Transplants

Tiffany Xie

CW: rape, xenophobia, violence against immigrants, involuntary psychiatric care

I was holding a sign on our way to a protest in the new neighborhood to which I had just moved. A man in a truck passing by rolled down his window: “Get that shit out of our neighborhood!” I live here, I wanted to say. Instead I said, “Have a good day, sir,” and went on my way.

I’d painted the sign in leftover orange wall paint in my partner’s garage, on a posterboard I had previously used to assemble jigsaw puzzles. NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL.

We stood on a bridge above an overpass on one of the hottest days of the year. I’m not really that comfortable at protests, and there was one girl who seemed the opposite. She was wearing a flowy skirt and tank top, relaxed and leaning against the fence, chatting with strangers. “It’s a great place just for people watching,” I overheard.

She was right. Although the cars zoomed past far below us, I could make out small details. There were truck drivers and commuters honking, people holding fists outside their window. There were also people taking both hands off the wheel to flip us off, and drivers filming on their phone. People were passing out water and saying hello. There was a crackling in the air, anger and love crinkling against each other like cellophane.

A man was playing Pet Sounds from a speaker on the back of a bike. I talked to him and found out Brian Wilson had just died. It was summery and felt right.

I was at this protest against mass deportation because my parents are immigrants, naturalized American citizens after decades in this country. Children should not be scared at school and people should not be afraid of going to the doctor. Schools and hospitals should be safer than that. It was summer. The sun was bright but the days were getting darker.

I just moved to this city and I’m thinking about whether I want to move out of this country, as if removing myself from the situation somehow makes it more palatable, or at least make me feel less despair. I’m tempted to move somewhere “safer,” more human, but I’m not sure where that place would exist for me. My partner asked if we should move to Montreal and I looked into it, but I don’t want to take the Canadian board exams. Although I have the means to move, and I want to get away from here, I don’t want to.

The only astrologist I follow, Alice Sparkly Kat, writes that:

Moving is a big fucking deal. I’m not just talking about immigration or international moving but about moving to a different city or to even a different neighborhood. Did you know that every single aspect of your life is destabilized when you move? […] I saw my parents lose their adulthood because they immigrated. I’m not kidding about this. They lost their language and they spent decades of their life scared and confused. When you’re an immigrant, you make really hard choices about where you work and how you live because you don’t have the legal status that will allow you to make real choices yet. That’s a lifetime.

My parents immigrated in the early ’90s. My mom mailed her application to grad school and landed in the Indianapolis airport with nothing except a handwritten letter saying a professor would come and pick her up.

My paternal grandmother only visited once, right after I (not the first grandchild, but the first American one) had been born. My father only saw his mother a handful more times before she passed away. I didn’t even move that far from my parents, just two states over, and it still scares me that the number of times I’ll get to see them is becoming more finite. Moving is a big fucking deal.

I just graduated from medical school. In training, and as a new physician, I’ve seen a lot of suffering. In fact, my motto from my first year of clinical rotations, when I would come back from the hospital and flop on my couch, was always: “Nobody told me about the suffering.”

I always come home and struggle with what to do with what I’ve witnessed. It doesn’t feel quite right to tell someone else’s story. I don’t think I can hold them all to myself. I end up telling my close friends about the cases I can’t get out of my mind, trusting that they won’t spread what wasn’t mine to share in the first place. But I also want to share what I see and why I think it’s important. This is why many medical writers share composite patient stories—to protect their real patients, but also give a window into their work.

This has been a long preamble. There was a young girl whose parents had driven from very far away. Someone had raped her, and she was pregnant, and they were looking to get an abortion, but they were undocumented immigrants, and they were afraid. Is it okay to tell you I’m crying while writing this?—how far they drove, how scared they must have been. They had nowhere to stay. They didn’t know anybody. They didn’t speak English. They drove all that way with their daughter, barely stopping along the way, because they loved her. Because something terrible had happened and they wanted to rescue her from it.

So when the government decided it could pull medical records from Medicaid to track down undocumented immigrants, when it decided that immigration officers could enter hospitals, when the people in charge decided that my patients were no longer human, and no longer deserving of medical care, I thought of this girl and her family, and the people like her, who would have nowhere to go.

There is so much suffering in the world and I see my job as trying my best to alleviate some of it. I don’t know if people are good by nature but I want to believe it.

“I used to be a psychiatric nurse. It was hard, but worth it. My best advice? Don’t take it personally,” the nurse told me during my pre-employment drug test.

Weeks later, after I had passed my drug screen and was deemed fit to work, I was facing my patient, dressed in paper scrubs and hair in a messy bun after days in the hospital. We were holding her involuntarily—as in, against her will—because I had testified in court to keep her here, saying that she was a danger to herself, and the judge had agreed. Predictably, our rapport was in shambles and she told me to fuck off. As I walked out of her room, I tried to remind myself that it’s her illness, that I shouldn’t take it personally.

I do not deport people as part of my job, but I do cause harm as part of my job (albeit in the hopes of doing good, hopefully not in an “ends-justify-the-means” way, more in a “psychiatric care necessitates confronting psychiatric pain” way). The process of civil commitment, e.g. treating patients against their will, is unique to psychiatry, and is also known as police power. We should feel uncomfortable about this. I do it in the hope that, with treatment, a patient might get better, and look back and say, I’m glad you kept me and treated me, because I’m in a better place now. I suspect this outcome happens less than I would like to think.

So I leave my patient in her room, and think about her more than I should when I go home. All she wants is to go home, and I don’t blame her, but I don’t think she is well. Frankly, I don’t know if I am well. There’s something icky but necessary about what I do. Sometimes I protest against policing and yet I wield police power. One of the other residents framed civil commitment by using medical ethics: first, do no harm. I try to ask myself if letting her go home would be a form of harm, of abandonment. Or maybe I’m just trying to convince myself of this.

I was in the garden trying to transplant some borage to a sunnier spot. The internet told me not to do this, that borage doesn’t tolerate transplanting well, due to its large and delicate taproot beneath the soil. I tried anyway, digging wide and deep to account for the taproot. I left the plant to the side while I dug a new hole, for maybe five minutes, and when I looked over again, its leaves had wilted as if it hadn’t been watered for a week.

“You killed it!” My partner joked, trying to lighten my disappointment.

I looked at its sad, withered leaves, its stem flopped over the damp soil in which I had tried to plant it in a rush. My rescue attempt. Sometimes, they just die, my mom had told me when I killed houseplants past.

This year, I wanted to grow a proper vegetable garden, something a little bigger than my balcony tomatoes and peppers in Chicago. With the help of the internet, I researched soil composition and learned how to drill fence pickets into a raised bed. When I started my vegetable garden, I thought I would be most excited about eating vegetables, but actually what I ended up being most excited about was watching seeds grow into plants that are now taller than me. I know it’s not a miracle but it feels like one.

When I first moved to Chicago, I was horribly overwhelmed and ended up crying on my new apartment floor because I bought the wrong kind of cheese from the grocery store. People don’t always tolerate transplanting, but we move anyway. I spent a lot of time after high school saying how much I wanted to leave the Midwest, how scared I was that I would be trapped here forever. Now that I’m a little older, but not that much older, and having chosen to stay in the Midwest for the time being, I’m realizing that there is a cost to moving away.

Transplantation is a risk. Moving an organ, a plant, yourself—knowing it might not take—trying anyway. And when a transplant takes, it unsettles the boundaries between us. One person’s heart can beat in another’s body. The act of transplantation questions the idea that any person has a rightful place. After all, this is a country that erases indigeneity. Nobody belongs in one place more than another.