Yesterday, in the hall of the outpatient clinic where I practice as a psychiatric nurse practitioner, my patient politely took my extended hand at the end of our session and then quickly hit the button on the wall sanitizer. The wall sanitizer had been my first impulse as well, but I refrained, worried as to the message I might give if I immediately cleansed my hand after we touched.

One’s identity is unarguably a product of one's history and life experience. We are also the product of our parents, grandparents, and the distant branches of our family tree. Beyond the obvious genetics—thank you for the 6’2’’ genes Grandpa Frank and not-so-much-thank-you for male pattern-baldness Grandpa Tudrus—our elders serve as our role models for adulthood, parenthood, career aspirations, and everything else one could possibly think of.

Eyes closed, lips pressed in a determined smile or grimace, back hunched to brace against the forlorn landscape, the central figure in Renua Giwa-Amu’s piece “Elmer” reminds me of my own medical journey. A fourth-year student on the verge of graduation, I reflect on how my entire education thus far has been dependent on the pain and illness of countless patients I have read about or cared for.

As someone who works with words some days and in medicine on others, I have always enjoyed the names of the human blood group systems. While most of us are familiar with A, B, and O nomenclature, there are over thirty other systems, mostly describing “rare blood types”—those that could dangerously react to a transfusion

The first time I spoke of the encounter depicted in “E.B.” was during an interview for pediatric residency. The interviewer, a steely-eyed child abuse specialist, asked – not gently, but keenly – about my most difficult experience in medical school. I was surprised that what came to mind was not the drama of bullet holes and blood in the ED, interviewing a woman my own age chained to the wall of the psychiatric ED, or playing tic-tac-toe with a child with leukemia who seemed well but was expected to die from fungal disease – the kinds of gut-wrenching experiences that we swapped like war stories over beers at the end of a rotation.