Ride

I was tired. No scratch that I was exhausted. I had been running on caffeine and the thoughts of becoming a disappointment to my parents and everyone else I loved. Both my parents were surgeons, my dad a neurosurgeon and my mother a cardiac surgeon. I had always loved kids and growing up I wanted to own a daycare, but after a rebellious phase that involved fighting and underage drinking and having my parents who had done everything for me threaten to send me to a school for troubled teens and express how disgusted they were with my behavior it made me shape up and pursue the future they wanted for me their once perfect child; so I was pursuing a career as a pediatric surgeon.

 After high school, I got into my mother’s alma mater for undergrad and my father's for medical school and graduated summa cum laude from both. Adding on finally dating Parker Richardson, my dad's best friend's son who I grew up alongside, it felt like I had finally dug myself out of the embarrassment of my youth. Everything seemed perfect. Parker and I finally took the steps of getting engaged and living together. We were talking about getting a dog… at least I was. I was thriving at my residency. The patients seemed to love me and I loved them, my mentors were wonderful and harsh when they needed to be while also wanting us to do our best. My friend group was wonderful and we would go out for drinks when our schedules allowed. Then Sept 19 2022 10:42 pm struck and everything changed. I went from being this productive member of society to becoming one of those people others crossed the street to get away from. 

She had only been one and when she came in so black and blue you would have thought that was her skin color not the patches of paleness that dotted her skin. Both eyes were bloodshot they still haunted my dreams to this day, the way her little hand grabbed onto mine as we rushed through the ER her parents were nowhere to be found because they were the ones who threw her out of the car after spending the day getting high on meth and beating her; because she was crying due to starvation. After we got her placed on the operating table my memory became a blur. I remember the beeping of her ventilators that kept her breathing but mostly I remember the rattling, the rattling that was so loud I was shocked when I asked about it and everyone looked at me like I was crazy. I would come to google it later; death rattle. Then the silence. The limpness of her tiny fingers and the closing of those bloodshot eyes never for her to open again. 

After that I remember getting home, getting in the shower, and then nothing. I don’t remember Parker finding me sitting in the bathtub with the water overflowing as I cried. I don’t remember my parents rushing over when Parker called them about how he found me. Or me going missing for two weeks only to be found is some seedy motel in nothing but a hoodie and short shorts scribbling in a notebook over and over, most of it nonsense. Psychosis. That’s the word the psychiatrist used to describe what happened a month after I saw that little girl come through hospital doors.

When I finally took control of my mind I was put on antipsychotics and put out on leave for another month after that, and only allowed back when I passed a rigorous mental health assessment that I passed with flying colors. Then the same day I came back a few hours into a pretty easy shift. A little boy came in with a broken arm after jumping on a trampoline and I was sent into a panic attack that lasted 3 hours. There was no third chance I was unfit, dismissed from my residency. Two months after that Parker told me we needed to take a break so I could “heal” my parents and his parents agreed. I moved out of our apartment and back in with my parents, where they watched me as if I was going to lose it again. In their eyes I saw something worse than disappointment, I saw pity. Their perfect daughter who they groomed for greatness couldn’t cut it. I had cracked under pressure.

Every day for 5 months it felt like I slowly suffocated in my childhood home. So I told my parents I was going to a recovering house, I knew they wouldn’t question it too much although they pitied me they still trusted me and I was going to betray that trust like I did when I was 16 but I needed to get out and get away without being told I was having another breakdown. I would have told Parker but whenever I called he was always too busy to talk, although we weren’t together I still thought of us as friends. My friends or the people I thought were my friends distanced themselves soon after Parker and I broke up so I confided in no one about my plan. I would tell my parents when I was a safe distance away.  So weighed down with only a suitcase of my most comfortable clothes, a few grand in cash, quite a few credit cards, and my 2019 Lexus I was ready to hit the open road. Where was I going? I had no idea. Was I manic? Some would say so. Did the weight on my chest feel a little lighter as soon as I approached the border from California into Nevada? Definitely. Little did I know my whole world was about to change.