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Metaphors and Medicine (Year III): Chapter 3

I could hear the engines of the aircraft blaring below me, the soft rumbling moving our chairs beneath us. This part was always my favorite, the excitement of looking out the window and realizing the next time I’d be on the ground again, the view outside the window would be one that always made me feel whole, alive again, and the closest to myself that I ever felt. It would be the beginning of weeks I would never forget, as my time back home always is. It didn’t matter that we stood in line with so many people. It didn’t matter how heavy the suitcases were. It didn’t matter that it would take hours of passing through Israeli border control before I’d finally say “I’m home.” 


What mattered is I would be home, once again, for a brief period that would leave me in a state of grief once I left it again, trying to hold myself together until the next time I was aboard that plane.


This was one year ago. 


Two years ago on this exact day, I was finishing my final day on another pediatric medical mission trip. I shared tears with the mothers of the patients I connected with. I said goodbye to the O.R. that I collected stories in and recognized that I would forever leave a part of my heart there. I was roaming around the old town of Nablus. I was trying to memorize the lines on the old walls, the curves of the winding roads, the smell of the Kunafeh in the oldest sweet shop in the city. On that day, I also crossed through checkpoints to get home as I did every day that week to get to and from the hospital. 


This day this year is different. The borders are closed. There are no planes going in and out. There are no new stories to collect but rather the old ones to reflect on again and again, even if painful to realize that homesickness is an old friend I will probably never part with. 


Tomorrow, I begin another rotation, another new chapter in a new hospital. My heart is split between the two places I feel I belong in: the hospital, amongst patients I can build a relationship with, and home, where I am reminded of my purpose, where my family reminds me of my roots, where I remember far away is to build myself to be better for them.


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