17/17
In which we ride the memory banks of pediatric medicine in LA from what I’m calling #perspective2026
It was a small gesture, from an adult trying to reach across the chasm of hurt and pain, to touch the gentle part of another human who had been harmed. Indelibly harmed. Repeatedly so. Such that her suspicion extended to us, her rescuers.
We were pediatricians in a land of broken children.
Raining down on us in residency training, 9 year old bodies who should be playing, instead being scraped over a rape kit. While you try to be as gentle as you can, given you are restoring to her, this baby, a smallish shred of faith in the species that birthed her. And should be caring for her. But instead is preying upon her. The textbooks don’t cover how you recover from this, ever.
It was a small gesture. An MP3 player full of music. Leant to a sullen and monosyllabic-ally angry teenage girl who was grounded in the hospital ward in Los Angeles, unable to return to her home on the street.
You see she thought we were part of the same system out there that she lived in day in and day out.
How was she to know that an 8,000 sq ft pediatric ward on the 8th floor (always the 8th floor, this) held to a different set of rules? That the squadron of adults she saw around her up here were there to protect her, unlike those in uniforms who were also supposed to protect her, but didn’t, downstairs, 8 floors down.
Different uniforms?
That we were doctors and not policemen?* How was she to know the difference? Was there a badge on my lanyard I could hang that said, I’m a safe adult? I do care for you, and what happened to you should never ever ever happen to anyone? Ever.
But it happened to you and that is now your reality?
*yes I’m aware that ICE is in hospitals right now. This is why it is called #perspective2026
Back then, only the kids from Juvie were chained while recovering from an appendix operation, with two parole officers in the room to guard them.
ICE raids are now the new normal. Deportation without life saving medical care is now Federal Law.
Got it. Let me update my moral compass here, shall I? Didn’t realize the iOS 2.0.26 update was more like a memory wipe.
Goals posts - moved.
Unironically, this is now our reality too.
We end up promising to walk alongside these beautiful hurt children, and many times we succeed in easing their way. Too many times; we don’t.
As my career has progressed I now see these same adult children, grown up, scarred from those years of abuse. So you see, this timeline of pediatrician turned adult mental health provider in trauma therapy, makes more and more insane sense every day. Every damned day.
From where she stands, the system is one in which we are embedded and can only be distinguished by some garbage hanging from our necks or pinned to our chests. #shitnorshinola
This mp3 player though? It held a piece of music, composed by a 17th century man and played on exquisite strings and woods strummed and plucked in effortful ways to create beauty of the highest order in the Soul of Man.
In the Soul. Of all Beings.
And something in that music, in the unlocking of her pain in the safe embrace of the music, a sonic box which held her as she needed to be held, as a Soul, in pain, but still a Human Soul on this Earth.
She cracked.
And the Light poured in.
The dam broke on her cheeks for the first time that hospitalization.
The hospitalization itself had been a much-needed grounding really, reality having dealt her a fractured femur and an involuntary meth detox in a (pfft) pediatrics ward, as a timeout.
6-9 weeks. No cap.
Sometimes the medical crisis is your stroke of luck, and maybe a part of you is saved. For now.
The music was a re-membering.
Out there, she could keep that sullen asshole teenage armor on because it helped keep her safe. In here, for just this moment, this piece of music, with room enough for you and your pain in it, she could let it drop and come home to her human-ness.
For just a moment, she felt her Soul as more than a scared and hunted animal. Instead, she knew, as completely as it is possible to know, that she was Human.
Some might doubt the wisdom of such frivolity with music and art and such, only to provide a fleeting and maybe cruel respite as she would be inevitably discharged back into “the System”.
I would tell them to read a good poem.
Sometimes you have a reader on your hands, and Harry Potter becomes a rich metaphorical landscape upon which to relate to the world of dementors, and wizards who may be children but save the world after all from the ultimate evil.
Writing this in 2026 truly is a full circle moment wrapped in a mobius strip that stretches language and beggars comprehension.
Mostly it is the kindness of nurses who mother them back to health, the other children who carry normalcy into the playroom activities on the daily, the medical trainees who go all out on Halloween.
Childhood shimmers into existence for brief moments of joy, and that is healing.
In the following days a pink returned to her cheeks, a dairy maid’s curls appeared around her head, she bathed and visited the teen lounge more. We witnessed this 17yr old battle-hardened Los Angeles street kid who had been used like a human dishrag in the system, held in the loving embrace of a 17th century musician’s neurological genius and connect to a less angry and hurt part of herself. For a brief moment, the 8th floor was illuminated in Grace.
#perspective2026
It is possible, and this pediatrician can bear witness to these stories because they are true. We know what is broken and we know how to fix it. It’s not rocket science at this point.
Instead the disease is systemic and now it appears to have been driven by the networked pestilences of power, money and influence peddling.
So forgive me if this current crisis of absolute shittery that is occurring is not at all surprising, but also a blindside because of the scale and reach and unmitigated, incontrovertibleness of it all, at the same time.
And they are still in power. Still vomiting over all of us every single day.
Making us accomplices in the killing of children. Of the devastation of childhood.
Don’t for a moment imagine this is not a seismic event in the lives of all women and children on this planet.
Don’t for a second let it not be.
- a witness for the prosecution