I finally picked up my two generic white coats from the hospital where I spent a good six years wearing ill-fitting Caribbean blue scrubs and the ugliest black non-slip sneakers imaginable.
The title of this entry is "The White Coat", though "The Black Shoes" would be appropriate a well.
Based on my former co-workers ' description, I would only call those shoes ugly. I found them functional but aesthetically challenged (the shoes, not my co-workers; they would be my hilariously dysfunctional work family). Back to the shoes... I never slipped in blood or plasma in the lab or on wet pavement when running toward one of the two buses I waited for in the mornings. I especially loved them when they gripped through anatomy in medical school with those old scrubs no less. They kept me steady through lengthy dissections, when fat dripped on the floor and coated the soles of my sneakers. I'd anchor my elbow to the stainless-steel beds while holding tools with hands whose baseline tremors worsened through the years.
I finally replaced my embroidered short white one that saw me through my extended curriculum in medical school with my involuntary Leaves of Absence and my need to escape through other graduate degrees for mental self-preservation.
I hold parts of my upbringing for private writings. It’s not that interesting: first-generation, ESL, poverty, underrepresented, loss, PTSD, depression, racism, sexism, queer, brown, cats, and... books. I'll probably earn another degree or two, collecting an alphabet soup of self-worth.
The White Coat will be buried in a closet, resurrected only for my mother as proof of its existence.
The black sneakers stay on my feet.
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