A doctor was one thing. A surgeon was a whole other thing. I’d have the knot-tying skills required to repair Alex’s weird penis, to yank his urethra into its proper position—without anesthesia, in his case.Let him feel the pain. Yes, I must become a surgeon. I had come to the fork in my life: spit or swallow, fight or flee. I would spit back in his face and stay.
No running home to Mama. No more floor waxes for errant pricks. Danger lurked; an aggressive female needs all her strength because she will never be welcomed into the male lair of big cats. I must be prepared to poke the tiger, for I was coming to realize that I was the angriest beast in the cage.
I would fuck Alex’s brains out and then dump him.
8. Sixty Percent Fructose Does Not Taste Like Sugar
That same summer, I had walked into the office of my temporary boss, Dr. Alfonso Caballo, a prominent diabetologist. I painted a smile on my face for the new Sugar Doctor, extended my hand, and formally introduced myself. “I will be your medical student for the summer—pleased to meet you.”
“Oh”—he was caught off guard—“very pleased to make your acquaintance, young lady,” he said, soulful Mexican accent on display.
Alfonso was in his forties. His thick dark mustache gave him the appearance of a ’70s porn star. I imagined that he was concealing a heavy gold chain and a rug of chest hair beneath his shirt and tie. Over the next several weeks, I learned everything there was to know about diabetes from him: the mechanism of insulin resistance; autoimmune destruction of the pancreas; how to use hemoglobin A1C to measure glycemic control over time; the triopathy seen with late-phase diabetes (blindness, kidney failure, loss of sensory input in extremities). I had to admit it: learning sugar medicine from Sugar Doctor was kind of exciting.
My assigned project was to synthesize all this information into sound bites for Hispanic patients. Not so different from movie production, I gathered. Telemedicine was all the rage—physicians wanted to be able to communicate with a broad audience through telecasts, and we were at the head of that curve. Alfonso and I spent many late nights in the clinic and his office, editing reels of educational material and translating it all into Spanish. He would sometimes hover over me, placing his hand atop mine atop the computer mouse, stretching his arm across my bodice to delete a word or two, his porn-star ’stache nearly painting my neck.
“Mejor decir ‘ven a la clinica para evaluar el azucar’ en vez de ‘cheque el azucar por la maquina.’ Although we want these patients to monitor their levels independently, we want to capture them here first, growing our census,” Sugar Doctor explained, as he helped perfect my raw, unrefined product.
Dr. Caballo was actually an ornery character. “No! Bring me the purple top, not the red! Don’t you know this by now?” He barked orders like this at his lab technician. With his staff, he preferred curt to flowery, magisterial to democratic, but with me, he was ALL SUGAR—patient, compassionate, and sweet.
Three weeks into my apprenticeship, Sugar Doctor took me to lunch at the Longbeech food court to reward me for my dedicated work. We bypassed the heavy pedestrian traffic gravitating around Sbarro, Burger King, and Panda Express, settling on an out-of-the-way sit-down restaurant.
Alfonso wasted no time. He promptly ordered a bottle of wine, diabetics’ poison, and poured and sipped aggressively, as he gazed into my eyes deeply and spoke about life, love, and relationships. I uncharacteristically drank a few glasses and became a bit untethered. As he spilled wine into my cup, I spilled my guts.
“He was a beautiful med-school student, albeit with a bad penis [okay, I left out that last detail], but some Euro-twat swooped in, stealing the man...” I lamented, a wine-inspired tear or two making it past the gate.
“This dumb cabron doesn’t know his good fortune, but let me ask you one thing. Did the young man make it clear that he wanted you here this summer?” My Sugar Doctor cut right through it.
“I suppose... I suppose... it wasn’t clear. He said ‘Sure, it would be great if you were in Boston for the summer,’ as if he were talking to a buddy.”
“Ah, mi cariña. Let me give you some profound advice: ‘Lo que perseguimos mas fuertamente escapa mas facilmente’; loosely translated, ‘what we chase most strongly escapes most easily.’”
The advice resonated. I had chased the Swede-fucker all the way to his city. Euro-twat was probably less the fool than I was. Who was the one with second-rate diagnostic abilities? Alfonso placed a strong hand over mine. I looked into Alfonso’s eyes. God, he was not... handsome. He really did look like a ’70s porn star, a part down the middle of his baby-shit-colored hair and that chevron mustache. Small brown eyes peered behind his oversized glasses, completing the Ron Jeremy look. But behind the glasses, his eyes expressed a sort of sadness, an endearing quality that pulled at my heartstrings. He fidgeted around with his wedding ring, twisting it around his finger nervously, metaphorically.
“Don’t worry,” he said, paying the tab before helping me into a cab home.
A few nights later, I stayed at the clinic late alongside my mentor. There was much work to be done. When the clock struck seven, I was getting ready to go home for the evening. Alfonso excused himself, informing me that he had to go up and round on a few patients but would be right back. I cocked my head to the side and nodded. I finished my last batch of paperwork, stood up, and leaned against the windowsill. I stared out onto Longbeech Avenue, taking in the beauty of the cobblestone carpeting the streets below. This institution and everything around it exuded greatness.The sun was flickering. Lost in the network of cobblestone paths and the footsteps of strangers hopping from one undulating stone to the next, I did not notice the office door closing and locking.
I felt a man’s hot breath on my neck, then goose bumps. My hair was in an up-do, glasses resting on my head. I was wearing a two-piece yellow dress that outlined my legs and upper body; a slight move to the right would expose my tear-shaped breasts. His arms gently slipped around my waist and down to my upper hips. His mustache tickled my neck, as he planted heavy kisses up and down my neckline. He placed his fingers in my mouth, one at a time, the masculine scent of cologne lingering in the air. He knocked the glasses right off of my head. He turned my body toward him, wrapped his hand around my throat, and kissed me...HARD.
“Wait! You’re married! What are you doing?” My throat constricted.
“It’s a loveless marriage... you have no idea how in love with you I am. You are the woman of my dreams.” He sounded like a character in a telenovela.
He unbuckled his pants and undid his zipper, slowly, applying pressure to my shoulders so I would descend to my knees. His cock sprung out of his zipper, Sugar Doctor fully expecting me to sample his candy. I had learned in medical school that year that the male ejaculate is composed of 60 percent fructose, but it tasted nothing like candy. Funny, I thought; for all of that sugar content, it doesn’t taste sweet—semen should come with a mandatory warning label for diabetics.
He looked down at me as if to say, “What’s the problem here?” But all I could muster was a pathetic, tear-soaked upward glance. Stumbling, I propped myself up. “I can’t do this. I’m sorry. I just can’t...” I raced to the bathroom, washed my face, and bolted out of the building. This apprenticeship was not evolving as I had intended. I ran the several miles back to apartment, up the five flights, slammed the door, slunk down to my knees, and replayed the evening’s events in Technicolor detail. The phone interrupted. I heard the click requesting additional quarters—it was Alfonso calling from a local laundromat.
Panting on the other end of the line, he whimpered, “Please, please be with me. I want to leave my wife.” Just because I couldn’t have Alex, didn’t mean I had to settle for this bad soap opera.
“No!” This was moving VERY quickly. “I have to go back to work, learn, and advance my career, and THIS is not how I am going to do it!”
Nothing ever transpired with Alfonso again; his sugar turned sour after my rejection. He would offer me nothing more than a small nod of acknowledgment in the hallway.
I joined the ranks of his lab technician, his light no longer shining upon me. I buried myself in work, trudging through the last few weeks of summer, strangely anxious to return to the monastic life of medical school, where the only things long and hard were the study nights.
9. Point and Shoot
The second year of medical school had commenced. The beginning of medical school had felt infantilizing. Professors took attendance and assigned lockers for our microscopes. First year had been dedicated to normal anatomy and physiology.
