I was digging though my language texts with the idea to pack them up and take them to my office. After all, do I really need my Latin-English dictionary on a regular basis? Or my Russian vocabulary flashcards? No and no. And someone (I’m not saying who, though his name begins with T and happens to be joined with mine on a certain certificate) has said that I need to do something about my “selfish obsession”—meaning the fact that my books take up a great deal of space in our one-bedroom apartment.

Nestled against my Italian textbook was a mysterious, thick envelope. What is this? I thought, and opened it to reveal copies of my medical records from my early years of grad school. I was pretty curious to read the reports. Sometimes I was surprised by the information the doctors saw fit to include, like that I “went on a camping trip about 12 days ago and slept on a blanket with no problem,” or “Mary is a pleasant female coming in today as a travel consult.” I’m not sure what my pleasantness would have to do with my health. I suppose being able to sleep on the ground might be proof of my hardiness, though it doesn’t seem worth commenting on. It’s not like I was toughie Antony back in the good old days of his military strength. When Caesar finds out that Antony is carrying on with Cleopatra, he disapproves. Caesar basically says to Antony, “Man, you used to be a man.” Caesar reminds him of hard battles, and says that Antony

“did’st drink the stale* of horses, and the gilded** puddle

Which beast would cough at.”

Ok, maybe I slept on a blanket, but I wasn’t surviving a famine by drinking horse urine, or anything.

Sometimes reading the records was like reading a diary. For example, during the first year of grad school, I told my doctor that I was under a lot of stress because of coursework (surprise, surprise). Perhaps most interesting were the reports related to the time I hurt my knee while ice skating with my boyfriend on Frog Pond in Boston. What happened was this: I fell down, and popped the knee cap. The popping was so violent that it tore a hole in the muscle wall and began pumping blood into my knee. I didn’t know this, though. All I knew was that I had fallen down, it hurt, and my knee began to swell. Sure, I almost fainted once I got to my feet (and I only managed to do this because it occurred to me, while laying on the ice, that someone might skate over my fingers. I had never come close to fainting before, and was interested to discover that everything began to go white, not black). But while any person with brains might stop to think that maybe something was wrong, and maybe she should see a doctor, I did not.

Well, eventually I did, because my knee swelled like a balloon (a doctor described it as 3+, which I’m guessing means three times the normal size, though I could be wrong) and the pain became so freaking bad (I was, the doctor reported, “occasionally tearful.” Oh, really?). But I went to the doctor two days after the fall. What is so strange to me is how (according to the records) I denied being in as much pain as I was—to the doctors, and myself. Examples: “She had severe pain in that knee however she states that she was able to get up and continue skating;” “After apply split patient said she felt a little bit dizzy, insisted that she should be able to walk home.” When I finally saw a specialist, he wrote, “Under sterile conditions approximately 20-33 cc of bloody fluid was aspirated from her joint.” You know what that means? He stuck a big fat needle in my hugely swollen knee and sucked out plenty of blood. The doctor writes that I “tolerated this well.” That’s not what I remember. I remember screaming, and my neighbor Iklil rushing into the room to offer me chocolate in comfort (bless Iklil).

But why did I keep pretending that I was ok? Because of a boy. Even when he wasn’t around. I’m sure I was just trying to prove to my boyfriend of four months that I was tough. Thank goodness I don’t have to do that anymore, now that we’re married (of course, I never had to do it, which I wish I had known as a 23-year-old). All I have to do now to keep our marriage happy is not buy too many books.

*urine

*golden