The Empathy Exams Read Free

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    I’ve thought about Stephanie Phillips’s seizures in terms of possession and privacy. Converting her sadness away from direct articulation is a way to keep it hers. Her refusal to make eye contact, her unwillingness to explicate her inner life, the way she becomes un-conscious during her own expressions of grief and doesn’t remember them afterward—all of these might be a way to keep her loss protected and pristine, unviolated by the sympathy of others.
    “What do you call out during seizures?” one student asks.
    “I don’t know,” I say, and want to add, but I mean all of it.
    I know that saying this would be against the rules. I’m playing a girl who keeps her sadness so subterranean she can’t even see it herself. I can’t give it away so easily.
    LESLIE JAMISON
    Ob-Gyn
    SP Training Materials
    CASE SUMMARY: You are a twenty-five-year-old female seeking termination of your pregnancy. You have never been pregnant before. You are five-and-a-half weeks but have not experienced any bloating or cramping. You have experienced some fluctuations in mood but have been unable to determine whether these are due to being pregnant or knowing you are pregnant. You are not visibly upset about your pregnancy. Invisibly, you are not sure.
    MEDICATION HISTORY: You are not taking any medications. This is why you got pregnant.
    MEDICAL HISTORY: You’ve had several surgeries in the past, but you don’t mention them to your doctor because they don’t seem relevant. You are about to have another surgery to correct your tachycardia, the excessive and irregular beating of your heart. Your mother has made you promise to mention this upcoming surgery in your termination consultation, even though you don’t feel like discussing it. She wants the doctor to know about your heart condition in case it affects the way he ends your pregnancy, or the way he keeps you sedated while he does it.
    I could tell you I got an abortion one February or heart surgery that March—like they were separate cases, unrelated scripts—but neither one of these accounts would be complete without the other. A single month knitted them together; each one a morning I woke up on an empty stomach and slid into a paper gown. One depended on a tiny vacuum, the other on a catheter that would ablate the tissue of my heart. Ablate? I asked the doctors. They explained that meant burning.
    One procedure made me bleed and the other was nearly bloodless; one was my choice and the other wasn’t; both made me feel—at once—the incredible frailty and capacity of my own body; both came in a bleak winter; both left me prostrate under the hands of men, and dependent on the care of a man I was just beginning to love.
    Dave and I first kissed in a Maryland basement at three in the morning on our way to Newport News to canvass for Obama in 2008. We were with an organizing union called Unite Here. Unite Here! Years later, that poster hung above our bed. That first fall we walked along Connecticut beaches strewn with broken clamshells. We held hands against salt winds. We went to a hotel for the weekend and put so much bubble bath in our tub that the bubbles ran all over the floor. We took pictures of that. We took pictures of everything. We walked across Williamsburg in the rain to see a concert. We were writers in love. My boss used to imagine us curling up at night and taking inventories of each other’s hearts. “How did it make you feel to see that injured pigeon in the street today?” etc. And it’s true: we once talked about seeing two crippled bunnies trying to mate on a patchy lawn—how sad it was, and moving.
    We’d been in love about two months when I got pregnant. I saw the cross on the stick and called Dave and we wandered college quads in the bitter cold and talked about what we were going to do. I thought of the little fetus bundled inside my jacket with me and wondered—honestly wondered —if I felt attached to it yet. I wasn’t sure. I remember