THE STRIKE | Pallavi Kenkare
My mallet is poised, one sharp tap to smash through the cheekbone. It’s not my turn to dissect but none of my lab mates wanted to, so I asked for the hammer to prove that I could.
It’s late in the first semester of medical school, and our poor, patient donor is ravaged by our amateur attempts at dissection. The top of her skull has been removed and her muscles are dry, flaking off in tough, red strips. She wouldn’t have donated her body to our way of learning about it if she knew how we’d treat it, I thought bitterly.
Refocusing, I take aim at the flinty bone, standing out in a tiny, wrinkled face. Then I blink, the face is gone, and instead our donor is an old man with a long visage, a hooked nose and hollowed cheeks. And his eyes are open and they’re full of fear and they’re looking right at me.
My grandfather died in September, five weeks after I moved away from my home in Georgia to begin medical school in Michigan. Three years prior, he was hit by a car while on his morning walk, shattering his hip and precipitating a series of health conditions – hospital pneumonia, heart failure, muscle atrophy – that defined the last few years of his life.
His accident left him unable to walk, prepare food or sometimes even breathe by himself. He and my grandmother had shuttled between my home and India since the early aughts, but after his hospital stay, my parents’ house became their permanent home. I had spent the summer before medical school assisting my grandmother with his care. I was in charge of directing his physical therapy exercises, during which we attempted to teach him how to walk again. He loathed physical therapy, only participating because we begged him. In retrospect, we wanted progress so badly that we imagined it – we celebrated every tentative step forward, ignoring the two steps he stumbled back.
Monday, a week before our first block final exam, my mother called me. It was 12 a.m. and I was in a sterile, mint green school study room. Clearly, precisely, drawing upon every inch of her formidable capacity for love and resilience, she told me my grandfather had had a stroke and was in the emergency room as we spoke. This was probably it. She said his condition for the next few days was uncertain, but that the second she got clarity, she’d help book my tickets home.
The next few days were a blur. I was in charge of breaking the news to my little sister, which, in my panic, I did with a total lack of the grace my mother presented. My mother called again and again, updating me. First, she said that she would book my tickets home for the next day, as my grandfather was in a rapid decline. My grandmother was refusing to leave his side, or to eat or drink. The next day, another call: She said his condition had stabilized, which, to my unprimed ears, sounded like music – after all, I knew stability to be that brief period that precedes recovery. Time was finally on our side, so we booked my tickets home for the following Monday, right after my exam. I confided the situation in a lab mate, who absent-mindedly responded, “Oh…huh.” I studied thirteen hours a day. I couldn’t fail the exam, but it wasn’t looking like I could pass either. I stopped feeling hungry, so I stopped eating.
The distinct thing I remember from those six days was that I lost everything. I lost my AirPods Tuesday, my iPad Wednesday, my laptop Thursday. Friday, I lost my car keys at seven in the morning, when I arrived at school. At one in the night, I walked hopelessly to my Corolla to find them still in the ignition.
My three finals were in a linear, five hours stretch that Monday, and afterwards I drove to the airport, hopped on my flight, and Uber-ed straight to the hospital. My mother, father, and grandmother were waiting for me.
No one had told me my grandfather was brain-dead. Or maybe they had, but they had cushioned the words and I didn’t understand what they were saying. I didn’t realize they were waiting for me to unhook the ventilator; I didn’t realize my grandmother made a promise to herself to wait for me. I didn’t realize I’d flown home to watch my grandfather’s chest stop its rise and fall. I didn’t realize I would sit silently with my family, waiting for his soul to stir from his body, drift to the window, and disappear into the sunlight. My stopover in Atlanta was a little less than twenty-four hours; I had to be back in class the next day.
For the rest of the semester, and sometimes still, I was sad. I was angry. I saw the ghost of a tall, skeletally thin man, who read Shakespeare and climbed mountains, who hated doing his physical therapy and reverted back to a scared, eager-to-please child when we forced him to do it. But these are not the thoughts you want to reveal to your new grad school classmates, so instead I shrank into myself. I made myself unapproachable, I knew myself to be unloved. I was lonely.
It’s the last anatomy lab before Thanksgiving break, and my donor lies on the metal table in front of me. Except it is not my donor, it is my grandfather, and his eyes are begging me to hold my strike. My throat closes up, and I promise him I won’t. I would never do that.
I turn around, tell my lab mates I will be right back, and hand over the mallet. I stride, measured and composed, down the length of the anatomy room, my plasticky yellow lab gown fluttering behind me. Still measured and composed, I push past the lab’s double doors, speed-walk into the women’s locker room, and throw up.
Pallavi Kenkare is a third-year medical student at Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine. She graduated from Cornell University in 2021, where she served as opinion editor for the Cornell Daily Sun. Before medical school, she worked as a journalist for CNET and ZDNET. She hails from Atlanta, Georgia.