Your Shoes, My Shoes

Yachna Ahuja, Case School of Medicine

24 year old female, 10 weeks twin gestation with chief complaint of bleeding. I walk into your room with this one line of information.

Twenty minutes later I walk out realizing for the umpteenth time that one line could never really sum up a person and their life.

We are the same age and yet a world of difference lies between the two of us. I will not judge you by our differences because I know that life and its circumstances push each of us into different directions. Yet while I have not been greatly affected by you right now, days later I know that I will find myself thinking about you…. simply because of the insidious effect of our differences on my subconscious mind.

You dropped out of high school years ago and left behind the possibility of earning anything too far above a minimal hourly wage. I studied for eight years longer than you and I will never know what it feels like to earn an hourly wage out of basic necessity.

You're homeless now and you've spent the past three days walking through streets with your boyfriend - a man who looks way older than you, who upon first impression looked like a drug dealer to me. I know not what it feels like to be homeless or hungry or alone in this world - in my eyes, your life takes a lot more courage than mine.

You've had two children with two different men and even if your children can't live with you, you've become responsible for them financially. The bulk of your salary goes toward child support but who knows if your children will ever get to really know you. And then there's me, still years away from having children, from knowing the pain of childbirth, and from realizing the sacrifices of being a mother. There's me, who barely pays for myself, forget about paying for anyone else.

You tell me that since the time that you found out about your latest pregnancy, you've not only drunk and smoked, you've also done crack and coke. As I rack through my brain to remind myself about the difference between crack and coke, I silently pray that your unborn children will make it through unscathed as they drink the poisons that circulate within you.

You now have an STD, out of the blue. Who knows where it came from, who was unfaithful - was it your boyfriend, was it you…. And when the resident doctor comes in later to ask you more questions, why is the picture changing to seem more like you've been selling your body for drugs or money, or both? Perhaps I never went there with my questions because I forgot that such a reality existed. Days later, I think about how much I take it for granted that there are people who pay for my every need, who surround me with love and security… the sheltered life of a little princess. My lack of consideration disgusts me.

I've always known about your life, I'm certain that I have. It's just that up to now I've walked past it on the sidewalks, or I've passively watched it on TV, or I nonchalantly read about it in the papers or in novels. This is the first time I've come close enough to touch your life, and I've spent time to hear your story as we sit in the same room - you, me, and your boyfriend. This is the first time I realized how hard it is to get through the layers of protection you've built around yourself as the years went by. There is a mist behind your suspecting eyes and it's so thick that I can't see beyond it.

But you want us to solve the one problem that you came for - you haven't come to hear us tell you about anything else. So here, here are the antibiotics to clear up the STD. Here is the third free lunch box of food you asked for. Here is a list of homeless shelters that you could contact, though I know you won't use them because you can't live at the shelter with your boyfriend. Here's the number for the ob/gyn clinic here, please contact them next week for follow-up care. And lastly, I'll run through a list of things that you need to avoid because they could cause harm to your unborn children. Goodbye now, and good luck. Take care.

Changing lives….so much easier said than done. I mean truly changing lives for the better. At least in this population - the uninsured, the homeless, less educated, almost unemployed, poor - most of the time, forget about it. Treat the problems at the surface because scraping further will do no good - they just don't want to hear it and that's not hard to see. We have to ask it all because we're legally bound to do so, even if there's not much we can do about it.

On the other hand, who are we to change lives anyway? What a silly authoritarian point of view. When a person asks for help with a problem, they're not always asking you to tell them why the problem happened and how they change things so they won't go wrong again. Sometimes it's all about finding an instant cure and letting them move on.

Maybe one day it won't drain our inner energy so much to go through several of these encounters everyday. Maybe one day we'll learn to care, but not really care.

Your shoes, my shoes. Same size, same store. Different look, different feel.

What did I do to deserve my shoes…. what did you do to deserve yours?