My mother refilled her wine and told me not to raise my voice at my father.
Tiffany looked up from her phone and told us she was launching a lifestyle and wellness boutique online the following month. She needed fifty thousand dollars in seed money for camera equipment, product inventory, and a professional website. My parents were her primary investors. They had, my father explained, made the decision to liquidate some assets to give Tiffany the capital she needed to build her brand properly, which was why their credit and their cash were currently committed elsewhere.
I sat at that table long enough to understand what I was being told. Then I picked up the acceptance letter, put it back in my bag, thanked them for dinner, and drove home.
In the morning I went to the financial aid office and applied for high-interest private loans that did not require a co-signer. The rates were punishing, but they covered tuition. They did not cover rent, textbooks, lab equipment, or food. I applied for a job as an overnight EMT with a company that ran ambulance shifts in the city, nine in the evening to five in the morning, six nights a week during the school term.
For two years, my life had a structure that I am only now able to describe without my chest tightening. I attended lectures and labs and clinical simulations from eight in the morning until late afternoon. I went back to my apartment and slept for three hours. I put on the uniform and worked until dawn. I came back, changed, went to class. On the ambulance I studied during the quiet hours, flashcards spread across my lap in the back of the vehicle, organic chemistry and anatomy and pharmacology in the yellow fluorescent light, with the smell of antiseptic and coffee and city air coming through the cracked window. I dealt with car accidents and overdoses and strokes and the specific particular helplessness of arriving somewhere after the worst has already happened. I learned more about what medicine actually was on those shifts than I learned in any lab.
