The Day I Matched

Written March 2015

The day that I found out that I matched in neurology, I had to look at my mom's head CT. She was involved in a four-car pile-up in a tunnel heading east from Boston on the way to work. I called her at 12:10pm after hyperventilating at a dog park and dancing around with my puppy in disbelief and joy. Her voice was not her typical calm, supportive and somewhat tired-at-work self.

She said immediately that she had been in a crash and that my dad's friend was there to help her. (Dad’s office was an hour away.) He would take her home and a rental car would follow. She had to go talk to the tow truck driver now.

My dad, calm in crisis, relayed the details. It wasn't the ice, it was traffic and my mom's car at a forty-five degree angle with the hood pointing down towards the ground. It was no one's fault, just cars stopped short going luckily only 30mph.

Later my mom would tell me that she had just wept through the botched abortion scene of the book on tape she had been listening to, and then boom.

Over the next two hours, I called her every 5 minutes on my way home as I remembered parts of a head trauma HPI.

Do you have a headache? Yes. Blurry vision? Yes. Dizzy? Yes, when I look to the right. Mom, get up and look at your pupils in the mirror! You're torturing me, I just want to sleep. Don't sleep! Tap tap tap. Some research on the internet and then, it’s ok, you can sleep, I just need to keep bugging you.

Later that afternoon, we got a head CT and it was normal. The ED physician and her nurse were stellar. I looked through the CT that night and started to explain what we were looking at to my dad in my best neuroradiologist voice. He "mmhmm"-ed and went back to watching TV.

I thought back to the month I had just spent in India, where a woman came to our clinic with an open wound in her scalp and a witnessed seizure, but would still never get a CT of the head.

I felt lucky we could have at least some assurance that I would not lose my mom on this day. I also feel lucky that today I am given a chance to learn more over the next four years, so that if or when this ever happens again, I will be even somewhat better prepared.