Hi, I'm Aisha Rahman. I'm 23, Bangladeshi-American, from Jackson Heights, Queens, where my parents run a restaurant under the 7 train, and as of this summer I'm a first-year medical student in North Carolina. I've been keeping this journal since my junior year of college, back when my biggest problem was organic chemistry. Oh, to be young.

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Older entries: January-June 1999 · 1998 · Fall 1997 (warning: Comic Sans)

A promise: I will never write about a real patient in a way anyone could recognize, and I don't use my classmates' last names. Please don't ask which school. Thank you!

SUN 9/26/99

Anatomy practical tomorrow at 8 a.m.

I've been in the lab all weekend with the others, going over our donor one structure at a time. It's quieter on weekends. The lights hum. Somebody always has a radio going low in the corner, and it is always playing that Santana song. I now know every word of it, against my will.

Before I left tonight I stood by our table alone for a minute. I said thank you. I don't know if that's weird. I say it every time. She's taught me more in six weeks than anyone except my parents.

Things I know now that I didn't know in July:

• Which stairwell has the best light at 3 p.m.
• That "y'all" is a perfectly good word. I've started saying it. Rafi is horrified.
• That you can make khichuri for four people in a hurricane.
• That I'm not the only one who's scared. Anand can't eat before a quiz. Ben draws so his hands won't shake. Meredith prays too, in her car, before lab.
• That Abbu's old table from the restaurant fits in my kitchen exactly, like he measured. (He measured.)

Ammu called at nine to remind me to pray about the exam. I told her I already did. She said, "Pray again. It doesn't cost anything."

OK, Ammu. Goodnight, everybody. Wish me luck. Or pray for me. It doesn't cost anything.

TUE 9/21/99

Classes started again yesterday. Our first anatomy practical got moved to next Monday, which everybody cheered about and then felt bad about cheering, because of the reason.

The pictures on TV from the eastern part of the state are terrible. Whole towns under water. Some of the rivers are still rising, days after the rain stopped. There's a town called Princeville where you can only see the roofs.

The masjid is collecting supplies to drive east, and so are a bunch of the churches. On Saturday I spent six hours sorting donations in a church fellowship hall with people from the masjid, the church, and our class, and a lady in a Panthers T-shirt taught me how to fold a baby blanket so four of them fit in one box. Diapers. Bleach. Bottled water. Socks. Everybody needs dry socks.

I keep thinking about how I lost two days of class and a night's sleep, and some people lost everything they own. I don't know what to do with that except fold the blankets.

FRI 9/17/99

Power came back an hour ago. I'm OK! Everyone's OK!

The rain started Wednesday and just did not stop. We lost power around two in the morning Thursday. The wind in the pine trees sounded like the ocean. I never knew trees could make that sound. A big limb came down across the carport next door (nobody under it, thank God).

We studied by candlelight and flashlight, which Anand said was "very Victorian." Ben drew the bones of the hand on the back of a grocery bag. At some point all four of us were lying on my living room floor in the dark saying the carpal bones out loud, over and over, like a prayer: scaphoid, lunate, triquetrum, pisiform, trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, hamate. Meredith fell asleep at capitate.

At noon Thursday I made khichuri on the gas stove: rice and lentils cooked together with onion and ghee and a little turmeric, which is what every Bengali mother makes when it rains. We ate it out of coffee mugs because I only have two bowls. I called Ammu on a neighbor's cell phone to tell her we were fine. She cried. From relief, and also, I think, because I made khichuri.

Our town is mostly OK: trees down, a lot of water in the streets. But the news from the east is bad. The rivers are rising.

TUE 9/14/99

Hurricane Floyd is coming. On TV the storm fills up the whole map. The school sent an e-mail at noon: no classes Wednesday afternoon or Thursday.

The grocery store was out of bottled water, bread, D batteries, and, for some reason, every single box of Pop-Tarts. I bought rice, lentils, onions, candles and a flashlight. Rice and lentils don't care if the power goes out. As Ammu has reminded me about twenty times today, this is why God invented khichuri.

She's called four times. The last time she said, "Come home." I said, Ammu, half the coast is driving inland right now, the interstates are parking lots on the news, I'm inland already, I'm staying put. She said, "Inshallah." Then she said it again.

Meredith, Anand and Ben are coming over tomorrow to ride it out, because my apartment is on the second floor and has a gas stove and, in Anand's words, "a mother's supply of lentils."

SUN 9/12/99

Friday was our first real patient interview for the clinical skills course. A real patient, at a clinic, with a doctor watching, just taking a history. (I will never say who. Not ever. See the promise at the top.)

I'd been nervous about the hijab. Not because anyone at school has been anything but good about it, but because patients are patients, and they're sick and scared, and people who are scared can say things.

Here is what happened. The patient, an older gentleman, looked at me for a long time and said, "Where are you from, honey?" I said, "Queens." He said, "No, where are you from?" And I said, "Sir, I'm from Jackson Heights, Queens. My father runs a restaurant under the elevated train." He laughed and said, "Well, you're a long way from home," and then he told me his whole medical history, including a bunch of things that weren't in the chart, and at the end he said I was the first one in years who'd let him finish a sentence.

The doctor watching said afterward, "You're a good listener." I think that's from twelve years of taking orders at table six.

Not every day is going to be like Friday. I know that. But Friday was like Friday.

MON 9/6/99 - Labor Day

Everybody went somewhere for the long weekend. I stayed and drew the brachial plexus nine times.

I called home at dinnertime, which was a mistake, because a holiday Monday is busy and Ammu kept putting the phone down to seat people, and I could hear the whole restaurant: plates, the train going over, Motin Chacha yelling for more onions. So I just listened. I didn't even mind when she forgot I was on the phone for a whole minute. I closed my eyes and I was home.

Rafi started college last week. He called me Saturday to ask how to find a quiet place to study on campus. My baby brother is asking me for advice. I told him about stairwells.

WED 9/1/99

It's been raining for two days from Hurricane Dennis, which is sitting off the coast like it can't decide what it wants to do with its life. (Relatable.) It's worse down east. Here it's just gray and wet, and there's a brown spot on my ceiling that's getting bigger.

The study group is official. It's our anatomy table: Meredith, Anand, Ben and me, three nights a week at my place, with a pot of cha, because I have the biggest table. (It's Abbu's old one from the restaurant. He brought it down in the van.)

Our system: Ben draws everything on a giant pad of newsprint. Anand makes up memory tricks, most of which I cannot type on a family web page. Meredith quizzes us from flash cards in a game show voice. My job is to feed everybody and to say "No. Go back. Do it again." They've started calling me Mom. I'm choosing to take it as a compliment.

TUE 8/24/99

There's no prayer room in the basic science building. I asked. The lady in Student Affairs was very kind and said she'd "look into it," which in every language means no.

So I found a stairwell. The back stairs, between the third and fourth floors, where the landing is wide and nobody ever comes, because the elevator is right there. I make wudu (the washing before prayer) at the sink in the ladies' room, which takes practice. You try washing your feet in a sink in a white coat without anybody walking in. I keep a little travel prayer mat in my backpack, face northeast toward Mecca (Ben lent me his compass to check), and pray Dhuhr at lunch and Asr between lab and lecture.

Yesterday the custodian, Mr. Hargett, came down the stairs with his mop bucket, saw me, and very quietly set the bucket down and waited on the landing above until I was finished. Today there was a yellow WET FLOOR sign at the top of my flight of stairs. The floor was not wet. I think it's my sign now.

WED 8/18/99

First day of anatomy lab. I've been trying all night to decide what to write.

Here's what I'll say. There are four of us at our table: me; Meredith, who's from a little town outside Charlotte and whose father is a Baptist preacher; Anand, from New Jersey, who can't stop making jokes when he's nervous; and Ben, from the mountains, who is quiet and draws everything. Before we began, our professor asked for a moment of silence for all the donors, and the whole room, a hundred and sixty people, went completely quiet. Then I asked my table if they'd mind if I said a prayer. Meredith said, "Only if I can say one after." So we did, mine and then hers, and Anand and Ben bowed their heads.

Our donor was 84. That's what the card says, and it's all it says. She had pale coral polish on her fingernails. I don't know why that's the thing I can't stop thinking about. I think somebody did her nails for her, near the end, a daughter or a granddaughter, and I keep thinking about that person.

Before I came down here I talked to the imam at home about all this, because in our tradition the body is treated with great dignity, even after death. He said the knowledge will save lives, and that the respect is in how you do it. So I'm going to do it with respect. That's what I can do.

The smell is in everything now: my hair, my hijab, my car. I washed my hijab twice tonight. I'll get used to it, they say.

SUN 8/15/99 - White Coat Day

They came. All of them.

Abbu closed the restaurant from Friday night until Monday. Shapla has not been closed on a Saturday since 1984 except for Eid. He put a sign in the window in English and Bangla: CLOSED — DAUGHTER BECOMING DOCTOR. Rafi told him that's not technically how it works. Abbu said the sign stays.

They drove down overnight in the van, nine and a half hours, Rafi asleep in the back, Ammu with a cooler of food on her lap like we were going to a village with no restaurants.

The ceremony was this afternoon. We walked up on the stage one at a time, and a doctor held out a short white coat, and I put my arms in it. Then we all stood up together and said an oath. I looked for them and found Ammu's green sari in about one second. Abbu wasn't clapping. He was sitting with his hands pressed together in front of his face, very still.

Afterward, outside, he reached out and touched the sleeve of the coat, the way he touches the fabric at the sari shop to check the quality. "Good cotton," he said. That's all he said. That's everything.

TUE 8/10/99

Orientation week. About a hundred and sixty of us, name tags, a picnic, a lot of people from very fancy colleges who are all very nice and all seem to have already done research on something with a long name. I have done research on how many samosas fit on a tray. (Thirty-six.)

Today they handed out the bone boxes. Every two students share a box with a real human skeleton in it, well, half of one, to take home and study. Ours lives under my bed. I told Ammu on the phone and she said, "Aisha. Under your BED?" and then said a prayer for whoever it was, which I thought was right.

An anatomy professor talked to us this afternoon about the body donor program, about the people who chose to give themselves to us so we could learn. She called our donor "your first patient." Nobody in the room moved.

SAT 7/31/99

I live in North Carolina now!

Abbu and I drove down Wednesday in the restaurant van with everything I own in the back, including the 40 pounds of rice and Abbu's old table. The van smells like onions permanently, so I arrived smelling like home.

My apartment is a one-bedroom on the second floor with beige carpet and a window air conditioner that sounds exactly like the 7 train. Abbu fixed the drippy kitchen faucet within an hour of walking in, and then found the masjid, a little Islamic center in an old house near campus, before I had even found the grocery store. We prayed jummah (Friday prayer) there together yesterday, and afterward the brothers invited him to lunch and the sisters invited me to their Sunday halaqa (study circle). Then Abbu drove the ten hours back so he could open Saturday.

At the car he held my face in both hands and said, "Be humble. Pray on time. Call your mother." Then he said, "And don't eat the cafeteria food," and got in the van.

First night alone. It's so quiet. There are bugs outside that sound like a hundred tiny sewing machines. I left the TV on for company.

SUN 7/4/99

My last big weekend at the restaurant. Friday and Saturday I worked double shifts, and every regular who came in knew I was leaving, because Ammu told them. The cab drivers left me tips of five dollars on a $6.95 lunch special and wouldn't take them back. One of them wrote "for books" on a napkin, the way Abbu does.

Tonight we closed early and all went up on the roof of our building to watch the fireworks over the East River, far off between the buildings. Rafi, Ammu, Abbu, Motin Chacha, me, and half the building, with plates. Abbu stood next to me and didn't say much. Then he said, "Your Nanu wanted to be a doctor. Did you know that?" I didn't know that. Nobody ever told me that. He said, "Girls didn't, then. Not in her village." And then a big gold one went off and everybody said "ooooh" and that was the end of that conversation.

I've been thinking about it all night.

Earlier: January-June 1999 · 1998 · Fall 1997 · back to top

Want an e-mail when I update? Write me with RAT ALERT in the subject line and I'll add you to the list. (Hi to the nurse in Michigan and the pre-med in Houston who both wrote last week. Keep going. It's worth it. I think. Ask me again after the practical.)