“Come on, people! Let’s go!” An actor would be rushed down a hallway on a stretcher, red liquid drenching his clothes, but then someone would turn the corner too quickly. “Shit!” the director would say. “Jesus, people, let’s get it right this time!” Burly men with cameras and lights would rush around in a frenzy, resetting the scene. I’d see a producer pop a pill—Tylenol or Xanax or Prozac?—and down it with sparkling water. “I’m gonna have a heart attack if we don’t get this shot today.” He’d sigh. “I swear, I’m gonna die.”
In the OR with Mr. Sanchez, there was no yelling, no one feeling as if a coronary was imminent. Even Mr. Sanchez, with his head sawed open, seemed less stressed out than the people on the set. As the surgical team worked, “Please” and “Thank you” peppered each request, and if it weren’t for the steady stream of blood dripping out of a man’s head and into a bag near my leg, I might have mistaken this place for fantasy. And in a way it was. It was at once more real than anything I had ever seen and also galaxies away from what I considered to be my actual life back in Hollywood, a place I had no intention of leaving.
But months later, everything changed.
I’m following an ER doctor in a county hospital on a Sunday. As we approach a curtain, he says, “Forty-five-year-old with complications from diabetes.” He pulls back the curtain and I see a woman lying on the table under a sheet. That’s when the smell hits my nostrils—an assault so vile I worry I might faint. I can’t identify the odor because I’ve never smelled anything this nauseating in my life. Has she defecated? Vomited?
I see no signs of either, but the smell becomes so powerful that I feel the lunch I ate an hour ago rise into my throat, and I swallow hard to keep it down. I hope she can’t see how pale I must be or sense the queasiness taking over my gut. I’m thinking: Maybe it’s coming from the next bed over. Maybe if I move more to this side of the room, I won’t smell it so strongly. I concentrate on the woman’s face—watery eyes, reddish cheeks, bangs over her sweaty forehead. The doctor is asking her questions and I can’t understand how he manages to breathe. I’ve been trying to hold my breath this entire time, but I have to come up for air.
Okay, I tell myself. Here goes.
I take in some air and the smell seizes my body. Steadying myself against the wall, I look on as the doctor lifts the sheet covering the woman’s legs. Only there are no lower legs. Her diabetes has caused severe vasculitis, and all that remain are two stumps above the knees. One has gangrene, and I can’t decide if the sight of this infected stump, all black and moldy like a rotten fruit, is worse than its smell.
The space is small, and I move closer to the woman’s head, as far away from the infected stump as possible, and that’s when something extraordinary happens. This woman takes my hand and smiles at me as if to say, I know this is hard to watch, but it’s okay. Even though I’m the one who should be holding her hand, even though she’s the one with the missing appendages and a massive infection, she’s reassuring me. And though this could make a great story line on ER, in that millisecond, I know I won’t be working on that show much longer.
I am going to medical school.
Maybe that’s an impulsive reason to change careers—the fact that this graceful stranger with a blackened stump is holding my hand as I try not to barf—but something is happening inside me that I’ve never felt at any of my Hollywood jobs. I still love TV, but there’s something about the real stories I’m experiencing in person that seduce me and make the imaginary ones feel thin. Friends is about community, but a fake one. ER is about life and death, but they’re fictional. Instead of taking these stories I witness and folding them back into my world at the network, I want real life—real people—to be my world.
As I drive home from the hospital that day, I don’t know how or when this might happen or what kind of medical-school loans I can get or even if I can get in. I don’t know how many science classes I’ll have to take to meet the requirements and prepare for the MCAT or where to take those courses, since I graduated from college six years ago.
But somehow, I decide, I’m going to make this happen, and I can’t do that while working sixty-hour weeks on Must See TV.
12
Welcome to Holland
After Julie learned that she was dying, her best friend, Dara, wanting to be helpful, sent her the well-known essay “Welcome to Holland.” Written by Emily Perl Kingsley, the parent of a child with Down syndrome, it’s about the experience of having your life’s expectations turned upside down:
When you’re going to have a baby, it’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip—to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It’s all very exciting.
After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The flight attendant comes in and says, “Welcome to Holland.”
“Holland?!?” you say. “What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I’m supposed to be in Italy. All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy.”
But there’s been a change in the flight plan. They’ve landed in Holland and there you must stay.
The important thing is that they haven’t taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It’s just a different place.
So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.
It’s just a different place. It’s slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you’ve been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around . . . and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills . . . and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.
But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy . . . and they’re all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say “Yes, that’s where I was supposed to go. That’s what I had planned.”
And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away . . . because the loss of that dream is a very, very significant loss.
But . . . if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things . . . about Holland.
“Welcome to Holland” made Julie furious. After all, there was nothing special or lovely about her cancer. But Dara, whose son had severe autism, said that Julie was missing the point. She agreed that Julie’s prognosis was devastating and unfair and a complete departure from how her life was supposed to go. But she didn’t want Julie to spend the time she had remaining—perhaps as long as ten years—missing out on what she might still have while alive: Her marriage. Her family. Her work. She could still have a version of those things in Holland.