intimacy

We just finished a week long obstetric-gynecology module, and I really enjoyed it. Before school ob-gyn never crossed my mind and upon entering, I didn't imagine it being something that would appeal to me. But it was the perfect subject to greet us post-break, a point of all time low as far as motivation goes. Because ob-gyn makes very apparently clear one of the elements of medicine most valuable to me--intimacy. It does this in large part because it deals with sexuality, which people immediately connect to intimacy in mind and practice. I once called our high school lockers "intimate" because we were in block of 8 half-lockers in a small space, and my friends laughed at the connotation. But in learning this past week, I'm reminded that intimacy doesn't stem directly from physicality at all. Intimacy is feeling safe when vulnerable. And that vulnerability comes in many forms. Ob-gyn makes it obvious with physically uncovering what we normally protect, but that's just a conduit for all the other things we keep close, things that are there whenever you become connected to someone else.

In workshop we had a case on a miscarriage, and after going over the symptoms of abnormal bleeding and the treatment required to clear her system, I realized that I'd never fully considered what a miscarriage entails. I thought of it in simple terms of something going wrong that prevents you from continuing your pregnancy, and then it's gone. But I never once thought of the fact that there was something inside of you, that is no longer living, and it has to go somewhere. Meaning that the place that once held it, has to let it go. And not to be graphic but for reality, there's blood, and pain, and someone has to open you and physically remove what they call "products of conception" (your baby), and it's less like plucking an egg out of a basket and more like undoing the interlaced weaving. How visceral, how traumatic. Without ever having had gained or lost anything quite like that, to imagine hurts.

When doing the pelvic exam, I was really nervous to be given responsibility to handle what's intimate. At one point we were told that we'd "feel the uterus between your hands." I was a little taken aback by how amazing I found that thought. My hands? The ones that a few minutes of chipping icy snow off my windshield render red and dry? Yes, mine. The ones that also felt the pulse of the ovarian artery. Besides the fulfillment that comes with learning concrete things after so much academia, these solid things are tied to people...their relationships with their bodies, the notions of family and your ties to others known and not yet known to you, the intricacies of conception and its complications and emotions, or even just those of being made to conceive.

I've felt safe at my most vulnerable rarely enough to remember and feel the feeling distinctly and vividly. To find a presence with whom you are able to bare yourself, in whatever sense that might mean to you, and then to feel safe, without ever losing the sense of fragility and value that made safety necessary in the first place. I've only known that to happen for me after long cultivation with time and trust and test. Now, to think of that as a mutual goal for every stranger you meet as your patient, closes some of the distance and isolation that studying can nourish. In broadening something defined by smallness, I find I have more of it.