Intern by Sandeep Jauhar

Her hand covered her mouth in an enigmatic expression of shock or perhaps boredom. “What do you think she’s thinking?” I asked the woman standing next to me, who was also staring at the painting. “I think she’s unhappy with her marriage,” the woman replied without missing a beat. Intrigued, I introduced myself and we started talking. Sonia Sharma was a third-year medical student at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., who was spending the summer doing a cardiology elective at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center on the Upper West Side. She was pretty, flirtatiously mirthful, with olive-colored skin, flowing dark brown hair, and dimples that deepened into beautiful trenches when she smiled, which was often. She was wearing a light blue J. Crew dress and brown platform sandals. After chatting for a while, she invited Vijay and me to join her and her sister at a nightclub after the party.
    At ten o’clock, Vijay and I paid Shannon a visit at the Hi-Life. As I was telling her about the nice Indian girl I’d just met, I realized I had forgotten to get Sonia’s mobile phone number. Now, I was going to have to find her in a packed Manhattan nightclub on a Saturday night. Though it was getting late, Vijay and I took a cab to midtown, near Times Square. After waiting endlessly in a line that weaved halfway around the block and then answering some impertinent questions from the burly bouncer—yes, we were doctors, how did he know?—we got into the club. Miraculously, it seemed, wandering through the smoky haze, we found Sonia and her sister. They seemed glad to see us, and for a couple of hours we smoked cigarettes and shouted at each other over the deafening drumbeat. The alcohol, the hip-hop, the buzz—I feltmore free and relaxed than I had in a long time, even a bit reckless; it was like I was in graduate school again. We stayed until the club closed at 2:00 a.m. When we parted, Sonia and I exchanged numbers.
Groovy girl
, I thought, riding home.
Too bad she’s a medical student.
I was hoping to date someone Indian, but I was pretty sure I didn’t want to marry a doctor.
    THE CLINIC MONTH WENT BY QUICKLY . With controlled hours and no call, the rotation was fairly easy, leaving me to wonder whether it wouldn’t have been better to be thrown into the fire of inpatient medicine earlier. I fell into a comfortable routine, running along the East River in the morning, which helped relieve stress. Since I didn’t have to be in clinic until nine o’clock, some mornings I would turn on the television and watch the CNBC talking heads intone pedantically about how the Internet was going to change the face of business. “Does it justify the stratospheric stock prices?” someone would invariably ask, and the response was almost stereotyped, half smile, expression of tired resignation: “Only time will tell.”
    New York patients had an edge, a roughness, an unsavoriness that kept me on my toes. There was the gay man who’d gotten into a fight on the subway and sprained his shoulder; the alcoholic who wanted to get drunk but compromised and sniffed cocaine instead; the old ladies who had more wrinkles on their legs than on their faces. One afternoon, a middle-aged woman came to me with a surprise. The severe lower back and leg pain and numbness that had plagued her for months, making it impossible for her to even sit in a chair, had all but disappeared. She informed me that she had canceled her back surgery scheduled for later in the month.
    But all was not well. Her neck and shoulder, only mildly bothersome previously, now ached as if in a vise. Her left arm was almost entirely numb, except for shooting pains when she flexed her neck. Though a recent MRI had been normal, I was pretty sure she had pinched a nerve in her neck, probably from a herniated disc.
    I asked her to close her eyes and gently stroked her left arm. She felt nothing.