied satire writing with the Second City. Her creative writing can be read in X-R-A-Y, Twin Pies, and Hobart.
