Kitten picture

Dr. K____

So mom's staying with me for a few days while Sean's out in Tampa taking the boards and it's late at night and we've been talking for hours and she's really letting her hair down.

She has, like pretty much anyone, a list of favorite stories, and we get through the greatest hits: Alice the babysitter meets Aubrey the driver, the shotgun wedding of Sandy and Bill, the adorable origin of Shadow's lifelong nickname. Then a whole new set starts showing up. They start out pretty lighthearted: dad used to give sleigh rides (and that's how I learned to jitterbug!), mom rented out my room while I was still in it. After a while, they get a little deep: you know we all think Marie was retarded, what do you expect when you meet your new husband in a bar.

And then it turns personal. We go through the greatest hits: you cried for three days when we brought you home, the only thing that made you smile was the dog, you never did like to be touched. But then the new ones show up.

I loved my pediatrician-- loved him! He was a kindly, grandfatherly sort with a beige Volvo station wagon and a fishing habit who died a very, very long time ago. He used to set aside a little time at the end of the appointment for you to talk with him one-on-one, in case there was something you wanted to say that you didn't really want mom to hear. I don't know if you can do that anymore, but I remember taking the opportunity to tell him that I would like to be a doctor, too and did he have any advice. (I must've been about five.) I remember him leaning back in his chair, giving a little sigh, and telling me with great sincerity that it was really a wonderful profession and that he thought I would find it very rewarding and enjoyable. He then leaned forward and advised me to do very well in school: get straight A's starting right now. After that, I would inform him of my progress at our yearly check-ups and he would teach me a little thing, like how to turn on the little light for the otophthalmoscope.

I remember that people would comment on the long drive we took to see him and the flashy neighborhood his office was located in but I guess I'd always figured that mom had searched around for the best pediatrician in the city and found him.

He might well have been the best around, but that's not why he was my doctor.

Dr. K___ donated his services to the Holy Family Adoption Agency, where I came from. And he knew my grandfather.

If you're not adopted, I don't know if you will appreciated the magnitude of this bombshell: someone that I knew knew who I was, really-- knew this shadow family that I wasn't part of but that was as close to me as my blood.

My genetic grandfather was a local physician and Dr. K_____ knew him, not well, not deeply, but he knew whose granddaughter I was, maybe whose daughter I was.

It's because of my forehead.

When I was an infant, my forehead was a little prominent-- I'm not a freak or anything, but in a baby that's kind of worrisome because you wonder if the brain underneath that little prominence is really normal. For an adoption agency, this is an administrative matter of some import, as it affects the placement: "special needs" versus "garden variety." As my pediatrician, Dr. K_____ would have been the one who spotted this and was responsible for determining if I was a special needs baby or not. I was held in foster care until everyone could be sure. We're all born with a series of reflexes that pretty much constitute our entire behavioral repertoire for the first few months, so intellectual capacity is measured by waiting a few months and seeing if the new behaviors pop up on time (making you milestones.) But my forehead (really, I'm not a freak-- let's just say I look better with bangs) still required an explanation. It could, of course, be a family trait, but to check for that, you'd need to look at the family. Apparently, my birth family obliged with a set of photographs to be compared with my head and, I guess I must've looked like them because after passing my milestones and photo check I was released into the main adoption pool and sent to my eventual family.

It must've fallen to Dr. K____ to check the photos. He must've recognized my grandfather from the photos. And then, like the honorable man he was, he took that secret to his grave.

Everyone is different: for some people it's a movie star, for some people it's a CEO, but for me, being a doctor is the finest thing you can be and all I can think since then is Grampa was a doctor! Grampa was a doctor!

The importance of being earnest

So I'm at the gym today, not the boxing gym, the gym gym-- the one I go to for the weights and absolutely nothing else and there's one of the trainers-- I think he's the one with the bumper sticker that says "fighter on board" but I can't prove it-- standing over a middle-aged man-- pudgy, balding, earnestly slogging through a set of sit-ups while maybe-fighter-on-board stands over him. (Note the middle-aged, pudgy blogger, by the way...)

I've been less-than entirely honest with myself about exactly how often I am going to the gym gym ever since my torrid love affair with boxing began, and this is my first visit in two weeks. My previous tediously regimented weights workout has been printed out and forgotten while I perform a routine I've nicknamed "favorite machines," useful for getting my butt actually into the gym itself but not a vehicle for breaking through strength plateaus or actually making any measurable improvement.

The gym gym I've chosen is one of those executive boxing gyms, equipped with a grid of heavy bags which dominate the floor and a teeny tiny little ring (why don't you just tie the fighters together like a Westside Story knife fight?) Notably absent are speed bags, double end bags, and, well, fights. There's a round timer, but I've never heard it. The rare times I've seen anyone use the ring, one of them was always a trainer with focus mitts on.

The grid is there for boxing and kickboxing classes, which are almost invariably packed. The instructors look like they've got skills, but I heard one of them telling people that this is not a self-defense class: it's a fitness class-- if you want to learn self-defense you'll need to go elsewhere and that ended any interest I might once have had in the classes.

Private lessons with these people are very expensive (I checked), well above my pay grade. I'm a doctor, sure, but not the rich kind: I'm a county doc and while that's plenty of money for me, it's definitely not "private-boxing-lesson"-type money, let's just get that straight. But I always like to peek at the people while they're getting their private lessons-- you know, see if I can pick anything up.

By this time, private lesson guy is on the heavy bag and I'm trying to figure out what's going wrong when it hits me: no opponent. At the gym gym there is never an opponent. There is never even the suggestion of an opponent. That's why the ring isn't really big enough for two people, that's why there's no timer, and that's why the sounds coming from the heavy bag are so muffled: he's pretending to hit it. He's pretending to train. He's pretending to box. There's nothing wrong with him-- he's not too old to try: he's trying-- he just needs an opponent. Because at the boxing gym, when I show up, I look around and there are my opponents. Training. And the heavy bag sounds like it's in trouble.

Grand opening

So sifu is opening a second studio about maybe half an hour away and he's been talking of nothing else for months now. It's a big stretch for a small business and sounds sort of like a make-or-break type of thing. We hardly ever see him now, as he is off minding the new store and we are left in the (quite capable) hands of his lead instructor and kung fu son.

(In kung fu, we're all a family, so I guess I'm a kung fu daughter, but it's more like I'm the fifteenth daughter by one of the lesser wives; Ryan is heir to the empire.)

There are further breakdowns. Maybe about a year ago, sifu instituted a three year instructor training track which buys you into two extra classes a week. (They kind of remind me of the black belt class except that they're longer and the uniforms are snazzier.) The curriculum is expanded and it serves as a shortcut around what otherwise would (I think) require your third degree black belt.

So last night's class, sifu announces to us that he's holding tomorrow's instructor training class at the new studio, blending the first hour with the regular class. People get lost, so I'm the ranking student out of seven or so when I get there. (I am the lowest-ranking black belt and black belts can only take black belt and instructor training classes so I am never, ever, ever the ranking student, but this is a blended class and, out of the instructor trainees, I outrank the smattering of us who were able to find the new place in time for class.) The studio's small so we fill it pretty nicely.

These kung fu studios are very, very small businesses. There's no receptionist and no extra instructors. If the phone rings in the middle of class and Sifu's not there, the instructor answers it: that's a potential sale. Don't get me wrong, they make an appointment to meet with the potential student and get the @#$! off the phone so they can continue leading class, but all I'm saying is that they do occasionally answer the phone. So when that sort of thing happens, the ranking student keeps the class going until the instructor can get back-- almost invariably within a minute or two.

Sifu begins the warm-up and is all of fifteen seconds into it when two young men show up at the door. This is a potential sale, so sifu leaves the room to take care of the customers and I start calling out the rest of the (routine) warm-up. Sifu's office door is still closed, so I start us up on our drills, basically calling for anything that comes to mind and hoping for sifu to come back. Four rows of high kicks later there's pretty much no room for hope anymore: sifu is well into the sale, giving young man #1 his free introductory lesson and I'm drilling the class back and forth across the room calling out combinations as they come to mind, adding flashier moves when the customers can see us and counting in our customary Cantonese.

This has happened to me once before. A few weeks ago, I'm stretching in the hour between black belt class and instructor training when Ryan comes back to me and says "Take the class." I must have given him a look because he follows it up with "You're in instructor training, take the class." They'd started in on drills when a customer showed up for an appointment (the free instruductory lesson.) Sifu was off at the new school and there must have been some sort of scheduling meltdown. I could hear the class counting in the background; they'd gotten to thiry-something of whatever it was they were doing. We're sort of a ten-to-twenty repetition studio, so a leaderless thirty-something with no end is sight wasn't quite a klaxon going off but it would be in another twenty reps or so. I ran up in front of the class and started calling out anything reasonable that came to mind, trying vaguely to remember if this class started at 12 or 12:15 so I would know when to stop drilling. About ten minutes into this, the instructor who was supposed to take over shows up and promptly rescues me. A little too fast, a little too complex, but altogether acceptable came the feedback.

So today, drawing upon my vast minutes of experience, I am surprisingly comfortable: the pace is better, the instructions are clearer, the combinations build more methodically. I wade in a sea of very athletic people who are dutifully kiyaping and snapping their kicks and generally throwing themselves into the series of extemporaneous drills I'm cobbling together for them when, thankfully, it's halftime: time to stop the drills and wander between them, checking their material and moving them forward individually as they're ready.

By this time, the lost people have found their way over-- including one of the instructors, and another guy who outranks me, by the way-- and quietly joined in the last five minutes of drills. No rescue this time, which I think means I'm doing Okay. By the time we finish out the first hour (time to dismiss the non-instructor-candidates) I've figured out something helpful to say to pretty much everybody in class (can't really help the late arrivals who outrank me.) Sifu just finishes his sale in time for the first batch of people to salute him and leave. Time for instructor training, in which things settle back to normal.

Young man #1 signs up; young man #2 doesn't and I'm wondering if I shouldn't have thrown in a few more flashy jumping spinning kicks to tip him over the edge.

Insert joke here

So it works like this:

You graduate medical school, finish your residency in pathology (five years for my class, although they're shortening it to four) and then you apply for a fellowship in forensic pathology (one year) at the end of which, provided you have passed you pathology boards (definitely not a "given" as the fail rate is 30%-- I think state bar exams are kind of like this) you are eligible to sit for the forensic pathology boards. At the end of this long road, you are a board-certified forensic pathologist.

I'm not at the end of the road yet. So toward the end of residency, you apply for a position in the fellowship. That's where I'm at.

Since the coroner's office is considered a law enforcement agency, you have to pass a background check and a psych exam to work there-- and since that's where you'll end up if you're gonna be a forensic pathologist, they go ahead and do the background check and the psych exam before they let you into the fellowship.

The background check combines the thrill of a scavenger hunt with the excitement of discussing your personal life in great detail with a pleasantly bored retired police officer named Stan.

For the psych exam, you get a Xeroxed sheet in the mail with directions and an appointment time on it. When you get to the inconspicuous little commercial plaza and find your way to the little office, you notice from the lettering on the door that these people do nothing else all day long but administer these kinds of tests. You have trouble imagining that there enough people even in a big city to require this much examining.

In the waiting room, you are handed a little checklist to fill out which seems to be trying to ask you if you've ever done anything embarrassing. The list of things they're asking about is vaguely alarming.

Soon thereafter, the receptionist hands you a packet of papers and ushers you into a conference room that is presently about half-full people, each quietly filling in their answer sheets. They are relatively young and almost all male. One man is a little older than the rest and wears a security guard's uniform. Another man is quite large and physically imposing. His watch clatters on the table and he smells like he's wearing some sort of cologne. There are lots of windows and a little side table with extra pens, pencils, and tissues.

The packet tells you what to do.

There's another depressing little questionaire: Have you ever filed for backruptcy? Have you ever had sex with a minor? Have you ever been convicted of a crime as a juvenile and had the record expunged? Then there's the Minnesota Multiphasic.

I'd heard about the Minnesota Multiphasic but I'd never seen one. It's bascially a very, very long list of strangely worded and often quite disturbing true or false questions: I seldom think of harming animals.... My hearing is sometimes too good and it bothers me... It bothers me when other people criticize me for hitting or striking my family members... (I steal a glance at physically imposing guy)

This is followed by another, similar test; the only differences are that there is a "maybe" option in the second test and that the questions are less overtly alarming but harder to answer: I often initiate conversations with people I don't know... (This is harder to answer than it appears: how often do most people initiate conversations with strangers? Do I initiate these conversations more or less than that? It is hard to arrive at an objective answer) I would rather be a beet farmer than an architect... (There is no box for "Never really gave it much thought")

After the tests, which take all morning, there's a half hour for lunch before you meet with the psychologist (and find out if you're too disturbed to work at the coroner's.)

Stuff like this sort of puts you in a weird mood. I am all weird moody through my baja fresh tacos.

Racing back to the waiting room, making sure to self-consciously to initiate a conversation with the woman in the elevator (just to see if it felt "normal"), there are only a few moments to avoid the gaze of the few other people in the waiting room before I hear my name.

The woman with the clipboard is wearing a jacket-like top and matching skirt in a large houndstooth print, sensible black low heels, a fluffy blond perm, glasses to peer over, and bright blue eyeshadow. Against one wall in the interview room is a series of bookshelves with curly brass sides and faux marble shelves. The titles are all in that loopy seventies font and they smell like an attic.

She sets the clipboard on her lap, smiles professionally, establishes rapport, and the launches into an even more detailed and disturbing variant of the checkoff sheet questions: Have you ever had any of your possessions reposessed? Have you ever been detained by the police? Have you ever... and at some point I just start laughing and tell her that this is the most depressing questionaire I have ever heard. I mean, it is a list of simply every possible thing that could possibly go wrong in your life. She smiles, agrees, re-establishes rapport, and, ever so slightly trips over the next question: Have you ever had sex with an animal?...